Keynote speech 1: Dr. Evangelos Bekiaris | Director General, Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)
Title
Towards the deployment of connected and cooperative automated mobility
When
Monday, Plenary Session MoK1NO, 09:40-10:40
Abstract
Prior to ad hoc adoption of automated mobility on city and country level across Europe, further research and pre-deployment activities are anticipated tackling with acceptance, technological, ethical, regulatory, operational and business challenges that have to be fully addressed. Cities across Europe are progressively participating in initiatives that are allowing them to explore their readiness towards this direction. Connection and cooperativeness of all types of autonomous vehicles – involved in passenger and freight mobility both - with the infrastructure and all other road users through a wide, evolving and complentary spectrum of technologies (LTE 4G/5G, G5, IoT), ensuring interoperability and security while responding primarily at the dynamic context of traffic safety and its criticality constitutes the key technological challenge. Full automation (SAE Level 4, 4+) through remote operation of fleets and collaboration with the Traffic Management Centres Strategy Managing systems is already validated in a series of European sites. Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are deployed to provide personalized services to the autonomous vehicles and the road users in a massive way. Dedicated Human Machine Interfaces for “drivers”, passengers and operators are being studied. Standardised homologation on a European level is key to wide deployment. Joined European efforts are disposed towards broad field pre-deployment with big fleets in different traffic contexts (urban, peri-urban, rural, motorways under mixed traffic conditions or dedicated lanes), confronting with different traffic scenarios and operating under different speed ranges and environmental conditions adhering to fleet sharing Demand Response Transport (DRT) and first-last mile business models and Automation as a Service. Finally, drivers, operators and road users need to get prepared and trained and Cities need to recognize those soft measures, initiatives and policies that will best accommodate the smooth and cost-efficient integration of automated mobility in the transport system currently standing in them.
Short bio
Dr. Evangelos Bekiaris, PhD on Mechanical Engineering NTUA, has been elected as Researcher of the Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) in 2001; being its Director General as of 2016. Since 1992 he has participated in over 120 research projects, in 40 of which at the role of Overall or Technical Coordinator. He’s the National representative of Greece in the H2020 Transport Committee since 2014 and President of the European Conference of Transport Research Institutes (ECTRI) and the European Rail Research Network of Excellence (EURNEX) since 2019. In the past he’s also been the President of the European Associations FERSI (on road safety) and HUMANIST (on Human Factors in Transport).
Keynote speech 2: Dr. Jack Weast | Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel and VP Autonomous Vehicle Standards at Mobileye
Title
Metrics, Methods and Assumptions: The State of the State of AV Safety Assurance
When
Monday, Plenary Session MoK2NA, 16:20-17:20
Abstract
In this engaging keynote talk, Jack Weast will provide a front-seat perspective on the state-of-the-state of AV Safety Assurance. Much has happened since ITSC 2019, but have we advanced state of the art thinking on what the Safety Assurance of AV’s is all about? In some ways we have, with compelling new metrics and standards providing important clarity on the role of assumptions in the ability for an AV to navigate not only safely, but usefully. Yet in other areas, the industry remains far from aligned on the path forward, and here is where industry and researchers have an opportunity to come together to solve the final frontiers of the AV Safety Assurance Challenge.
Short bio
Jack Weast is a Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel and VP Autonomous Vehicle Standards at Mobileye. In his nearly 20 year career at Intel, Jack has built a reputation as a change agent in new industries with significant technical contributions to a wide range of industry-first products and standards in complex heterogeneous high performance compute solutions in markets that are embracing high performance computing for the first time. With an End to End Systems perspective, Jack combines a unique blend of embedded product experience with a knack for elegant Software and Systems design that will accelerate the adoption of Autonomous Driving. Jack is the co-author of “UPnP: Design By Example”, is an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University and is the holder of 40 patents with dozens pending.
Keynote speech 3: Dr. Georgia Ayfantopoulou | Deputy Director and Research Director, Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)
Title
The future of urban mobility and city logistics after COVID-19
When
Tuesday, Plenary Session TuKN, 18:00-19:00
Abstract
COVID 19 created challenges and opportunities in urban transport and invoked transformations in urban context in relation to mobility and logistics. This speech gives an overview of the COVID-19 impacts on urban networks of Europe and highlights best adaptation cases. It summarizes what we learned from the lockdown and on this basis, it discusses priorities for Research and Innovation taken up, in order to efficiently meet the requirements of the future operation of the urban mobility and logistics systems and avoid disruption of real operations.
