Meet the Team: Philip Martin

Philip Martin is one of our newest Codethings, but who is he?

Philip is a passionate advocate for making software-defined vehicles as safe as possible. His area of expertise is decision analysis, specifically exploring how its methodologies can be applied to critical software in the automotive industry. Our experience and contributions to the automotive industry make Philip a natural fit for the Codethink team.

In this interview, you will learn about Philip’s academic background, his career to date, and his motivations for building a safer future for the automotive industry.

Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background?

Philip Martin: How far back should I go?

I studied mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. I then worked for an early dot.com before moving to Raytheon in general software development. I then headed to Stanford University, where I discovered ‘Decision Analysis’.

After finishing grad school, I was going to teach, but I ended up back in software engineering. I moved into consulting from software engineering, leading me to Codethink.

Q: What is decision analysis?

PM: Decision analysis involves using applied mathematics and probability to help people make better decisions. This logic based methodology removes inconsistencies and improves understanding of uncertainty.

Ultimately, all decisions on a project may change the overall level of risk of the project. The role of decision analysis is to measure those risks and allow the owners of the project to make informed decisions about its release. By turning the evidence we collect into a probability of failure, we can track well understood metrics like “expected time to failure” which did not always make sense for software.

In addition, decision analysis is particularly important for risk management for a project or company as a whole. It allows you to quantify the tradeoffs between risk and benefit for each decision. While this can be a design decision or a funding decision, the ability to make the best decision possible improves the overall potential for the company every time.

Q: What brought you to Codethink, and what’s your role?

PM: I found the problem Codethink was trying to solve particularly interesting.

There is risk exposure when releasing software, whether open source or proprietary. This is a critical consideration when working with safety critical systems. The challenge with this is turning evidence into a useful decision tool.

Q: What impact do you hope to have?

PM: My ultimate goal is to make software in automobiles safer.

I would love for the industry to change and become less concerned with sales and more concerned with safety. We can move in the right direction by wrapping the concept of ‘Trustable software’ into a practical, usable framework.

The current safety standards were not written to handle software. In various forms, hardware has existed for thousands of years, but software has only existed for 50 years. It’s no wonder the standards are behind.

Q: Any final thoughts?

PM: A good decision can still result in poor outcomes, and poor decision makers can get lucky as well. What we can do with decision analysis, is have confidence we've done enough to understand the decision, and improve our chances of a good outcome as much as we are willing to spend to do so.