Conference programme

Simona Sacone is Professor of Automatic Control at the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering of the University of Genova in Italy. She teaches Systems Theory, Identification and Estimation Techniques, and Sustainable Systems Modelling within Master degrees in Computer Engineering and Management Engineering. She also coordinates the PhD Course on Systems Engineering. Her research activity is devoted to optimization and control of complex physical processes through discrete-event and hybrid modelling and control approaches. The main application fields are freeway traffic control and logistics network planning. About these themes, she has authored and co-authored one book and more than 150 papers published in international journals, books and conference proceedings. She has been the Chair of the Technical Committee on “Planning and Control of Transportation and Logistic Networks” of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society.  From 2019 to 2024, she has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. Presently, she serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Michiel Bliemer is Professor of Transport Planning & Modelling at the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. He holds a PhD in Transport Planning from Delft University of Technology and has held various academic positions in Delft and was a researcher and consultant at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and Goudappel. Michiel’s expertise lies in the development, design, and application of models for transport network analysis and travel demand forecasting.  He has made significant contributions to the areas of traffic assignment and stated choice methods, as well as road pricing and driving behaviour. He is an Associate Editor of Transportation Research Part C and a founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Choice Modelling.

After a few years work as programmer and project engineer, Hans pursued his PhD at TU Delft and continued an academic career at the same institute. He was awarded an Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek full professorship in traffic simulation and computing—granted at the time to high profile young tenure trackers at TU Delft. Hans’ research focusses on modelling, estimating, and predicting road traffic supply and demand dynamics on multiple levels of scale, from trip (production) dynamics in entire regions and networks, to flow dynamics on corridors and carriageways, and the actual interactions and driving behaviors on road infrastructures. Focus is on identifying recurring patterns, understanding the limits of predictability, and quantifying the uncertainty of traffic dynamics and in turning these to useful applications for practice. The latter is the goal in all the work in DiTTLAB, which in 2024 was rechristened as DAIMoND Lab (diamond-lab.citg.tudelft.nl — Digitization and AI for Mobility Network Dynamics). Hans supervised 27 PhD students and served as external examiner in PhD committees for 50+ other PhD students in the Netherlands and abroad. He (co)wrote successful grants worth over 11ME sponsored by NSF, EU, government, and Industry and is active in many international projects and collaborations.

Carolina Osorio is a faculty at HEC Montreal, where she holds the SCALE AI Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence for Urban Mobility and Logistics. Osorio is also a Staff Research Scientist at Google Research. Osorio has consulted for Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, and has collaborated with top private and public sectors,  transportation and supply chain stakeholders, including Zipcar, Ford Motor Company,  New York City Department of Transportation, and SANDAG. Her research focuses on the design of ML and simulation-based optimization algorithms to tackle high-dimensional transportation problems. Osorio was recognized as an  outstanding early-career engineer in the US by the National Academy of Engineering’s EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, is the recipient of an MIT Technology Review EmTech Colombia TR35 Award and was on the GOOD 100 list of innovators in the category of “Minds That Are Hacking Our Surroundings for the Better”.