Dr. Michail A. Makridis is the Deputy Director of the Traffic Engineering and Control group at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Previously, he led the Transport and Traffic Engineering group at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and was the scientific lead for the Traffic Modeling Group at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Vision from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. His research focuses on traffic flow, management, and control for Intelligent Transportation Systems involving Connected and Automated Vehicles. His work emphasizes data-driven, physics-informed modeling and AI to enhance sustainability, traffic efficiency, antifragile operations, and equitable transport networks. In 2022, he received the JRC Annual Award for Excellence in Research from the EC. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems and serves on various scientific committees. Dr. Yifan Zhang is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan), China. She completed a PhD in Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong in Summer 2022. Her major research interests lie in autonomous driving, microscopic traffic modeling, and intelligent transportation systems. Her previous work mainly covers human driving behavior modeling, motion planning of autonomous vehicles, trajectory prediction, and traffic prediction through leveraging multiple AI models, such as conditional variational autoencoder, convolutional neural networks, transformers, neural processes, and so on. These works are published in top AI conferences and transportation journals. She is also a reviewer of several A-tier transportation journals and computer science conferences.
