Stephen Lawrence is a Principal Engineer at Renesas Electronics, an embedded semiconductor solutions provider. In his role as Renesas technical representative within COVESA, he currently leads the COVESA Data Architecture and Infrastructure pillar of the Data Expert Group. It was here that he conceived the idea for the COVESA Central Data Service Playground and, with the community, grew it into an open-source project with contributions from major OEMs. He also serves on the COVESA Board and the Technical Steering Team. He has over a decade of experience in the automotive open-source software community. In GENIVI, the organization prior to COVESA, he led the GENIVI Integration Team (BIT), which provided software platforms to verify GENIVI compliance and deliver reference integrations of GENIVI components. These baselines were then used as the foundation for both open-source and commercial platforms. He was also active in the development of the GENIVI Development Platform (GDP), including its support on Renesas R-Car SoCs. Prior to his work in the automotive domain, Stephen worked in digital TV and graphics systems for printing. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science.