Risk Institute-Affiliated Center to Host a Seminar on Autonomous Vehicles

Image of Seminar Flyer

When: Friday, March 20, 2026
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Where: Engineering BLDG 6, Mong Auditorium

The UCLA Mobility Lab and the Mobility Center of Excellence (Risk Institute-affiliated center) will host a seminar on Friday, March 20, 2026 from 12:00-1:00pm PT in Engineering Building VI, Mong Auditorium. Boris Ivanovic, a Senior Research Scientist and Manager in NVIDIA's Autonomous Vehicle Research Group, will present "Accelerating the Development and Deployment of Reasoning Autonomous Vehicles with Alpamayo.” 

Abstract: Foundation models are driving a new generation of Physical Al systems that integrate perception, reasoning, and action. In autonomous driving, this shift is giving rise to Reasoning Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that unify semantic understanding and control. This talk will focus on the design of Alpamayo, a reasoning-centric VLA architecture for autonomous vehicles, including efficient vision tokenization strategies, action representations, and mechanisms for multimodal reasoning. I will also discuss training paradigms for eliciting reasoning capabilities in VLA models and briefly highlight how foundation models accelerate the overall AV development flywheel, enabling new capabilities such as synthetic data generation and accelerated safety validation via simulation.

Bio: Boris Ivanovic is a Senior Research Scientist and Manager in NVIDIA's Autonomous Vehicle Research Group. His research interests include novel end-to-end AV architectures, policy training strategies, Al safety, and the thoughtful integration of foundation models in AV development. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2021 and an M.S. in Computer Science in 2018, both from Stanford University. He received his B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto in 2016.