Bio: Onur Altintas is the InfoTech Labs Fellow and a Senior Executive at InfoTech Labs, Toyota North America R&D, in Mountain View, California. He has been with the Toyota Group since 1999 in various roles in New Jersey, Tokyo, and California. He is the co-founder and has been the general co-chair of the IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (IEEE VNC) since 2009. He serves as an associate editor for IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, IEEE ITS Magazine and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. He holds a Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo, and M.S. and B.S. from ODTÜ in Ankara, Türkiye, all in EE. He is an IEEE VTS Distinguished Speaker.
Statement: While ITS has progressed through several standardisation efforts and technological innovations, there is an ever pressing need of a comprehensive, safe communication ecosystem that incorporates all road actors including the so-called Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) namely pedestrians and two-wheelers. Support for VRUs requires new paradigms, new mobility models, new technologies and sensors, new standards and new user applications. Paramount is the support from AI, especially at the edge of the network for scalability and reduced latency, in order to identify threats and optimise traffic management.
Bio: Claudio Casetti is a Full Professor at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He has published over 250 papers in peer-refereed international journals and conferences on the following topics: vehicular networks, 5G networks, transport and network protocols in wired networks, IEEE 802.11 WLAN. According to Google Scholar, his H-index is 41. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. He was the Scientific Coordinator of the Master in “Electrified and Connected Vehicle” at Politecnico di Torino between 2018 and 2021. He chaired the Turin Urban Digital Mobility working group within the Smart Roads project fostered by the City of Turin between 2018 and 2022. He has given Tutorials on vehicular networks at major IEEE Conferences, including IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom, IEEE CCNC and IEEE VTC. He has served in the Technical Program Committees of the main international conferences in the networking field (such as IEEE INFOCOM, ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE GLOBECOM or IEEE ICC). He is Senior Editor for Mobile Radio of IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine.
Statement: Vehicles are increasingly being equipped with advanced sensing capabilities, collecting an impressive amount of data about the road environment. Currently, most of this data is used exclusively for vehicle operation. The research and engineering community has started investigating potential usages of this wealth of data beyond vehicle operation, for applications ranging from road surface monitoring to structural health status of bridges to real time emission modeling, and so on. While exciting in terms of potential new applications, the processing and transmission of such huge amount of data could challenge the vehicular communication network in new ways.
Bio: Paolo Santi is Principal Research Scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab where he leads the MIT/Fraunhofer Ambient Mobility initiative, and a Research Director at the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR, Pisa. Dr. Santi holds a “Laurea” degree and the PhD in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy. Dr. Santi is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and has recently been recognized as Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery. His research interest is in the modeling and analysis of complex systems ranging from wireless multi hop networks to sensor and vehicular networks and, more recently, smart mobility and intelligent transportation systems. In these fields, he has contributed more than 180 scientific papers and two books.
Statement: Due to various uncertainties from hardware, software, human, and environment, current autonomous driving systems have not reached the level of full autonomy. V2X has been widely considered as a viable solution to enhance the performance of perception in autonomous driving. How can V2X enhance the performance of other major modules in autonomous driving systems such as trajectory prediction, motion planning, control, and beyond? In other words, how can V2X be better leveraged to improve the robustness of an autonomous driving system as a whole?
Bio: Prof. Jianping Wang is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and assistant provost at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are resource allocation and resiliency in Autonomous Driving, Networking Systems, Edge Computing, and Cloud Computing. Her research has been supported by various funding agencies and industry companies. She has been serving or served as an associate editor for several IEEE transactions/journals such as IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and IEEE Internet of Things Journal. She is an IEEE fellow. She has been listed among the world's top 2% of the most-cited scientists since 2020.
Bio: Tommaso Melodia is the William Lincoln Smith Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things and the Director of Research for the PAWR Project Office. He received his Laurea (integrated BS and MS) from the University of Rome - La Sapienza and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. He is an IEEE Fellow and recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, and of several best paper awards, including at IEEE Infocom 2022. Prof. Melodia the Editor in Chief for Computer Networks and was a co-founder of the 6G Symposium, the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE Infocom, and General Chair for ACM MobiHoc, among others. Prof. Melodia’s research on modeling, optimization, and experimental evaluation of wireless networked systems has been funded by many US government and industry entities.
Bio: Dr. Venkatesh Ramaswamy is Chief Technologist at MITRE Labs in Bedford, Massachusetts where he currently leads technical innovation and R&D activities in 5G/xG technologies. He has more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and has held technical leadership positions at top technology companies, startups, and research labs. Currently he serves as one of the active industry members of the ATIS/Next G Alliance Research Council working on the development of a comprehensive North American 6G strategy. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and patents, served as a TPC member for various conferences, and participated in several technical panels. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mississippi.
Bio: Joerg Widmer is Research Professor and Research Director of IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain. Before, he held positions at DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, Germany and EPFL, Switzerland. He was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, USA, University College London, UK, and TU Darmstadt, Germany. His research focuses on wireless networks, ranging from extremely high frequency millimeter-wave communication and MAC layer design to mobile network architectures. Joerg Widmer authored more than 200 conference and journal papers and three IETF RFCs, and holds 14 patents. He was awarded an ERC consolidator grant, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Mercator Fellowship of the German Research Foundation, a Spanish Ramon y Cajal grant, as well as nine best paper awards. He is an IEEE Fellow and Distinguished Member of the ACM.
Bio: Abhimanyu (Manu) Gosain is a Senior Director for Institute of Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University, co-Chair for the FCC 6G Technology Advisory Council and Senior Advisor for NTIA and DoD OUSD R&E. He is in charge of setting strategic goals and the research agenda for a $100M public-private partnership for the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program and $25M DARPA Colosseum program. He serves as a Board Member for the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, Founding member for Magma Core Foundation, Academic research council representative for O-RAN Alliance, Technology Roadmap group member for NextG Alliance and co-chair on organizing committee and program committees for 6GSymposium, EuCNC,IEEE InfoCom and ACM WinTech. His numerous professional publications and experience exemplify use-inspired basic research in the field of networking technologies such as 5G,6G, AI/ML, edge computing and Internet of Things. He is an IEEE Senior Member. He received his M.S. degree from Tufts University and M.B.A. from Boston University with High Honors.