Keynotes

Sharief Oteafy

Assistant Professor // Telecommunication & Networking, Internet of Things, Tactile Internet

Title: Building on the Tactile Internet

Bio:

Sharief Oteafy (SM’19)is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing,    DePaul University, USA, where he founded the Next Generation Networking    (NexGeN) lab. His current research focuses on developing the Tactile Internet, caching in Information Centric Networks, and managing the proliferation of Big Sensed Data (BSD). He currently co-leads the team working on the Tactile Internet architecture, under the development of the IEEE P1918.1 Standard Working Group, and is the lead technical editor of that standard. Dr. Oteafy co-authored a book on “Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks”, presented 50+ publications and delivered multiple IEEE tutorials on IoT, BSD and TI. He is the TPC chair of IEEE LCN 2022, and co-chaired a number of IEEE symposia (Globecom, ICC, CSCN), in addition to a number IEEE and workshops in conjunction with IEEE ICC and IEEE LCN. He is currently an Associate Editor with IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Access, and on the editorial board of Wiley’s Internet Technology Letters.

Abstract:

How do you design a communication infrastructure that sets to defy the speed of light? Developing the Tactile Internet (TI) has brought together experts from a myriad of fields, aiming to compensate for the inevitable latency in long-range communication, to deliver tactile and haptic feedback over a global network. In this talk, we present an architecture that promises to deliver Tactile communication in perceived real-time, focusing on design aspects that yield agile operation. We will explore potential areas of development, future challenges in realizing a scalable and reliable TI infrastructure, and the potential impact on industrial processes. This talk will also address tangent developments in IoT infrastructures that aim to improve Tactile Internet Cognizance.

Baher Abdulhai, Ph.D., P.Eng.

Professor and Director, Toronto Intelligent Transportation Systems Centre

Title: Urban Pervasive Connectivity: Opportunities for Managing Congestion in Real-Time with Artificial Intelligence

Bio:

Baher Abdulhai has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1998. Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1966, and earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA, in 1996. Prof. Baher Abdulhai has 34 years of experience in transportation systems engineering and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).  He is the founder and Director of the Toronto ITS Centre and the founder and co-Director of i-City Centre for Automated and Transformative Transportation Systems (iCity-CATTS). Abdulhai received several awards including IEEE Outstanding Service Award, Teaching Excellence award, and research awards from Canada Foundation for Innovation, Ontario Research Fund, and Ontario Innovation Trust.  He served on the Board of Directors of the Government of Ontario (GO) Transit Authority from 2004 to 2006.  He served as a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in ITS from 2005 to 2010.  The ITS Centre won the Ontario Showcase Merit Award of Excellence and the National GTEC Bronze Medal Award in 2005.  His research team won international awards including the International Transportation Forum innovation award in 2010 (Hossam Abdelgawad), IEEE ITS 2013 (Samah El-Tantawy) and INFORMS 2013 (Samah El-Tantawy). In 2014, he won the University of Toronto Inventor of the Year Award. In 2015 he has been inducted as a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC). In 2018, he won the prestigious CSCE Sandford Fleming (Career Achievement) Award for his contribution to transportation in Canada. He has been elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2020. In 2021, he won the Ontario Professional Engineers Awards (OPEA) Engineering Medal for career Engineering Excellence.

Areas of Expertise: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), modelling and simulation of large-scale dynamic transportation networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based street and freeway traffic control, traveller information systems, emergency evacuation optimization, dynamic road pricing, smart cities under automated and transformative transportation systems.

Abstract:

When every car tells the next traffic light I am approaching, can the traffic light use AI to learn to optimise its timing plan to reduce delay? When every event in your calendar automatically transfers to your autonomous car and the car books ‘the road as a service’ giving you a time slot, a route and possibly a shared ride, can we eliminate congestion?  When disasters happen, and they do, can we guide people when to mobilize to evacuate, where to go and how to get there without turning the road network into a parking lot? This talk will share state of the art research in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and AI that relies on pervasive connectivity and AI to optimize the urban transportation system of systems.