Board and Officers

 



President
Matt Jones
Director of Global Technology Strategy at Ford Motor Company

With nearly 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Matt now oversees technology strategy and embedded experience at Ford Motor Company.

Until recently, Matt led the delivery of safety-critical connected, intelligent systems as Wind River’s Corporate Vice President of Global Engineering. Accelerating the digital transformation across verticals from aerospace to industrial, defense to medical, and networking to automotive. He was previously an engineering Senior Vice President at Virgin Hyperloop One; Chief Product Officer at moovel Group, Daimler’s mobility solutions company, and Director of future technology at Jaguar Land Rover.

Matt holds a Master of Engineering in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and a Chartered Engineer within the Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET).



Chairman of the Board
Graham Smethurst
Research Lead at BMW Group

Graham previously held the position of Chairman and President at GENIVI Alliance and has now returned as Chairman of the Board for COVESA. Graham has been with the BMW Group for over 30 years and now is a research lead focusing on data and program sharing among OEMs and suppliers.



Vice President
Gerald Spreitz
Open Source Strategy Officer at
Robert Bosch Car Multimedia GmbH

Gerald is the OSS Strategy Officer at Bosch and held past positions as the Corporate Officer for Open Source based software development and Group Lead Corporate Research for Communication Technology System Design for Digital Radio, Digital Wireless Microphones for professional audio systems. Gerald holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Communications Engineering and Electronics and Signal Processing from Leibniz University Hannover.



Board Member
Christoph Ludewig
Vice President OEM Europe at Geotab Inc.

Working with Geotab, the global leader in IoT and connected vehicles industry, Christoph is responsible for OEM relations and integrating Geotabs business model with that of the OEMs. He looks back to 25+ years in the Automotive industry where he built, ran, and grew various products and businesses for fleet telematics for trucks, vans, and cars.



Board Member
Florian Baumann
Sr. Director of Product Management, Middleware & DevOps at APTIV

Florian Baumann has been the Director for Cloud & Software Strategy at Aptiv since 2021. From a young age, Florian has been obsessed with technology especially machine learning (ML), leading up to a PhD on the topic from the Leibniz University of Hannover. He brings that experience to the table developing AD/ADAS solutions.



Board Member
Hisao Munakata
Senior Director, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division Automotive Solution Business Unit at Renesas Electronics Corp

Munakata had strived to utilize various OSS (like Linux kernel, Chromium, Wayland,..) in Renesas automotive target silicon over ten years. And he established a close collaborative connection to various OSS community stakeholders and Industry consortia leaders now.



Board Member
Trpko S. Blazevski
Head of Global Digital Innovation, Tech Scouting, & Digital Partnerships at Stellantis

Trpko S. Blazevski is responsible for Global Digital Innovation and Agile Coaching at Stellantis, where he leads his teams on a journey of experimentation implementing innovative product features for end customers. Trpko is a two-time alumni of Oakland University, having graduated with his bachelor's degree from the School of Engineering & Computer Science in 2014 and his master's from the School of Business Administration in 2016.



Board Member
Thomas Bloor
Director of Automotive for RTI

Thomas Bloor is Director of Automotive at Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the industry leader in DDS-based communication software for automotive and other mission-critical systems.

With over 25 years’ experience in the technology sector, Thomas started his automotive career n business development at Intel, where he built the foundations for Intel's automotive business working with major OEMs in North America and Europe. Subsequently he worked as the Head of Global Business Development for BlackBerry QNX, and then as Director of Sales and Business Development for BlackBerry QNX in the Americas, where he worked extensively with startups and traditional OEMs across North America.

As the Director of Automotive at RTI, Thomas manages the automotive business and strategy to accelerate the transition to software-defined architectures. Thomas holds a BEng(Hons) in Materials Engineering from Birmingham University.



Board Representative
Shareef Hakim
Director of Platform Architecture and Prototyping at Ford Motor

Shareef leads a team that delivers advanced platform and simulation technologies to improve experience and increase the spectrum of capabilities in future vehicles. Having previously worked at Intel; Shareef has extensive experience working in the tech industry in both hardware and software domains delivering solutions in the domains of architecture, simulation and cloud.



Board Representative
Stephen Lawrence
Principal Engineer at Renesas Electronics Corporation

Stephen is a principal engineer representing Renesas within the COVESA Alliance. He is highly skilled at Embedded Systems and software and was formerly the global representative of the GENIVI Linux automotive alliance Baseline Integration Team (BIT). He also was a maintainer of the Renesas R-Car SoC Genivi Yocto BSP. Stephen is highly skilled in Linux kernel development within the Linux team of the European Design Centre for global automotive markets. His focus has principally been in the area of SoC for high-end Car Information Systems (CIS). Stephen holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.



Board Representative
Ted Guild
Connectivity Standards Lead at Geotab Inc.

Ted Guild is the Connectivity Standards Lead at Geotab. His role consists of standards participation and coordination, strategy, and partner engagement. He came to Geotab in May of 2021 from MIT where he had been for 21 years, most of that time as Head of IT for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In his last seven years at MIT, he led W3C's Automotive activity, developing standards for connected vehicles and conducting cybersecurity research. He remains active in the W3C Automotive activity as a co-chair and is involved in the broader, joint Common Vehicle Interface Initiative with COVESA.