‘Tasmu-QCAI Artificial Intelligence in Transportation’ workshop is being hosted by the Ministry of Transport and Communications’ (MoTC) Smart Qatar Tasmu programme, 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 (QCAI) initiative, an initiative of QCRI.
Reem al-Mansoori, member of the 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 organiser 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 neighbourhoods 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 8am on Thursday. For more information, one can visit qcai.qcri.org.
