About

White Box Autonomy runs the Global AV Event Observatory: a structured, openly sourced catalogue of events involving automated-driving systems.

What we record

Each entry is an event — a record that something happened involving a putative automated vehicle. An event anchors one or more sources (the original reporting or documentation) and specific, individually checkable claims about what occurred. We record both failures and the successful handling of difficult situations, so the catalogue is not limited to things that went wrong.

How we use AI

AI is used only to discover and structure publicly available information. It finds candidate reports and drafts a neutral summary. The AI’s output is never treated as evidence: the evidence is always the original sources, which are linked from every event. AI-written text and curator-written text are always shown distinctly.

Principles

• AI discovers and structures information; AI itself is never evidence.
• Every machine-discovered event has traceable source provenance.
• Missing facts are left unknown — we do not infer them.
• The involvement of an automated vehicle is not the same as its being the cause.
• Verification status is always explicit.
• AI-generated and curator-written text remain distinguishable.

First public release

The first release is deliberately small: this set of information pages, a browsable list of events, individual event pages, a small initial dataset, and a basic curator workflow. An interactive map is planned but not yet available. Everything else in the long-term design — scenario extraction, benchmarking, contributor accounts, semantic search — comes later.

The methods behind discovery, provenance, and verification status are described on the methodology page.

Who runs this

White Box Autonomy is developed and maintained by the M2CAT Lab at The University of Queensland, with support from the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT250100337) and The University of Queensland.

The views expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Research Council or the Australian Government.

Contact and corrections

To report an error, request a correction, or raise a concern about a record or its source material, contact zuduo.zheng@uq.edu.au.