Speaker

Steve Smith is a Research Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he heads the Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory. He is also CEO of Rapid Flow Technologies, a company that focuses on smart transportation infrastructure for urban mobility.

Smith’s research at CMU focuses broadly on the theory and practice of next-generation technologies for automated planning, scheduling, and coordination. He pioneered the development and use of constraint-based search and optimization models, and is an internationally recognized leader in the application of these and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to practical problems. He is a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and has served as a member of AAAI’s executive council since 2014.

For the past several years, Smith work has focused on applying AI technology to the problems of traffic congestion and mobility faced by cities. This work has produced Surtrac, a unique, real-time traffic signal control technology aimed specifically at optimizing multi-modal traffic flows in urban road networks. Surtrac uses a novel decentralized planning approach to adapt the traffic signals to the actual sensed traffic on the road on a second-by-second basis. This technology has been commercialized by Rapid Flow Technologies, and current work focuses on the development of broader smart infrastructure capabilities for multi-modal traffic flows that are possible through ubiquitous sensing and vehicle-to-intersection communication.