(in alphabetical order)
We are honored to welcome Moshe Ben-Akiva, Petros Ioannou and Michal Tzur as our keynote speakers.
Prof. Moshe Ben-Akiva
Moshe Ben-Akiva is the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Director of the MIT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Lab. He holds a PhD degree in Transportation Systems from MIT and honorary degrees from the University of the Aegean, the Université Lumiére Lyon, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and the University of Antwerp.
His awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research, the Jules Dupuit prize from the World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ITS Society Outstanding Application Award for DynaMIT, a mesoscopic simulator with algorithms for dynamic traffic assignment, traffic predictions and travel information and guidance. Ben-Akiva has coauthored two books, including the textbook Discrete Choice Analysis, published by MIT Press, and over 200 papers in refereed journals or conference proceedings.
He has been a member of over three dozen various scientific committees, advisory boards, and editorial boards. He has worked as a consultant in industries such as transportation, energy, telecommunications, financial services and marketing for a number of private and public organizations, including Hague Consulting Group, RAND Europe, ChoiceStream and Cambridge Systematics, where he was previously a Senior Principal and member of the Board of Directors.
Prof. Petros Ioannou
Petros A. Ioannou received the B.Sc. degree with First Class Honors from University College, London, England, in 1978 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, in 1980 and 1982, respectively. In 1982, Dr. Ioannou joined the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. He is currently a Professor in the same Department and holds the A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Chair. He is the Director of the Center of Advanced Transportation Technologies and Associate Director for Research of METRANS, a University Transportation Center.
He also holds a courtesy appointment with the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Industrial Engineering. His research interests are in the areas of adaptive control, neural networks, nonlinear systems, vehicle dynamics and control, intelligent transportation systems and marine transportation. Dr. Ioannou was the recipient of the Outstanding Transactions Paper Award by the IEEE Control System Society in 1984 and the recipient of a 1985 Presidential Young Investigator Award for his research in Adaptive Control. In 2009 he received the IEEE ITSS Outstanding ITS Application Award and the IET Heaviside Medal for Achievement in Control by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (former IEE). In 2012 he received the IEEE ITSS Outstanding ITS Research Award and in 2015 the 2016 IEEE Transportation Technologies Award. Dr. Ioannou is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and the author/co-author of 8 books and over 300 research papers in the area of controls, vehicle dynamics, neural networks, nonlinear dynamical systems and intelligent transportation systems.
Prof. Michal Tzur
Michal Tzur is a professor in the Industrial Engineering department at the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She holds B.A. degrees in Economics and Statistics from Tel Aviv University, and a Ph.D. degree in Management Science from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University in the city of New York. She was a faculty member in the business school of the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton School) and a visiting faculty member in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS) at Northwestern University.
Michal’s main research interests include modeling and optimization in the areas of Smart Transportation Systems, Shared Mobility Systems, Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management. She published dozens of papers in the journals: Operations Research, Management Science, Transportation Science, Naval Research Logistics, IIE Transactions, Transportation Research Part B, European Journal of Operational Research, among others. She is also the advisor of many students towards M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees.
Michal’s research was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology and Space, the Center for Innovation for Transportation, IBM and the Manna Center Program for Food Safety & Security at Tel Aviv University. She was the chair or a member of numerous organizing committees for national and international conferences and workshops. She was on the editorial board of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) journal and a guest editor in The EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics. Currently she is on the editorial board of IIE Transactions and Naval Research Logistics. Since 2015 she is the president of the Operations Research Society of Israel (ORSIS).