Professor Luis M. Bergasa Pascual is invited by the chapter as Distinguished Lecturer for a virtual talk on Friday 18 June 2021 from 15h00 to 16h00 CET.

Deep Learning for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:

Autonomous driving is one of the most exciting engineering fields of our era. The benefits that self-driving cars will have in our society are still unmeasurable, while the associated goals are also growing increasingly complex, specific and challenging for both research and industry teams. Despite these challenges, the recent progress in all related sub-fields such as Computation, Sensing and Data Science (Machine Learning & Data Management) are already posing as excellent allies to make big steps forward in two essential fields for making self-driving cars possible: Control & Perception. On both, Deep Learning algorithms have supposed an unprecedented boom, and our group at the University of Alcalá has leveraged and applied them jointly with our related know-how to walk effective steps to get autonomous cars in our streets.  

In this talk, we will revise the latest Deep Learning developments made by our Research Lab for our Autonomous Vehicle prototype. In addition, we will present our thoughts on the future of research in this field with the purpose of solving the challenging remaining problems.

Bio:

Luis M. Bergasa received the MS degree in Electrical Engineering in 1995 from the Technical University of Madrid and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 1999 from the University of Alcalá (UAH), Spain. He is Full Professor at the Department of Electronics of the UAH since 2011. From 2000 he had different research and teaching positions at the UAH. He was Head of the Department of Electronics (2004-2010), coordinator of the Doctorate program in Electronics (2005-2010) and Director of Knowledge Transfer at the UAH (2014-2018). He is author of more than 200 refereed papers in journals and international conferences. He was recognized as one of the most productive author in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) field during the period 1996-2014. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (2019-2021). He received the Institutional Lead Award 2019 from the IEEE ITS Society for the longstanding work of his research group. His research activity has been awarded/recognized with 27 prizes/recognitions related to Robotics and Automotive fields from 2004 to nowadays. 

He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on ITS from 2014 and habitual reviewer in several journals included in the JCR index. He has been Guest Editor of three Special Issues (Sensors, IEEE T ITS, MTAP), member of the Editorial Board of International Journal of Vehicular Technology (2012-2017) and he have served on Program/Organizing Committees in more than 20 conferences. He was Research Visitor at the Computer Vision Research Group of the Trinity College in Dublin (Irland) in 1998, Visiting Scholar at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (USA) in 2013, and at the OPTIMAL Center Northwestern Polytechnic University (China) in 2017. He was co-founder of Vision Safety Technologies Ltd, a spin-off company established to commercialize computer vision systems for road infrastructure inspection (2009-2016). His research interests include driver behaviors and scene understanding using Computer Vision and Deep Learning Techniques for autonomous vehicles applications.