The Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (RITAS) was officially announced by the Shenzhen Municipality on 1 November 2019, with a total investment of 100 million RMB over five years. It  is led by Turing Award Laureate, Professor Joseph Sifakis, a Distinguished Visiting Professor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), as the Institute Director, and assisted by Professor Xin Yao as the Executive Director of RITAS. Currently, RITAS has 30 professors (PIs), 8 of them are IEEE fellows and over 70 research fellows, postdocs and research students. RITAS’s mission is to carry out both fundamental and applied research in trustworthy AI systems using a highly interdisciplinary approach by bringing people together from artificial intelligence, computer science and engineering, system engineering, mathematics, operations research, cognitive science, psychology, etc. It covers five major areas, including autonomous driving, smart cities, AI and medicine, machine learning systems, and trustworthy software systems. The common theme cutting across all these area is trustworthiness --- how can we develop trustworthy autonomous systems? What does trustworthiness mean for an application scenario? How to measure trustworthiness? These are some of the basic research questions that will be addressed by RITAS. RITAS has three important pillars to support its growth and long-term sustainability, i.e., cultivation of research talents, international cooperation and knowledge transfer to industry. It recruits international talents with the most competitive pay packages and ample research funding. It has an open and stimulating environment for young researchers to grow and develop their careers. It is aspired to become a world-class research institute in trustworthy autonomous systems and their applications.