The IVORY project consortium successfully held its Mid-Term Conference, titled “AI for Vision Zero in Road Safety”, on 15 April 2025 in Athens, Greece.
Hosted by the National Technical University of Athens, the conference explored the latest advances in AI applications for road safety, aligned with the EU Vision Zero strategy.
🔍 Conference Overview:
The IVORY Mid-Term Conference featured:
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- Research presentations by IVORY doctoral researchers on
- Responsible and ethical AI for road safety,
- AI for driver safety,
- AI for proactive infrastructure safety management.
- Keynote lectures by internationally recognised experts in AI and road safety
- A round-table discussion reflecting on future challenges and opportunities
- Research presentations by IVORY doctoral researchers on
🎤 Openning Session & DCs’ Three Minute Pitch:
The conference opened with an introduction to IVORY by Dr. Eleonora Papadimitriou. This was followed by 3-minute pitch presentations from all IVORY doctoral candidates, providing a concise overview of their research topics and contributions.
🎥 Watch the presentations: [DC1] [DC3] [DC5] [DC6] [DC7] [DC8] [DC9] [DC10] [DC11] [DC13][DC14]
🛣️ Session 1: AI and Road Infrastructure Safety
The first session focused on AI applications in infrastructure safety and included a keynote lecture by Dr. Simon Washington titled “Improving Road Safety with AI – Harnessing AI Innovation to Reduce Fatalities and Serious Injuries ”. The session continued with presentations from IVORY doctoral candidates in Work Package 6 (WP6), focusing on:
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- Automated infrastructure assessment (Porto, J.A., Shahid, M., Ziakopoulos, A., Lopez, D.F., Bradford, J., Yannis, G., Ševrović, M.)
- Subjective Safety and Routing (Agarwal, A., Janssens, D., Bellemans, T.)
- From Infrastructure to Behaviour: Learning Risk Patterns from Telematics (Paradiso, S., Porto, J.A., Ziakopoulos, A., Sideris, H., Avgeros, J., Forstakis, P., Yannis, G.)
- Safety Beyond Crashes: Tracking Conflicts and Infrastructure Optimisation (Altuntas, G., Jabeen, N., Brijs, T., Ectors, W., Jacobs, T., Pirdavani, A., Polders, E.)
🏛️ Session 2: AI and Road Safety Policy
The second session explored the intersection of AI and policy-making, featuring a keynote by Prof. Tatiana Kováčiková titled “AI and Road Safety Policy: From Reactive Models to Predictive Governance”. This was followed by presentations on Responsible AI for Road Safety from IVORY doctoral candidates in Work Package 4 (WP4), focusing on:
🚗 Session 3: AI and Driver Safety
The third session addressed driver behaviour and human factors, with a keynote by Prof. Marco Dozza titled “AI in Active Safety”. Then IVORY Doctoral candidates from Work Package 5 (WP5) presented research on:
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- From Raw Signals to Road Safety: Feature Engineering for Driver–Vehicle–Environment Interaction (Brijs T., Tsoutsanis A., Styanidis A., Iyer A.)
- Adaptive Driver Behaviour and Driver State Monitoring in Naturalistic Driving (Iyer A., Pashaee M.)
- Sleepiness on the Road: Integrating Physiological, Behavioural and Vehicle-Based Indicators (Styanidis A., Iyer A.)
- From Prediction to Intervention: Personalised Driver Profiling and AI-Enabled Driver Assistance (Brijs T., Tsoutsanis A.)
🗣️ Round Table: Messages for the Future
The conference concluded with a round-table discussion involving leading experts in road safety, including Dr. Simon Washington, Prof. George Yannis, Prof. Marco Dozza, Prof. Tom Brijs, and Dr. Amir Pooyan Afghari. The discussion focused on future directions for AI in road safety, highlighting the importance of ethical AI deployment, data-driven decision making, and cross-section collaboration.
🎓 Training & Knowledge Exchange (Pre-Conference)
Ahead of the conference, IVORY organised a dedicated training and knowledge exchange day. The programme included:
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- A training session by OSeven on Digital law, data privacy & intellectual property.
- A knowledge exchange session with the Expert Advisory Board, including presentations from doctoral candidates.
🌍 Linking with the IRTAD Conference
The IVORY Mid-Term Conference was held back-to-back with the IRTAD Conference, providing an excellent opportunity to present IVORY’s latest research to a broader audience, engage with the international road safety community, and strengthen collaboration between research, policy, and industry stakeholders. The conference proceedings, including the contributions presented during the event, can be accessed at the following link:
| Title | Authors | Abstract | Presentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Robust Timestamp Correction for Multi-Camera Trajectory Reconstruction in Road Safety Analysis | Nimra Jabeen, Cédric Vandelaer, Tim Jacobs, Evelien Polders, Wim Ectors, Tom Brijs (Uhasselt, Cegeka EngineeringSTUDIO) | 📝 | 📊 |
| The Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence for Road Safety | Bahare Khajehpour, Kritika Maheshwari, Neelke Doorn, Niek Prins, Jan-Pieter Paardekooper, Oscar Oviedo-Trespalacios (TuDelft, Haskoning, TNO, Radboud University) | 📝 | 📊 |
| Impact of Camera vs. Lidar Data on Road Attribute Identification Using Deep Learning: An Empirical Investigation | Muhammad Shahid, Amirhossein Hassani, Marko Ševrović (University of Zagreb) | 📝 | 📊 |
| Probabilistic Modeling for Node-Based Partitioning of Telematics-Informed Road Networks | Simone Paradiso, Apostolos Ziakopoulos, Petros Fortsakis, George Yannis (NTUA, Oseven) | 📝 | 📊 |
| Decoding the Roads: An Infrastructure-Driven Machine Learning Approach to Predict Safety | Akanksha Agarwal, Davy Janssens, Geert Wets, Tom Bellemans (Hasselt University) | 📝 | 📊 |
| Transformer-Based Driver Behavior Recognition Using the UAH-DriveSet Dataset | Aristotelis Tsoutsanis, Apostolos Ziakopoulos, George Yannis (NTUA) | 📝 | 📊 |
| Temporal Modeling of Heart Rate Variability for Driver Drowsiness Detection with LSTM Networks | Aristotelis Styanidis, André Lourenço, Carlos Carreiras, Christer Ahlström, Apostolos Ziakopoulos, George Yannis (NTUA, CardioID, ISEL, NOVA, Linköping University, VTI) | 📝 | 📊 |
| Compositional Diffusion Image Synthesis for Long-Tailed Multi-Country Road Infrastructure Assessment | Amirhossein Hassani, Muhammad Shahid, Marko Ševrović (University of Zagreb) | 📝 | 📊 |
This milestone event highlighted the strong progress of the IVORY Network and reinforced its mission to develop responsible, data-driven AI solutions for safer roads.
IVORY will return at TRA 2026 ….