Modern automotive in-vehicle architectures consist of hundreds of processors that are connected via a heterogeneous collection of communication buses, and run several millions of lines of software code. In addition to the complexity of this hardware/software system, there is a rapid pace of innovation, extreme cost pressure, a growing number of autonomy-related functions, and the need to meet safety requirements. Hence, this is a domain where the industry - that includes both, OEMs and also suppliers - is keen to collaborate with academic institutions. In this talk, we will discuss some of the problems we have jointly studied with industry partners, both during my time at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and also after moving to the United States. This collaboration has not only helped us identify interesting research problems, they have provided research funding, and resulted in new results and joint publications with our colleagues from the industry. We will discuss the lessons learnt in the process -- what leads to successful academia/industry collaborations, what are the benefits of such collaborations, and what are potential challenges. Our own experience in this process has been very successful and has resulted in research successfully transitioning into industrial practice and recognition from national funding agencies that our projects being among those having the most impact.

Samarjit Chakraborty is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill. He is also an adjunct professor of Mathematics at UNC. Prior to coming here, he was a professor of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, where he held the Chair of Real-Time Computer Systems. Before that he was an assistant professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD from ETH Zurich. His research interests cover all aspects of designing hardware and software for embedded computers, with an emphasis on cyber-physical systems design, sustainable computing, and sensor network-based information processing. He serves/d on the editorial boards of several journals, including the ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems and the ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems. He and his students have won several best paper awards for their work, including the 2019 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems Best Paper Award for their work on automotive security, and the 2021 ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Best Paper Award for their work on energy modeling of the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, was offered a Humboldt Professorship in 2023, which is considered to be Germany's highest endowed research prize, and was awarded the 2025 Dieter Schwarz Courageous Research Grant. He is also a Fellow of the TU Munich's Institute of Advanced Study and is currently the elected Chair of SIGBED, which is ACM's Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems. In addition to funding from several governmental agencies, over the past 20 years his research has also been supported by grants from General Motors, Intel, Google, BMW, Audi, Siemens and Bosch.