Urban computing experts from Europe, the United States and Qatar are to discuss state-of-the-art advances in artificial intelligence for transportation with local stakeholders in Doha this Thursday, November 22, 2018.

The TASMU-QCAI Artificial Intelligence in Transportation Workshop is being hosted by the Ministry of Transport and Communication’s Smart Qatar TASMU program, along with Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). The event is conducted under the umbrella of the Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence initiative (QCAI), an initiative of QCRI. 

HE Ms. Reem Al-Mansoori, a Member of the Qatar Shura Council and Assistant Undersecretary for Digital Society Sector Development at the MoTC, is to deliver a keynote speech at the event.

The international experts will include the University of Minnesota’s Shashi Shekhar, who developed technologies behind in-vehicle navigation devices in the 1990s. Dr. Shekhar has more recently developed disaster evacuation route planning that has been put in place by US homeland security.

Christian Jensen, a traffic analytics expert from Aalborg University in Copenhagen, who has devised large-scale algorithms to compute taxi fares in Denmark, will also attend.

Archan Misra, of Singapore Management University and Director of the Centre for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics, will present his work on using public transport trip data to predict the number of commuters disembarking along bus and train routes. He has also used smartphone and wearable sensor data to predict effects on urban spaces such as queueing delays.

QCRI’s Sofiane Abbar, an urban mobility and transportation expert who is an organizer of the workshop, said the event will highlight some of QCRI’s technology being developed for local stakeholders including the MoTC, Mowasalat’s Karwa, Qatar Airways and the Qatar Mobility Innovations Center. The technology includes generating maps from real-time GPS trajectories and satellite images, and predicting congestion in different neighborhoods using taxi data. 

“The experts we have invited are the very best in their fields and we look forward to hearing examples of successful collaborations between data scientists and transport providers that show how computing is having a real impact in improving people’s lives,” Dr. Abbar said.

The workshop will be held at the Auditorium in the Minaretein Building (formerly known as the College of Islamic Studies Building) from 8 am on Thursday.

For more information, visit qcai.qcri.org.