News

Mona Jaber delivered an invite talk to the IEEE Distinguished Webinars series.

Title: IoT-Enabled Intelligent Transportation Systems for Sustainable Future Cities

Abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) integrate digital technologies, such as sensing, communications, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), to make transportation safer, more efficient, reliable, and sustainable. This talk explores emerging IoT-enabled sensing technologies and AI-driven approaches that are reshaping ITS, with a particular focus on improving road safety through the co-design of smart infrastructure and smart vehicles.

The first part of the talk focuses on smart roads. Conventional sensing modalities for ITS, such as cameras and LiDAR, are widely used to support safe, efficient, and low-emission mobility. However, these technologies face well-known limitations, including degraded performance under adverse weather or visibility conditions. To address these challenges, we present Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), a novel sensing paradigm that leverages existing buried optical fibre infrastructure to monitor road traffic. In contrast with existing sensing methods, DAS enables continuous, energy-efficient sensing over distances of up to 50 km, is robust to adverse conditions, and is inherently privacy preserving.

The second part of the talk focuses on smart vehicles and human-centred AI. While autonomous vehicles are not subject to fatigue, distraction, or intoxication, this alone does not guarantee safer roads for pedestrians and wheelers. These often have unconstrained and unpredictable behaviour in complex traffic environments, which is challenging to predict. The talk will present a contextual stacked ensemble model that outperforms the state of the art while achieving up to 25× lower inference latency, enabling real-time pedestrian intent prediction.

Please visit iot.ieee.org/education.html for slides and video recording.