Privacy Talk with Privacy Talk with Hussein Dia, Professor of Civil Engineering at Department of Civil and Construction Engineering Swinburne University of Technology: What has been discussed among the industries about self-driving realization?
“This interview recorded on 27th March 2024 is talking about future mobility and ethics.”
Kohei is having great time discussing future mobility and ethics.
- Why did you decide to work in the mobility field?
- What are you teaching at the University?
- What has been discussed among the industries about self-driving realization?
Kohei: Thank you everyone. I’m so glad to have an interview today, Professors Hussein from Australia. He’s very great, innovative work in the mobility space. So Professors Hussein, thank you for joining us today.
Hussein: My pleasure. Thank you.
Kohei: Thank you. First of all, I’d like to speak about his profile.
Hussein Dia is a Professor of Civil Engineering at Department of Civil and Construction Engineering Swinburne University of Technology Hawthorn, VIC, Australia specializing in future urban mobility research.
His current work is focused on decarbonisation of urban transport and harnessing digital innovations to unlock opportunities for smart and sustainable mobility futures. His standing in the field is demonstrated by more than 150 publications including manuscripts and books on ITS, low carbon mobility for sustainable cities, and a forthcoming Handbook on Artificial Intelligence in transport.
He is ranked in the Stanford University Global Scientist Citation Rankings in the top 2% most cited scientists in the field of Logistics and Transportation. He is Fellow of Engineers Australia, Fellow of Institute of Transportation Engineers, and Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
So again, it’s so great to have a conversation with you today.
Hussein: Thank you for having me.
Kohei: So let’s jump into the first agenda. I was so inspired. You’re very important work in the mobility space. So it’s a very happy to ask you about why you decided to work in the mobility field. Could you share about it?
- Why did you decide to work in the mobility field?
Hussein: Thank you. I will. I was attracted to transport engineering because it brings together people from different disciplines to solve some of the most challenging problems faced by society.
So when we look at transport, and despite more than 50 years of investment in roads and transport infrastructure, our cities still experience severe traffic congestion issues, emissions, and air pollution, especially from motorized transport.
So solving these issues requires a good effort to bring together engineers, infrastructure specialists, as well as information technology and people from social sciences and economics.
My key research interests, as you mentioned, are in these areas, and have been focused around applications of technology in transport, as well as sustainability.
So I find this sort of collaboration that we are, you know, doing research in teams at the intersection of infrastructure, technology, and human behavior to be very rewarding and leads to very good outcomes for society.
Kohei: That’s amazing. So when you are attracted to the mobility space, are there opportunities for you to get into this field? It’s just like you did some of the study research in the universities or some similarities?
Hussein: Yes, so most of my career has been in academia. I’ve also had some years of experience in the industry and consulting. But I think throughout my career, I was attracted to research and especially looking at solutions that are different from what we are doing now because clearly, we haven’t been very successful in many cases, eliminating congestion, etc.
And there are many reasons for this. So my interest has always been to look at new solutions. And I found that technology in particular, provided a good avenue to provide, if you like, new innovations that can help us solve some of these problems.
Kohei: Thank you for sharing. I’m so interested and fascinated by your research field because you have the civil engineering and mobility space, so could you share about your work in your university and what kind of curriculum the are you teaching to the students’ surroundings?
- What are you teaching at the University?
Hussein: Yes, so we have a number of courses that are specific to transport engineering, and we offer them both at the undergraduate level and also at the postgraduate level. But in recent years, my main focus has been in creating a set of professional development courses to help the industry develop future transport leaders.
So to achieve this, I recently established a Future Transport Academy which offers short online flexible learning on topics of interest to transport engineers, so these include around 15 to 20 hours of online flexible learning on topics that impact sustainability and future transport such as smart mobility, decarbonizing transport, intelligent transport systems and also transportation modeling.
（Movie: Masterclass Introduction）
A core component of all these courses is focused on technology and sustainability approaches for solving transport problems.
Kohei: Thank you. So what do you expect with the future mobility expert? I think you broadcast in a very important contents on the YouTube then that’s been a very important for the future expert, involved in not just only for the mobility but also the including the experiences in digital technology. So are there any expectations as a teacher?