Short bio
Dr. Georgia Ayfantopoulou is Deputy Director and Research Director at the Hellenic Institute of Transport (ΗΙΤ) of CERTH with professional and research experience for over 25 years in transport systems management and optimization. She is the Head of Research Department of HIT “Intelligent Infrastructure and Networks, Sustainable Mobility and Logistics” and being assigned the scientific responsibility and the coordination of many research, consultancy and industrial projects in these topics. She has written numerous scientific articles and reports.
Always focusing on new technology implementation, as enabler for transforming transport and mobility systems, her work emphases on: a) ITS, C-ITS for transport demand and traffic management, b) Data sharing and Big Data analytics for knowledge creation, modelling and decision support in Sustainable Mobility c) Tools and Services development for supporting intermodality as well as users and actors visibility in passengers and freight transport chains operation.
Heavily involved in supporting policy formulation, implementation and policy assessment for sustainable mobility (Urban Mobility Package assessment - DG MOVE, Sustainable Urban Mobility Indicators framework - DG MOVE, Greek Committee on SUMPs specifications, numerous SUMPs in Greece & Cyprus, author of thematic guides of SUMP 2.0, coordinator of CIVITAS projects) she has good knowledge of the cities challenges and of techniques for managing the change towards implementation of new mobility schemes.
She has migrated from industry to academia terrain in 2004 and she is committed to innovation creation and growth through collaboration. She is the Managing Director of the Thessaloniki Technology Park S.A., an innovation multiplier company with stakeholders all industrial associations and research organizations of Northern Greece promoting Mega Project for innovation in Greece (http://www.thestep.gr/), one of them being in mobility. Supporting ecosystems in 4helix collaboration towards city led innovation for mobility is an important part of her work the last ten years, in local ecosystems, H2020 and INTERREG projects. She is currently the coordinator of the Thessaloniki Smart Mobility Living Lab (https://smartmlab.imet.gr/), a member of the European Association of Living Labs ENoLL (https://enoll.org/) and is leading the initiative for the establishment of the national Cluster and Competence Center on sustainable mobility and city logistics. She is a member of the EU Digital Transport & Logistics Forum (https://www.dtlf.eu/), an expert group formulated by DG-MOVE for supporting interoperability of technologies platforms and services in transport and Logistics and with the mandate to deliver the proposal for the European Federated Network of platforms in transport logistics community.
Keynote speech 4: Prof. Nikolas Geroliminis | Associate Professor, ‘Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Title
Hierarchical large-scale control for heterogeneously congested urban networks
When
Wednesday, Plenary Session WeKN, 13:10-14:10
Abstract
Human mobility in congested city centers is a complex dynamical system with high density of population, many transport modes to compete for limited available space and many operators that try to efficiently manage different parts of this system. New emerging modes of transportation, such as ride-hailing and on-demand services, and new technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, create additional opportunities, but also more complexity. The new era of sharing information and ‘big data world’ has raised our expectation to make mobility more predictable and controllable through a better utilization of existing resources and capacity. The primary motivation of this talk is to study the spatiotemporal relation of congested links in large networks, develop new advancements in the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram, observe congestion propagation from a macroscopic perspective, identify the effect of multimodal interactions in network capacity and finally design network-level control strategies to improve multimodal mobility. Investigating the clustering problem over time help us reveal the hidden information during the process of congestion formation and dissolution. In this framework, we will be able to chase where congestion originates and how traffic management systems affect its formation and the time it finishes. Different control strategies are developed based on principles of optimization control theory.
Short bio
Prof. Nikolas Geroliminis is an Associate Professor at EPFL and the head of the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS). Before joining EPFL he was an Assistant Professor on the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a MSc and Ph.D. in civil engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He is an Associate Editor for Transportation Research part C, IEEE Transactions on ITS and Transportation Science. He is a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Traffic Flow Theory Committee. His research interests focus primarily on urban transportation systems, traffic flow theory and control, public transportation and on-demand transport, car sharing, Optimization and Large Scale Networks. He is a recipient of the ERC Starting Grant METAFERW: Modeling and controlling traffic congestion and propagation in large-scale urban multimodal networks. Among his recent initiatives is the creation of an open-science large-scale dataset of naturalistic urban trajectories of half a million vehicles that have been collected by one-of-a-kind experiment by a swarm of drones ( https://open-traffic.epfl.ch).
