Keynote Speakers
Keynote 1 – Research, Data, and Policy at the Department of Transportation: An overview
In this talk I will discuss elements of the Infrastructure Bill and the priorities of the Department of Transportation. Specially, I will discuss how the safety, equity, economic strength, and climate goals of the Department of Transportation can benefit from the active engagement IEEE Smart Cities communities.
Robert Hampshire
Bio:
Robert Hampshire serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology, and Chief Science Officer. Hampshire was previously an associate professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He was also a research associate professor in both the U-M Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE).
His unique blend of engineering systems research with public policy has made him a leader in not only transportation research, but also on the disparate impact of policy decisions in transportation systems. This has led to important strides in our understanding of transportation equity. His research applies operations research, data science, and systems approaches to analyze novel transportation systems such as smart parking, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing, bike sharing, car sharing, as well as, pedestrian and bicyclist safety. His research focuses on environmental impacts, equity, and access to opportunities. His work has been cited widely, and covered by major press outlets. He has worked extensively with both public and private sector partners worldwide. He has also been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hampshire received a PhD in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University.
Bio:
Robert Hampshire serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology, and Chief Science Officer. Hampshire was previously an associate professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He was also a research associate professor in both the U-M Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE).
His unique blend of engineering systems research with public policy has made him a leader in not only transportation research, but also on the disparate impact of policy decisions in transportation systems. This has led to important strides in our understanding of transportation equity. His research applies operations research, data science, and systems approaches to analyze novel transportation systems such as smart parking, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing, bike sharing, car sharing, as well as, pedestrian and bicyclist safety. His research focuses on environmental impacts, equity, and access to opportunities. His work has been cited widely, and covered by major press outlets. He has worked extensively with both public and private sector partners worldwide. He has also been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hampshire received a PhD in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University.
Keynote 2 – Achieving Smart Urban Mobility at Scale: Beyond ACES (Autonomous, Connected, Electric, Shared)
Transportation is undergoing deep and significant transformation, seeking to fulfill the promise of connected urban mobility for people and goods, while limiting its carbon footprint. Achieving the promise of these technologies calls for concomitant development of the underlying intelligence through advanced distributed software tools that implement prediction and control algorithms, machine learning methods and fast optimization techniques. It also calls for a departure from a vehicle-centric view of the world to a person-focused perspective on mobility. We discuss these developments and provide selected examples of predictive analytics with connected trajectory data to support intelligent mobility operations and planning. We also discuss challenges in fulfilling broader societal objectives of inclusion and equity alongside sustainability and mobility, and the role of technology in that regard.
Hani S. Mahmassani
Dr. Hani S. Mahmassani holds the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation at Northwestern University, where he is Director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center, and Director of the US-DOT Center of Excellence on Telemobility. Prior to Northwestern, he served on the faculties of the University of Maryland and the University of Texas at Austin. He has over 35 years of professional, academic and research experience in the areas of intelligent transportation systems, freight and logistics systems, multimodal systems modeling and optimization, pedestrian and crowd dynamics, traffic science, demand forecasting and travel behavior, and real-time operation of transportation and distribution systems. He is past editor-in-chief of Transportation Science, senior editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, founding (past) associate editor of Transportation Research C: Emerging Technologies, and associate editor of Transportation Research Record. He is a past president of the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS, past President of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research, and the Convenor-elect of the ISTTT International Advisory Committee. He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the American University of Beirut (2006), the Intelligent Transportation Systems Outstanding Application Award of IEEE (2010), and the Transportation Research Board’s Thomas Deen Distinguished Lectureship (2016). He was elected Emeritus member of the Transportation Research Board committees on Telecommunications and Travel Behavior, Transportation Network Modeling, and Traveler Behavior and Values. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021 “for contributions to modeling of intelligent transportation networks and to interdisciplinary collaboration in transportation engineering”. Mahmassani received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in transportation systems and MS in transportation engineering from Purdue University.
Dr. Hani S. Mahmassani holds the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation at Northwestern University, where he is Director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center, and Director of the US-DOT Center of Excellence on Telemobility. Prior to Northwestern, he served on the faculties of the University of Maryland and the University of Texas at Austin. He has over 35 years of professional, academic and research experience in the areas of intelligent transportation systems, freight and logistics systems, multimodal systems modeling and optimization, pedestrian and crowd dynamics, traffic science, demand forecasting and travel behavior, and real-time operation of transportation and distribution systems. He is past editor-in-chief of Transportation Science, senior editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, founding (past) associate editor of Transportation Research C: Emerging Technologies, and associate editor of Transportation Research Record. He is a past president of the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS, past President of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research, and the Convenor-elect of the ISTTT International Advisory Committee. He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the American University of Beirut (2006), the Intelligent Transportation Systems Outstanding Application Award of IEEE (2010), and the Transportation Research Board’s Thomas Deen Distinguished Lectureship (2016). He was elected Emeritus member of the Transportation Research Board committees on Telecommunications and Travel Behavior, Transportation Network Modeling, and Traveler Behavior and Values. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021 “for contributions to modeling of intelligent transportation networks and to interdisciplinary collaboration in transportation engineering”. Mahmassani received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in transportation systems and MS in transportation engineering from Purdue University.