Hussein: Yes, I think because we are a University of Technology, we are really focused on applied research and applied teaching.
So while sometimes we do some theoretical work, our real interest is in developing applications, in developing research directions and even in developing, you know, courses and curriculum to help students be future ready.
So that when they graduate, you know, they have the tools, they have the skills, the experience, especially working with technology to be able to go out in the field and start applying these solutions.
And we find that these are things that are very welcomed by the industry. They keep coming back to, you know, employ our students.
They take them on work experience, because they feel they are hands on, because we focus on the technology approach.
Kohei: That’s brilliant and mobility and technology is a key part of the field and for future expertise. I agree with that as a next question about the mobility transitions and you have this some research about self-driving that’s been attractive that you had commented on the very important events.
It’s the problem of Apple, they had a suspension to invest in more resources in self-driving. They changed your strategy and you are given a very important comment. So could you share your view of the industry of self-driving and how this industry has been discussed until now?
- What has been discussed among the industries about self-driving realization?
Hussein: Very good. That’s a very important topic. And as you mentioned, you know, many companies have been working around this and, and also researchers for, probably over 20 years now have been looking at this issue of autonomous vehicles and self driving mainly for safety aspects.
So I think that if we look at the industry there is general agreement, that self-driving technologies are an important development to solve road safety issues around the world. To give your audience and understanding nearly 1.2 million people die in road traffic crashes worldwide every year.
This is equivalent to around 15 wide body aircrafts, each with a capacity of 200 passengers falling out of the sky every single day and killing everyone on board, which is, you know, something that is not accepted in air travel.
And it is actually quite shocking that it continues on our roads today. In Australia, we lose around 1000 people every year to road crashes. Now, the majority of these crashes include human error as a contributing factor.
And a large proportion of these crashes could be avoided by using self-driving vehicles. So there is compelling logic to introduce self-driving technologies, and in removing the humans who are the key source of error from the driving equation.
When you think about self-driving vehicles, they are essentially driven by AI self-driving software. And this software, when it’s ready, it is not ready completely yet, when it’s ready, the software is not going to make errors of judgment, the way that a human driver does.
You know, they will have AI self-driving software and will not drink and drive. They will not fall asleep behind the wheel. So these are why I would like to see self-driving vehicles tomorrow. But we are not ready yet. As you mentioned, you know, despite billions of dollars in investment, there are still some technology and public acceptance issues.
As you mentioned, Apple recently announced that after 10 years of investment and billions of dollars, it’s abandoning its electric self-driving project.
（Movie: What Killed the Apple Car?）
And we currently have a number of companies especially in the US, who are doing trials and are struggling with the robo-taxis which seem to have attracted mixed reactions from the public and even resulted in some clashes between members of the public and the vehicles.
The vehicles are not ready yet and they’re being deployed in the public and they’re causing disruptions to emergency services and for no reason they’re stopping and not moving.
（Movie: Driverless taxis in San Francisco cause traffic jams, chaos）
So the public, are not happy. And I think it’s a realization that self-driving technologies, you know what we call Level-Five automation which is when you have a vehicle that can drive anywhere and under any conditions, still requires a lot of development and we need further breakthroughs in AI before these vehicles become a reality.
So one thing that some of the companies are doing, they’re not actually saying we’re going to wait until we have fully self-driving technologies. Instead what they’re doing they say that today we have a good technology for automatic braking or we have a very good and proven technology to help the vehicle stay between lanes.
So they are already starting to implement these technologies in their vehicles.
And they’re still waiting until we have full self-driving vehicles. But at the same time they’re introducing these technologies in their vehicles so that they improve safety.
Kohei: It’s been very challenging. Many of the projects are trying to replace human errors with self-driving which are the very key actions for our safety society in the mobility field.
So, thank you for sharing some of the very important history as well. In order to apply artificial intelligence for vehicles, you mentioned in the Handbook, which is very helpful for the listeners as well. And artificial intelligence needs some very important components.
In this interview we would like to touch on the security and privacy for ethical autonomous vehicles. So what do you have to consider about privacy and security for ethical autonomous vehicles in the future?
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