Distinguished Lecturers

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Cristina Olaverri-Monreal

Johannes Kepler University Linz - JKU
Linz, Austria

Univ. Prof. Dr. Cristina Olaverri-Monreal is the president of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (IEEE ITSS), founder and chair of the Austrian IEEE ITSS chapter, and chair of the Technical Activities Committee (TAC) on Human Factors in ITS.

She is professor and holder of the BMK endowed chair Sustainable Transport Logistics 4.0 at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, in Austria. Prior to this position, she led diverse teams in the industry and in the academia in the US and in distinct countries in Europe.

She received her PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich in cooperation with BMW. Her research aims at studying solutions for an efficient and effective transportation focusing on minimizing the barrier between users and road systems. To this end, she relies on the automation, wireless communication and sensing technologies that pertain to the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).

Dr. Olaverri is a member of the EU-wide platform for coordinating open road tests (Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM)) as well as a representative for the European technology platform "Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe" (ALICE) for the "Workgroup Road Safety" (WG4: EU-CCAM-WG-ROAD-SAFETY@ec.europa.eu). She is additionally a senior/associate editor and editorial board member of several journals in the field, including the IEEE ITS Transactions and IEEE ITS Magazine.

Furthermore, she is an expert for the European Commission on "Automated Road Transport" and consultant and project evaluator in the field of ICT and "Connected, Cooperative Autonomous Mobility Systems" for various EU and national agencies as well as organizations in Germany, Sweden, France, Ireland, etc. In 2017, she was the general chair of the "IEEE International Conference on Vehicles Electronics and Safety" (ICVES'2017). She was awarded the "IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Continuing Education" for her dedicated contribution to continuing education in the field of ITS.

Talk #1

Intelligent automated vehicles and vulnerable road users

Maximum automation in vehicles requires sensing the environment, analyzing information to make the appropriate decisions, and taking the appropriate actions. This process requires overcoming many challenges, including the detection of other road users. The protection of vulnerable road users has been an active research topic in recent years. In this context, P2V (pedestrian-to-vehicle) and V2P (vehicle-to-pedestrian) have become crucial technologies to minimize potential hazards due to the high detection rates and high user satisfaction they achieve.

In this context, the trust of other road users in the technology plays a crucial role when interacting with highly automated vehicles. This presentation will provide an overview of the impact of automated technologies on road safety and identify ways to increase trust in the system.

Talk #2

Effects of conditional and high levels of automation on road safety

The ability to incorporate new technology-enabled functions into vehicles has played a central role in the development of motor vehicles. The widespread application of digital technologies provides the opportunity to design systems whose operation is based on multiple, interconnected applications. As a result, the development of intelligent road vehicle systems such as cooperative driver assistance systems (Co-ADAS), and thus the level of vehicle automation, is rapidly increasing. The advent of vehicle automation is leading to a reduction in driver workload. However, depending on the level of automation, consequences for passengers are foreseeable, such as out-of-the-loop conditions. This presentation will provide an overview of the impact of such technologies on traffic awareness to improve driving performance and reduce traffic accidents. It will also highlight the benefits and potential problems of vehicle automation.

Mohan Trivedi

University of California
San Diego (CA), USA

E: mtrivedi@eng.ucsd.edu

Mohan Trivedi is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California San Diego and founding director of the Computer Vision and Robotics Research Laboratory (est. 1986), as well as the Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles (LISA) (est. 2001). Trivedi and his team are pursuing research in intelligent vehicles, human-centered autonomous driving, machine perception, machine learning, human-robot interactivity, and advanced driver assistance. LISA research outputs have directly impacted a broad range of commercially deployed ADAS, driver monitoring, active safety, and high autonomy systems, including lane departure warning, lane keep assist, lane/road/vehicle/pedestrian/traffic sign detection/tracking modules, panoramic surround viewing, trajectory prediction and collision avoidance, driver attention, activities, intent and readiness prediction modules. The LISA team has won over 30 “Best/Finalist” paper awards, six best dissertation awards, the IEEE ITS Society’s Outstanding Research Award and LEAD Institution Award, as well as the Meritorious Service and Pioneer Award (Technical Activities) of the IEEE Computer Society. Trivedi has received Distinguished Alumnus awards from BITS-Pilani, India and Utah State University. He has given over 130 keynote/plenary talks. He regularly serves as a consultant to various industry and government agencies in the US and abroad. He frequently serves on panels dealing with technological, strategic, privacy, and ethical issues surrounding research areas he is involved in.

Trivedi has served as the Chair of the Robotics Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society, Governing Board member of the IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics, and IEEE ITSC societies. Trivedi is a Fellow of IEEE (life), SPIE, and IAPR.