Keynote 3 – Enhancing the Security and Resilience of the Smart Grid in Smart Cities
Cybersecurity is of paramount importance for the smart grid, especially since energy is a major critical infrastructure sector. Recent cybersecurity incidents and security research studies demonstrate that smart cities and electric grids could be subjected to debilitating and disrupting attacks that might lead to severe security and economic consequences and even endangerment and loss of human lives. These attacks might be carried out by a spectrum of individuals such as criminals, cyber-terrorists, terrorists, and foreign government spies. In this talk, we will first discuss the threat landscape by presenting recent attacks on industrial control systems, smart cities, and the smart grid. Second, we will emphasize the derivation of cyber threat intelligence that could be used to prevent, detect, mitigate and attribute attacks on IT/OT infrastructure. Finally, we will address the security of the smart grid. In this regard, we will discuss the monitoring, detection, and prevention of attacks. As such, we will address the design and implementation of digital runtime co-simulation models. Then, we will use them to: (1) execute attacks and quantify their cyber-physical effects, and (2) collect telemetry data and subject it to AI-based security analytics for attack detection purposes. An important goal of this talk is to discuss metrics that could be used to measure the security and resilience posture.
Mourad Debbabi
Bio:
Mourad Debbabi is a Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering and the Dean of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University. He holds the NSERC/Hydro-Quebec Thales Senior Industrial Research Chair in Smart Grid Security and the Hon. Concordia Research Chair Tier I in Information Systems Security. He is a member of CATAAlliance’s Cybercrime Advisory Council. He serves/served on the boards of Canadian Police College, PROMPT Québec, and Calcul Québec. He was also a member of the Cybersecurity Advisory Board to the Minister for Government Digital Transformation. He is the founder and the Director of the Security Research Centre of Concordia University. Dr. Debbabi holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Paris-XI Orsay, University, France. He published 7 books and more than 300 peer-reviewed research articles in international journals and conferences on cybersecurity, cyber forensics, smart grid, privacy, cryptographic protocols, threat intelligence generation, malware analysis, reverse engineering, specification and verification of safety-critical systems, programming languages, and type theory. He supervised to successful completion 33 Ph.D. students, 76 Master students, and 15 Postdoctoral Fellows. He served as a Senior Scientist at the Panasonic Information and Network Technologies Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of Laval University, Canada; Senior Scientist at General Electric Research Center, New York, USA; Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, California, USA; and Permanent Researcher at the Bull Corporate Research Centre, Paris, France.
Bio:
Mourad Debbabi is a Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering and the Dean of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University. He holds the NSERC/Hydro-Quebec Thales Senior Industrial Research Chair in Smart Grid Security and the Hon. Concordia Research Chair Tier I in Information Systems Security. He is a member of CATAAlliance’s Cybercrime Advisory Council. He serves/served on the boards of Canadian Police College, PROMPT Québec, and Calcul Québec. He was also a member of the Cybersecurity Advisory Board to the Minister for Government Digital Transformation. He is the founder and the Director of the Security Research Centre of Concordia University. Dr. Debbabi holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Paris-XI Orsay, University, France. He published 7 books and more than 300 peer-reviewed research articles in international journals and conferences on cybersecurity, cyber forensics, smart grid, privacy, cryptographic protocols, threat intelligence generation, malware analysis, reverse engineering, specification and verification of safety-critical systems, programming languages, and type theory. He supervised to successful completion 33 Ph.D. students, 76 Master students, and 15 Postdoctoral Fellows. He served as a Senior Scientist at the Panasonic Information and Network Technologies Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of Laval University, Canada; Senior Scientist at General Electric Research Center, New York, USA; Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, California, USA; and Permanent Researcher at the Bull Corporate Research Centre, Paris, France.
