Title: Connected Vehicles Make Cities Smarter

Speaker: João Barros, Veniam and Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Porto

Abstract:
There are 1.2 billion vehicles in the world waiting to be connected to the Internet. Clearly, there is need for a low-cost wireless networking solution that can be placed in any vehicle and offers reliable connectivity, improved quality of experience, and higher safety for drivers and passengers, both in cities and industrial environments (ports, airports, construction sites, etc.). Drawing from ten years of R&D and two years product experience with the world’s largest network of connected vehicles (Porto, Portugal), we will address how city-scale deployment can be achieved and show how a vehicular mesh network can be used as a highly dense urban scanner to deliver real-time data on-the-move for smart city applications that protect our environment and improve our quality of life.

Bio:
Dr. João Barros is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Veniam, which is developing connected-transportation systems for car fleets and seaports. He is a Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto (currently on leave) and a visiting professor at Stanford. His work has led to 160 science and technology papers. He was a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University and has held visiting appointments at MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Barros is fluent in Portuguese, German, English, French and Spanish. He received his undergraduate education in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Porto, Portugal and Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany; a performing arts degree in flute from the Music Conservatory of Porto; his Ph.D. is in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany.