Celebrating Women Leaders in Automotive

Thank you, Priya. A very good afternoon to all of you. A quick disclaimer, I'm going to be keeping you all away from lunch for the next 30 minutes, but I assure you that the next 30 minutes would definitely be worth the wait. With that, on behalf of MathWorks India, let me welcome you all to this segment that focuses on celebrating women leaders in automotive.

Let me give you a quick backstory. When we were initially planning this session, right, for this event, there was a lot of deliberation that went behind it, a lot of thought process that went behind it because we didn't want it to be too stereotypical. We firmly believe that in today's era, each of us is mindful, each of us is well aware, and we are all-- we do take proactive measures in addressing issues like gender inequality or biases.

But having said that, when you take automotive industry separately and keep it under a lens, there definitely, when it comes to women representation, there definitely is-- it is lesser in number. It could be due to the innate nature of the automotive industry or it could be because of how automotive has been historically. But the fact remains that the women representation is less.

And while we were discussing internally about all of these things, one of my colleagues shared a very powerful anecdote and I wish to share that with you today. So this is a story of Bertha Benz, the business partner and wife of the legendary Karl Benz of the Daimler-Benz fame. So what's her story? So it goes like this.

Karl Benz designed his automobile and it was the patented motorwagen, but Karl Benz did not have the confidence that this design would make it far. He didn't know and he didn't believe that his design had a future, but Bertha did. So what Bertha did to instill this confidence in him was she took the automobile and she single-handedly took it on a journey for about 100 kilometers, and along the way inventing the brake lining, and became the world's first person, not woman, world's first person to ever drive an IC engine automobile, and in doing so, she got this patent the worldwide attention that it deserved, and also its company's first sale.

And there we got the team for this segment that we wanted to celebrate this kind of leadership. And in order to inspire women to take that lead, to take that small step, however small it may be, we have with us two very dynamic women who have been leading efforts in their respective organizations. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a conversation with our first guest speaker for the day, Tracy Austina from Tata Technologies.

[APPLAUSE]

And while Tracy joins us, let me give you a quick introduction for those who don't know Tracy. Tracy is the global head at TTL TechVarsity, which is a technical learning and development organization at Tata Technologies. She has witnessed the growth of technical L&D for over two decades of diversified experience. Her expertise lies in building organization wide technical competency, development strategies across different employee levels and key customers. She was recently awarded an Indian patent for a revolutionary car accessory. So Tracy, a real pleasure having with us-- having you with us here.

Thank you so much, Shama, for this honor. And thank you so much MathWorks for having me on this elite dais and it feels honor to represent Tata Technologies on this forum.

OK, so Tracy, you have worked with both the Academy and your work with the industry. You are a pioneer in technical competency, and I'm sure many of us in the room are trying to join the gaps or join the dots between all three of these, especially in the mobility industry, which is trending at a very fast pace. So what are your views on how do we keep up with competency needs in academia and industry in such an accelerated pace of future mobility?

Thank you so much, Shama, for this wonderful and much discussed question in the industry, especially in the automotive industry. I think the last greatest revolution which the automotive industry saw was the introduction of IC engines. And today when we talk about mobility, it is more of comfort, and it's more colorful, it's more complex affair for all of us.

So right from morning, I've been listening to all the renowned speakers and tech stalwarts in the automotive industry, we have seen how far the auto industry has come. And today the disruption is mainly because of ACES, as all of us know. And if you would want to look into the statistics part of it as published by one of the famous groups, I think by 2035 we will have about 15% of the urban population using shared mobility spaces by 2035. And in the next 15 years, we plan to have L-4 level of automation.

And in the next, say by 2035, we will have about 100% of the vehicles being connected. And when we say connected, it is either through IoT or through the over-the-air updates or anything that we spoke about since morning. So there's a whole lot of connectivity that's going to happen and we are going to see a car more like a smartphone, and that is what the industry wants.

And talking about EV, much has been spoken now. So by 2035, we will have about 35% of the industry move towards electric vehicles, while meeting the larger objective of having a greener planet. So while industry is having these discussions, at the same time, the technology is also growing exponentially to meet these disruptions, be it in terms of AI, or ML, or even the cybersecurity, or even robotics, or metaverse, or digital, whatever we spoke about since morning. So we are talking about all of this, but on the contrary, do we have the necessary skill set with our budding engineers?