Keynote 4 – Energy Efficient Edge Processing in Smart Cities
Traffic continues to grow in communication networks at 30% to 40% per year thus doubling every two years and increasing by factors of 30x and 1000x in 10 and 20 years respectively. Power consumption in equipment tends to scale with data rate and thus this increased traffic can lead to power consumption levels that are not sustainable if there is no intervention. Power is consumed in communication networks and in data centres that support the digital transformation in smart cities. Edge processing can help reduce latency and reduce power consumption when used in smart cities by bringing processing closer to end users. In this talk, we will introduce a number of measures that can be taken to improve the energy efficiency of the communication networks and edge processing which are key to smart cities. We will also introduce energy-efficient virtualisation approaches in edge processing where a number of business processes are embedded in an energy-efficient manner into the substrate/physical networking and processing infrastructure. Each business process in the smart city may call for IoT sensing, communications, processing and actuation. A business process may involve providing security functions on-demand in the smart city, pollution monitoring for a short time in a given location for a festival event or multiview view for a football match together with security for the match duration. The requests for these business processes vary in space and time in the smart city and are typically short-lived, but can also be durable. The role of edge processing and energy efficiency will be introduced in this setting.
Jaafar Elmirghani
Prof. Jaafar Elmirghani is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of IET and Fellow of Institute of Physics and Director of the Institute of Communication and Power Networks, Leeds. He has provided outstanding leadership in a number of large research projects, secured over £30m in grants and was PI of the £6m EPSRC Intelligent Energy Aware Networks (INTERNET) Programme Grant, 2010-2016. He was PI of the CHIST-ERA STAR project with a focus on energy efficiency, 2013-2016. He is Co-Chair of the IEEE Sustainable ICT initiative, a pan IEEE Societies initiative responsible for Green ICT activities across IEEE, 2012-present. He was awarded in international competition the IEEE Comsoc 2005 Hal Sobol award, 3 IEEE Comsoc outstanding technical achievement and service awards (2009, 2015, 2020), the 2015 GreenTouch 1000x award, IET Optoelectronics 2016 Premium Award for work on energy efficiency and shared the 2016 Edison Award in the collective disruption category with a team of 6 from GreenTouch for joint work on the GreenMeter. His work led to 5 IEEE standards with a focus on cloud and fog computing and energy efficiency, where he currently heads the work group responsible for IEEE P1925.1, IEEE P1926.1, IEEE P1927.1, IEEE P1928.1 and IEEE P1929.1 standards; this resulting in significant impact through industrial and academic uptake. He is Area Editor of IEEE JSAC series on Machine Learning for Communications and is PI of the EPSRC £6.6m Terabit Bidirectional Multi-user Optical Wireless System (TOWS) for 6G LiFi, 2019-2024. He has published over 550 technical papers, and has research interests in energy efficiency, optimisation, machine learning, cloud and fog computing.
Bio:
Prof. Jaafar Elmirghani is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of IET and Fellow of Institute of Physics and Director of the Institute of Communication and Power Networks, Leeds. He has provided outstanding leadership in a number of large research projects, secured over £30m in grants and was PI of the £6m EPSRC Intelligent Energy Aware Networks (INTERNET) Programme Grant, 2010-2016. He was PI of the CHIST-ERA STAR project with a focus on energy efficiency, 2013-2016. He is Co-Chair of the IEEE Sustainable ICT initiative, a pan IEEE Societies initiative responsible for Green ICT activities across IEEE, 2012-present. He was awarded in international competition the IEEE Comsoc 2005 Hal Sobol award, 3 IEEE Comsoc outstanding technical achievement and service awards (2009, 2015, 2020), the 2015 GreenTouch 1000x award, IET Optoelectronics 2016 Premium Award for work on energy efficiency and shared the 2016 Edison Award in the collective disruption category with a team of 6 from GreenTouch for joint work on the GreenMeter. His work led to 5 IEEE standards with a focus on cloud and fog computing and energy efficiency, where he currently heads the work group responsible for IEEE P1925.1, IEEE P1926.1, IEEE P1927.1, IEEE P1928.1 and IEEE P1929.1 standards; this resulting in significant impact through industrial and academic uptake. He is Area Editor of IEEE JSAC series on Machine Learning for Communications and is PI of the EPSRC £6.6m Terabit Bidirectional Multi-user Optical Wireless System (TOWS) for 6G LiFi, 2019-2024. He has published over 550 technical papers, and has research interests in energy efficiency, optimisation, machine learning, cloud and fog computing.
Keynote 5 – Smart energy homes and communities
As energy systems around the world become decarbonised, decentralised and digitalised to address climate change targets, there will be rapid deployment of small-scale distributed energy generation and storage technologies, sensors and control systems in people’s homes and communities. This presentation will provide learnings and insights on the actual performance of smart energy homes and planning of smart energy communities in the UK, drawing from a portfolio of recent and ongoing research and innovation projects undertaken by the Low Carbon Building Research group led by Professor Gupta. The projects range from field trial of rooftop solar and smart batteries across a cluster of homes in Oxford, retrofits of smart heat pumps and smart heating controls to intelligently coordinate heat pumps and battery assets in social housing, to the development and trial of an online and interactive local area energy mapping tool for planning smart local energy neighborhoods in Oxfordshire.
