The Use of Contextual Reasoning for Road Users’ Behaviour Prediction in the Framework of Automated Driving Technologies
Miguel A. Sotelo, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, Spain
Renewable Energy Systems: Current Status in the World, Prospects and Problems
Soteris Kalogirou, Cyprus University of Technology, European University of Technology, Cyprus, Cyprus
The Use of Contextual Reasoning for Road Users’ Behaviour Prediction in the Framework of Automated Driving Technologies
Miguel A. Sotelo
Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Spain
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Brief Bio
Miguel Ángel Sotelo received the degree in Electrical Engineering in 1996 from the Technical University of Madrid, the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2001 from the University of Alcalá, and the Master in Business Administration from the European Business School in 2008. He is currently a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering of the University of Alcalá, where he was the Vice-President for International Relations (2014-2019) and General Manager (2019-2022). In 1997, he was a Research Visitor at the RSISE of the Australian National University in Canberra. His research interests include Self-driving and Interacting cars, as well as Predictive and Cooperative Systems. He is author of more than 300 publications in international journals, conferences, and book chapters, being in the top 1% of researchers in the field of Logistics and Transport, according to the ranking elaborated by the University of Stanford. Miguel Ángel Sotelo has served as Project Evaluator, Rapporteur, and Reviewer for the European Commission in the field of ICT for Intelligent Vehicles and Cooperative Systems in FP6 and FP7. He was Director General of Guadalab Science & Technology Park (2011-2012) and co-founder and CEO of Vision Safety Technologies (2009-2015). Miguel Ángel Sotelo served as President of the IEEE ITS Society (2018-2019), Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine (2014-2016), and General Chair of the 2012 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV’2012). He has delivered invited keynotes in conferences and seminars in ~30 different countries in the five continents and has participated as member of PhD Juries in different universities across Germany, Austria, France, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and Australia. He has been recipient of the Best Research Award in the domain of Automotive and Vehicle Applications in Spain in 2002 and 2009, the 3M Foundation Awards in the category of eSafety in 2004 and 2009, the ITSS Outstanding Editorial Service Award in 2010, the IEEE ITS Outstanding Application Award in 2013, the Prize to the Best Team with Full Automation in GCDC 2016, and the IEEE ITS Outstanding Research Award in 2022. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association).
Abstract
Automated Vehicles (AVs) have experienced a booming development in the latest years, having achieved a large degree of maturity. Their scene recognition capabilities have improved in an impressive manner, especially thanks to the development of Deep Learning techniques and the availability of immense amounts of data contained in well-organized public datasets. But still, AVs exhibit limited ability to deal with certain types of situations that become natural to human drivers, such as entering a congested round-about, predicting the presence of occluded pedestrians at cross-walks, dealing with cyclists, or giving way to a vehicle that is aggressively merging onto the highway from a ramp lane. Not to mention their limitations to interpret implicit communication -when interacting with other road users- and to anticipate dynamic scenarios, especially those dealing with near-crash situations. All these tasks require the development of advanced capabilities that rely on contextual reasoning in order to: a) anticipate the most likely behaviours of all traffic agents around the ego-car; and b) adapt the AV’s own actions to the anticipated road users’ behaviours in a socially-accepted manner. These features will open the gate to expanding the operational design domain of AVs and to contribute to their societal acceptance. In this talk, latest results achieved in the framework of contextual reasoning for behaviour understanding and prediction will be presented and discussed, with a special focus on the prediction of occluded pedestrians and the anticipation of near-crash scenarios.
Renewable Energy Systems: Current Status in the World, Prospects and Problems
Soteris Kalogirou
Cyprus University of Technology, European University of Technology, Cyprus
Cyprus
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Brief Bio
Professor Soteris Kalogirou is at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Sciences and Engineering of the Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus. In addition to his Ph.D., he holds the title of D.Sc. He is a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences, Founding Member of the Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, Member of Academia Europaea and Fellow of International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance.
For more than 35 years, he is actively involved in research in the area of solar energy and particularly in flat plate and concentrating collectors, solar water heating, solar steam generating systems, desalination, photovoltaics, geothermal energy and absorption cooling.
He has a large number of publications in books, book chapters, international scientific journals and refereed conference proceedings. He is Editor-in-Chief of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Renewable Energy and Honorary Editor of Energy, and Editorial Board Member of another twenty journals. He is the editor of the book Artificial Intelligence in Energy and Renewable Energy Systems, published by Nova Science Inc., co-editor of the book Soft Computing in Green and Renewable Energy Systems, published by Springer, editor of the book McEvoy’s Handbook of Photovoltaics, published by Academic Press of Elsevier and author of the books Solar Energy Engineering: Processes and Systems, and Thermal Solar Desalination: Methods and Systems, published by Academic Press of Elsevier.
Abstract
This presentation examines mainly the current status of renewables in the world. The presentation starts with some facts about climate change, global warming, and the effects of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels on the climate problem. It then outlines the status of renewables in the world, which includes their shares with respect to conventional fuel use for power and for electricity production alone, and their social dimension in terms of jobs created. Then the basic forms of renewables are examined in some detail, which include solar thermal, both for low and high temperature applications, photovoltaics, hydro power, onshore and offshore wind energy systems and biomass/biofuels. In all these the basic technology is presented followed by the current status, the installed capacity in the last decade, which reveals their upward trend, as well as the prospects of the technology and some new research findings. Problems related to the extensive deployment of RES are identified as system transformation is not progressing so fast. We need to build resilient infrastructure, including mainly grids and storage, to be able to utilise renewable energy more effectively.