So we are talking about larger things now since morning, and is the industry really ready for achieving this larger dearth of skills, which we are going to see in future? Let me just shift my focus towards academic world. This is the industry world that we spoke about. I happen to come from both the worlds. So let me just slightly shift my focus towards academia.

Academia is like conventional. Today, in all the engineering universities we see that we have mechanical engineering, we have electronics engineering, then we have computer science, we have information science. So there are silos in this department. So there is a professor who is well versed in mechanical who delivers classes for mechanical engineering folks.

But when we look at mobility as a key word, we need to look at it holistically because mobility is just not automotive. What was once an all-in-all mechanical device, it has moved towards being more of software-driven vehicles that we were talking about. So today when we talk about a car, it is just not the mechanical device. We are talking about AI, ML, and all the other technologies venturing into this.

So my recommendations in order to build this skills, I take this opportunity to bring this point on this forum because I'm leading one of-- I have set up a small university within Tata technologies, which caters to the skills of Tata Technologies employees at the fresher level, as well as at the experienced level. Today typically we take about 90 days to make a fresh candidate billable. So right from the day he on-boards us still, he is billable, it takes a solid 90 days. That's the amount of time and money the organization spends on the fresh engineers.

If we have to slightly shift this load to the academic world, there are various possibilities to do that. I think Vijayalayan rightly brought out in his session as well. So most of the things that are covered in the industry, that are expected in the industry, if it is covered back in the academia that actually means a lot to the industry, saving those 90 days, all of us knowing this forum, right? So when we say of 90 days of the billable period, so we will be very close to creating miracles.

So I'm also a staunch believer of sabbaticals taken by professors or faculty members in the industry. Sabbatical always need not be upscaling the qualification of a faculty member, and it also means that while a faculty member is on a sabbatical, he or she should work in an industry as an intern, soil their hands, exchange knowledge between the industry and academia, take it back to your colleges, permeate that knowledge to the students down there, bring the concept of project-based learning, upscale them, now that you all know the kind of expectations what auto industry needs.

So let us have a holistic approach. A mobility engineer need to know a bit of hardware, bit of programming, bit of operating systems, bit of diagnostics, bit of in-vehicle networking, bit of protocols, bit of project management skills, and not the least, soft skills as well. So why don't we focus on all of this, look at it holistically, and start building our talent right from, say, a sixth semester or fifth semester so that by the time they are on their first job, they are almost ready, and the companies need not spend about 90 days to make them billable.

So these are my views, Shama, on bridging the gap. It's a very cliche. It's cliche to say that there is a gap, but yes there is when we talk about the transformation the mobility space is seeing too.

Thank you. Thank you, Tracy, for that insightful articulation on this entire topic. We have been hearing about software design, software design, virtualization the entire morning. So we are keen to hear your views on what you think software and say model-based design has an impact in the automotive industry.

This is definitely an era of software defined vehicles. So what was a mechanical device earlier has transformed into a hardware or-- sorry, an electronics device, which is heavily embedded with software. So here we are focusing on the embedded software development. I know most of you under this roof are embedded software developers or at least rubbed off by what embedded software development is, the kind of challenges you all go through day in and day out.

So there can be non-functional challenges or functional challenges. It may be in terms of cost, time to market, or it can be in terms of issue resource management that we talk about, or time to market, et cetera. There can be many challenges as an embedded software developer we all face.

Possible solutions of it could be, one, a standardization of software. AUTOSAR, much has been spoken about AUTOSAR. So when we move towards AUTOSAR as a standard, maybe most of the things can be sorted out. And another key possible solution is model-based development.

So I think that also has been spoken about since morning. So as all of us know what model-based development brings onto the table. So there can be only verification validation, there can be auto-code generation, the concept development, or even the design justification, et cetera. So I think model-based development has a significant role to play in the automotive industry, and MathWorks has been a key game changer in this industry.

In fact, coming from Tata Technologies as an organization where we are from the-- we are an engineering services organization and our vision is to engineer a better world. So we have used MathWorks tool or model-based development as a concept in many of our customer projects. And we were able to deliver the concept development.

Say, for example, it can be in terms of battery sizing, or it can be in terms of range estimation, or it can be in terms of iterative simulations that are performed, et cetera. So these are some of the areas where model-based development definitely has an upper-hand. And I'm glad that I've been associated with MathWorks for quite some time in my career and this has been a key game changer for all of us.