Rajat Gupta
Rajat Gupta is Director of the multi-disciplinary Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) and Low Carbon Building Research Group at Oxford Brookes University (Oxford, UK). He holds a senior professorial chair in sustainable architecture and climate change. Rajat’s research interests lie in evaluating building performance from a socio-technical perspective, smart local energy systems, local energy mapping, scaling up energy retrofits and climate change adaptation. As Principal Investigator (PI) he has won over £13 million in research grants from EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, EU and Innovate UK to investigate these subjects.
Rajat is presently Co-I on the £9 million EPSRC EnergRev project on scaling up smart local
energy systems, PI of the £382k EPSRC EnergyREV Plus project on smart energy tools for
enhancing user engagement in local energy projects and lead academic in the Innovate UK
£15.4 million smart local energy system demonstrator, Local Energy Oxfordshire. He is also
lead academic on a UK Government funded Breathe project on Bringing Renewable Energy Automation To Homes Everywhere.
Rajat is Director of the international Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) network and member of the EPSRC and ESRC peer review colleges. He has delivered 50 conference keynotes and produced over 150 publications. Rajat lives in a home that has solar panels, smart meters, smart IAQ monitors, Electric Vehicle and one of the first residential Vehicle2Grid charger.
Webpage: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/templates/pages/staff.aspx?uid=p0020979
Bio:
Rajat Gupta is Director of the multi-disciplinary Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) and Low Carbon Building Research Group at Oxford Brookes University (Oxford, UK). He holds a senior professorial chair in sustainable architecture and climate change. Rajat’s research interests lie in evaluating building performance from a socio-technical perspective, smart local energy systems, local energy mapping, scaling up energy retrofits and climate change adaptation. As Principal Investigator (PI) he has won over £13 million in research grants from EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, EU and Innovate UK to investigate these subjects. Rajat is presently Co-I on the £9 million EPSRC EnergRev project on scaling up smart local energy systems, PI of the £382k EPSRC EnergyREV Plus project on smart energy tools for enhancing user engagement in local energy projects and lead academic in the Innovate UK £15.4 million smart local energy system demonstrator, Local Energy Oxfordshire. He is also lead academic on a UK Government funded Breathe project on Bringing Renewable Energy Automation To Homes Everywhere. Rajat is Director of the international Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) network and member of the EPSRC and ESRC peer review colleges. He has delivered 50 conference keynotes and produced over 150 publications. Rajat lives in a home that has solar panels, smart meters, smart IAQ monitors, Electric Vehicle and one of the first residential Vehicle2Grid charger.
Keynote 6 – Rapid Deployment of Your Smart Vision Application with OpenNCC™ (Open Neural Compute Camera)
Many AI developers have faced the challenge of deploying their algorithms and applications in the real world. It can take 9 to 18 months to design and manufacture customized optics and edge-AI cameras. It takes a lot of effort to integrate these cameras into a cloud based data collection and device management system for an end-to-end IoT application. Now with the Open Neural Compute Camera system, it takes away the pain and time of designing a customized hardware with the modulized, fully customizable lens, sensor, imaging pipeline, inferencing engine, and communication interface. OpenNCC is an appliance conforming to the Intel OpenVINO framework so that more than 100 public OpenVINO models such as Human Pose Estimation and Pedestrian Detection can be applied on the camera seamlessly. OpenNCC also comes with its software development kit to make it easier to integrate with server or cloud applications for device management, data collection, and remote control panel of the AI cameras.
In this keynote speech we will explain the architecture and interfaces of the OpenNCC appliance and demonstrate through examples of how quickly one can build a Smart Vision Application using the OpenNCC appliance and platform.
Po Yuan
Bio:
Po Yuan is the Founder/CEO of eyecloud.ai, a Silicon Valley startup specializes in AI vision product design. Prior experience including VP of Applications Engineering at Movidius an AI processor startup which was acquired by Intel, Sr. Manager at Aptina Imaging, Director of Mobile Software at SanDisk, and Sr. Software Engineer at Microsoft. Po graduated from University of Texas at Dallas with Master’s degree in digital signal processing, and Master and Bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University. Po has many years of technical development and management experience and is an expert in AI, Computer Vision, Imaging, and IoT applications holding 20+ patents in the US and Europe.
Bio:
Po Yuan is the Founder/CEO of eyecloud.ai, a Silicon Valley startup specializes in AI vision product design. Prior experience including VP of Applications Engineering at Movidius an AI processor startup which was acquired by Intel, Sr. Manager at Aptina Imaging, Director of Mobile Software at SanDisk, and Sr. Software Engineer at Microsoft. Po graduated from University of Texas at Dallas with Master’s degree in digital signal processing, and Master and Bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University. Po has many years of technical development and management experience and is an expert in AI, Computer Vision, Imaging, and IoT applications holding 20+ patents in the US and Europe.