Prof. Haibo Chen, University of Leeds, UK

Speech Title: Enhancing user acceptance of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs): the PAsCAL approach (Click for abstract)

Dr. Haibo Chen is currently a professor in Intelligent Transportation Systems at the Institute of Transport, University of Leeds (UK), an active member of the ITS-UK Association, and an academy trainer of the European ITS Association (European Road Transport Telematics Implementation Coordination Association). He is the leader for the "Spatial Modelling and Dynamics" research group and for the "Connected and Shared Mobility" research theme. He is a visiting honorary professor and an external academic advisor to several universities in China. Since 2020, he has published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers in top international journals. In the recent years, he has led the Leeds team to participate in ten EU-funded projects of more than 60 million euros as a key member. His research interests include smart mobility, traffic and environment management and control, big data and digital twins in transport, zero-emission vehicles, automated transport systems etc.

Prof. Wei Fan, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

The title of my speech will be "Analyzing Pedestrian Injuries in Pedestrian-Vehicle Crashes using Emerging Hotspots Analysis and XGBoost" (Click for abstract)

Dr. Wei (David) Fan currently serves as a full professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the also Director of the USDOT University Transportation Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education. Dr. Fan holds a Ph.D. (May 2004) in Civil Engineering – Transportation from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Fan serves as the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology, a handling editor on the Transportation Research Record (TRR) inaugural editorial board, an associate editor of IEEE Transactions – Intelligent Transportation Systems, and an associate editor of ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems while also serving as a member of two other transportation journal editorial boards. Dr. Fan also serves as a member on the National Science Foundation (NSF) review panels, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) panels, the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) panel, as well as a member on three American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) committees and three Transportation Research Board (TRB) committees.

Dr. Fan has been and is involved in many sponsored projects (with a total of over 17.35 million dollars in funding and about 7.25 million dollars of them being his share), having been a principal or co-principal investigator on many research studies for the U. S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), NCHRP, SHRP2 Education Connection, Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT). He has published 120 peer-reviewed journal articles thus far, and many proceeding papers and technical reports on big data analytics in transportation, connected and autonomous vehicles, shared mobility and multimodal transportation, traffic system operation and control, and transportation system analysis and network modeling. He is a registered professional engineer in Texas.

Prof. Zongzhi Li, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

Speech Title: Megacity Mobility toward Integrated Urban Transportation Development and Management (Click for abstract)

Dr. Zongzhi Li is a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago, USA. He received BE (1992) from Chang’an University, Xi’an, China; MSCE (2000), MSIE (2002), and Ph.D. (2003) all from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA with MSCE and Ph.D. under supervision of Dr. Kumares C. Sinha, a member of U.S. National Academy of Engineering and MSIE under supervision of Dr. Thomas L. Morin, a renowned scholar in discrete optimization and multicriteria decision-making. He currently coordinates IIT Transportation Engineering Program and Infrastructure Engineering and Management Program; and serves as the Director of Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure Research (STAIR) Center and Transportation Engineering Laboratory at IIT. He was appointed as a senior research fellow of the Reason Foundation; a member of multiple U.S. National Academies’ Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committees; a member of editorial board of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Infrastructure Systems, an associate editor of Elsevier Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, and a handling editor of TRB Journal of Transportation Research Record. Dr. Li’s areas of expertise are in multimodal transportation infrastructure, dynamic traffic network, and user behavior/freight movement performance modeling, dynamic transportation asset management, and transportation network economics. He has served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for a vast amount of research studies at IIT totaling 4.3 million US dollars funded by U.S. Federal and state agencies and the private sector; supervised nearly 80 M.S. and Ph.D. students; published 4 books (the 3rd book on Transportation Asset Management: Methodology and Applications is the world’s first graduate-level textbook in the related field), 3 book chapters, and nearly 80 referred papers; developed 2 software packages; and invented/holds 7 U.S. patents. He has received numerous awards, including ASCE Arthur M. Wellington Prize (2011), IIT Sigma Xi Award for Excellence (2011), Charley V. Wootan Award given by the U.S. Council of University Transportation Centers (2000), and International Road Federation Fellowship Award (1998).