Thank you, Tracy. That definitely made our day. So one last question. How do you see yourself as a woman leader? And any two cents for the budding engineers out here?

First of all, to be very honest, I never thought myself as a woman leader all these years till this came up. So when Shama discussed this point with me, I started introspective, yes, I am a woman and a leader. So what has taken me to come this far in life, something what I started in prospecting?

Going back, it's a 22-year-old journey. And yes, as the panel, esteemed panel before this mentioned, that-- or rather when Shama brought out the point that this is a male-dominated industry. When I started my-- when I started doing my Master's in Automotive Electronics, I was the only girl student. And when I started delivering trainings on automotive electronics to various corporates back then when I was associated with the university, I used to be the only female trainer or professor in the university, and I had men in my classroom, and I have many of my students also here.

So this has been a long journey. Today when I look back, say my previous organization, KPIT, or even in Tata Technology, I see a lot of girls taking up this career. So one is that. And what is the advantage we have as women? This is the first time I'm making this kind of a talk, by the way, on the dais.

I think we are inherently wired to do multitasking. So people who know me, I have my childhood friend who's 30. After three decades we met, and he's also one of the speakers. And I think we are multitaskers, and I was always being appreciated or condemned both for being a multitasker. I do multiple things at a time, and I always look at 30,000-feet view, and I always try to solution as a problem.

So I think these are some of the inherent characters that we get as a woman because when we run the household, we need to think of 101 things, and same thing we start applying in our day-to-day work. That being one.

And two being the upbringing. Never there was a differentiation that I'm a girl, or my brother is a boy, or something like that, the kind of appreciation upbringing that the push, especially my mother was very, very. But my peer pressure started from my mother, in fact. She was a helicopter mom. So if it is not first, there is no second for her. So that has always pushed me to stand first in my class and work towards it.

And most importantly, what I have done is I have set a benchmark for myself. So this is a rat race and I'm not in the rat race. What I personally believe and advise to everyone is set yourself as a benchmark. How better are you than yesterday? How better are you today? So when you start seeing that delta improvement in yourself, you will be able to fare well and excel in whatever you do.

And especially, this is the most blessed generation is what I feel. This is exactly what I talk in many of the engineering colleges as well because they are from an era where they have internet. We have completed engineering without internet and we feel proud of it, though.

So they have knowledge at their fingertips, and make the best use of it. And you have forums like this where you get to see where the industry is heading towards so that you can prep yourself and you can shine better. So this is a very closely knit industry where academia, then industry, and everyone should partner in this, and we should be in sync, synergy, and we should create this beautiful symphony and see how mobility as a service is going through over a period of time. Thank you so much, Shama.

Thank you. Thank you, Tracy. I would like to invite Sanjay Gopinath who is our marketing head, and also who is leading the accelerator programs in India to hand over a quick memento and felicitate Tracy. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And while we do that, I'd like to call upon a colleague and a friend of mine, Anuja Abdi.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you, Tracy. So Anuja, let's have you on stage. So Anuja, with over 20 years of experience, manages the product marketing team in India based out of the Hyderabad Office. The product marketing teams in Hyderabad and Bangalore lead global marketing efforts for products developed in India. Anuja's team covers product areas such as automated driving, motor control, HTL co-generation, and embedded targets. So Anuja, I'd like to hand over the baton for you to continue the conversation with our second guest speaker for today.

Thank you, Shama

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you all for listening to us patiently. I would like to now call upon stage our next esteemed guest, Sandhya Anilkumar. Please welcome her. As she's walking on the stage, I'm going to introduce her. She's the head of Software, Software Quality, and Verification Validation at Varroc Engineering. And over 23 years of her experience she has covered a lot of new products from two, three, and four-wheeler sector, as well as she has worked in R&D, gotten the project management certifications, and many more.

Since morning I've been noticing people have been walking up to her, and there are many, many in this room that have been mentored by Sandhya. So please welcome, Sandhya. Very warm welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. Thank you, Anuja. I think that was indeed a good introduction. And for sure I've seen a lot of people whom I've connected to over the years. And I especially thank MathWorks for calling me onto this opportunity and giving me this opportunity in order to put my views forward. Thank you.

Pleasure is all ours. Thank you. Yeah, so kind of continuing the theme that Tracy and Shama were talking about, if you look at a survey from "Economic Times," it mentions that 46% of the STEM graduates in urban India are women, which is a great number to have.