Talk # 1

On Safe Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future

Engineers and scientists engaged in making artificially intelligent systems have successfully resolved many challenging technical problems and have demonstrated the practical viability of autonomous driving on test tracks and carefully selected roads. These are major milestones in engineering and a clear harbinger of a transformative new era of moving goods, supplies, and people from point A to point B. Yet, along with these accomplishments come many new challenges that are not only of a technical nature, but also of a broader social, legal, and even “ethical” nature. Such issues become more urgent and important as collisions and accidents involving self-driving or semi-autonomous vehicles occur more often – injuring and even killing humans in the real world. A key challenge that needs to be addressed is making sure that the artificially engineered automobiles and humans cohabit in a harmonious, safe, and secure manner. For researchers this provides the exciting opportunity to pursue important problems from a broad range of topics in distributed perception, cognition, planning, and control. We will present a “Human Centered” approach for the development of highly automated vehicle technologies. We will also present a brief sampling of contributions in the development of systems and algorithms to perceive situational criticalities, predict intentions of intelligent agents, and plan/execute actions for safe & smooth maneuvers and control transitions. We will highlight major research milestones in the autonomous vehicles area and discuss issues that require deeper, critical examination and careful resolution to assure safe, reliable, and robust operation of these highly complex systems in the real world.

Danwei Wang

Nanyang Technological University
Singapore

E: edwwang@ntu.edu.sg

WANG, Danwei received and his Ph.D and M.E.S. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, in 1989 and 1986, respectively, and his B.E. degree from the South China University of Technology, China, in 1982. Currently, he is a professor, Division of Control and Instrumentation, EEE, NTU, Director, EXQISITUS, Centre for E-City, and Director, STE-NTU Corp Lab. From 2005 to 2011, he served as Head, Division of Control and Instrumentation, a member of School Management Committee and a senator in NTU academic council. He is also a facilitated faculty member in Singapore Arm Force - Nanyang Technological University Academy(SNA). He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany from 1996-1997. He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics since 2003, Member, Editorial

Board, International Journal of Vehicular and Autonomous Systems and Advisor for ASME Book Series in Robotics Engineering. He has served as guest editors for various journals, including Journal of Field Robotics. He has been invited to deliver keynote speeches in 9 international conferences and workshops and he was awarded the best conference paper award or in the final list of best conference paper award. He has served in the International Program Committees for IEEE IROS 2006 (Technical Co-Chair) and many recent IEEE IROSs and IEEE ICRAs as Associate Editor. He is a senior member of IEEE and active in conference organization (as general chair, technical chair, keynote chair, etc). He is actively involved in teaching and research related to robotics and control. He has developed and taught postgraduate and undergraduate courses on engineering mathematics, control engineering and robotics. So far, he has completed and ongoing research projects with total fund of 20million SGD. He leads the Centre for E-City with over 74million SGD of active research grant as at March 2015. Since 2015, he is in charge of STE-NTU Corp Lab with approved funding of 52.5million SGD. Dr Wang has been working on robotics/control since 1985. He is a recognized expert on iterative learning/repetitive control theory and applications. He has been working on outdoor mobile robotics since 1995 and was a team leader in a collaboration project with PSA. He led two teams of professors and researchers to pass the qualifying rounds and participate in the Finals of both TechX Challenge 2008 and 2013,respectively, which are outdoor autonomous robot competitions. He was instrumental in the developments of two laboratories for outdoor mobile robots and intelligent robotics in the school of EEE. In recent years, he has successfully developed a framework of fault diagnosis and isolation for complex and hybrid systems. He has also made substantial contributions to the field of satellite formation flying and satellite attitude fault tolerant control. He is the supervisor for 29 Ph.D theses, 38 Master theses and 27 post-doctorates/visiting researchers. He has published two books, 7 book chapters, five patents and over 340 technical papers and articles in international refereed journals and conferences. His research interests include a wide range of topics: robotic manipulators and force control, advanced control design, intelligent systems, learning control, mobile robotics, mobile robot path and trajectory control, satellite formation flying and fault tolerant attitude control, fault diagnosis and prognosis for complex systems, traffic light control. SCI citations to his papers amount to 2414 as of Feb 2015. Contact: Prof Danwei Wang, School of EEE, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Ave., Singapore 639798, Rep. of Singapore. Email: edwwang@ntu.edu.sg, Phone: (+65)-6790-5376, Fax: (+65)-6793-3318. Homepage:http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/edwwang/.

Talk #1

Cybersecurity for Autonomous Systems

Autonomous vehicle technologies have matured to a stage for applications. Autonomy is an integration of multiple technologies, such as sensing, perception, decision and execution. Each application imposes various constraints and limitations to the above technologies and integration. This talk presents our efforts on development of some technologies for a new generation of autonomous environmental service including autonomous navigation for street sweepers, high-fidelity teleoperation and cyber security for autonomous systems. In particular, this talk focuses on the cybersecurity of autonomous systems. We consider cybersecurity for four scenarios including two attacks on prime sensors and two attacks on actuation systems. Our detection frameworks are described and experiments are illustrated to show the effectiveness.

Talk #2

Multi-Robots Collaborative Mapping and Formation Keeping

Future robotics deployments will be in large quantities for efficiency by scaling. Applications will require multi-robots with capabilities such as collaborative mapping and moving in formation. Multi-robots collaboration require technologies beyond autonomous technologies for single robot. This talk discusses a few developments in our laboratory on collaborative mapping and formation keeping in unstructured complex and GPS-denied environment. The focuses are 1) multi-robots collaborative exploration in an efficiency manner with merged map, and 2) robust formation keeping. Examples and experiments are used to illustrate the concepts and points.