10 years into the career, 41% of those women leave their careers. And as you can see what Shama alluded to earlier, this trend only continues to ratify the kind of presence of women leaders later on in their career. So I just want to ask you, as you look back upon your journey as a leader, what are your observations and what difference can you make as a leader?

For sure, I think that's a very interesting question. And the numbers if you signify 46 to around 41, it's like hardly you have around 10% of the people who take forward or 6% of the people who take forward. So I think this 10-years period in a woman's life is very crucial because they start having dual responsibilities. So they start having family responsibility along with work, and that's where it becomes very important where you have to have a right balance between your work and your family as well.

They start learning through these experiences, and somewhere where they feel that when they're not able to take it forward, that's where they drop out from the mainstream. But I think the key word, the key message that I want to give out here is basically you need to-- for having this right balance, you need to ask for help.

So for sure you need to create an ecosystem around you so that you have the right balance between the family and the professional life. And there are a lot of people, when you create that ecosystem, you realize that there are a lot of people who really reach out to you for help, and actually even provide you help in terms of taking the, too I would say, the career and your family life forward in a very balanced way.

So I think that's key out here. And today if you see, there's a lot of opportunities. So as Tracy also mentioned, the era in for today, I mean, the women, they are into, I think, it's very different because there are a lot of companies who thrive on relaunch programs, restart career programs for industries. And I think that's where women should really leverage those opportunities and take it forward for their career and come back to the mainstream.

I too have taken breaks in my career, but yeah, not for a very long duration, but you take one step backwards just to take a leap ahead. So that's where, because during that period, you do a self-realization, and you also groom up some of your competencies that you need to really match to the mainstream. So I think taking those breaks is not bad. It's not guilty.

You just need to self-revive yourself during that period and just go ahead and go back to mainstream after. And there are a lot of companies who actually have these programs, which I just told you, and just take leverage of them. And especially if you see going forward, like, it's been about two decades now in my career, there's a lot of value into women perceptions, especially at the leadership roles, and it brings a lot of difference.

And as Tracy also mentioned, yes, getting into this male-dominated society, people have started accepting that women perceptions play a different-- give a different angle to certain decision making powers within the leadership. And I think that's where it is being valued and really needs to be leveraged, so.

Thank you. All great points, the value of mentorship and support system, looking at relaunching if you take a break, and then also valuing your own perspective and what it brings to the table. Thanks for that. I think moving on from a role of software, I think the whole morning has been filled with sessions that talked about softwares in cars and how the industry has really transformed over the years.

I guess I wanted to learn about maybe a couple of use cases that you have seen in your career. How you got introduced to software tools, and how was it a game changer from your perspective, and how it has evolved?

I think the opportunities when you talk about, especially in the automotive industry, is really endless. You see, previously, the features that were played on to the entry-level segments are now trickling down-- I mean, in the premium segments are now trickling down to the entry-level segments as well. So the features which you have seen in probably, which was made majorly from the connected aspect into premium segments, are now as a base feature in the entry segments, and that's where it is creating a difference and where software is getting more and more complex and more and more intelligent.

And that's where I would say moving from assembly language programming because when we started out our career with embedded design, it was basically with assembly language programming and moving on to embedded C. And then now if you see embedded C, it's moving on to MATLAB-based design.

The major reason for this is basically, I, in my career, to have faced these challenges, when you see the embedded design, especially for complex software algorithms, it becomes very challenging from the maintainability point of view, and especially when you put it into production and when you see certain issues coming up at the field. Debugging those issues and fixing those issues because as software programmers, most of us out here would have used flags, you enable a flag, make it true, and then you make it false, and then you really don't know where these flags move on to, and how these flags effect at the end of when the software is running onto your programs.

And then you find that, OK, I forgot to disable my flag during this function mode. So it becomes very difficult to maintain such software going forward. But I think thanks to MathWorks and where MATLAB programming has really become maintainable, and the models and the state flows that we can use in terms of making such complex control algorithms has really brought out ease.

And I myself in my career have had where we have two programs moved on from the embedded C, the application development moved on from embedded C into MATLAB programming, and which is really eased out into our journey of giving the platform development to the customer because the field issues were reduced, and we have really seen a very strong, reliable software into the issues.

Great. Thank you very much. Yeah, like you said, I think verify, validate early and reduce the time to development, that's great. So thank you, Sandhya. I think with that, I would like to conclude the segment, and again.