Plenary Session 4 Panel Dicussion

Professor Takashi Oguchi, born in Tokyo in 1964, graduated Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) in 1988 and got Ph.D from Graduate School of Engineering of UTokyo in 1993. After joining to Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., he started his academic career in Tokyo Metropolitan University, & promoted to Professor in 2007. He moved to Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) of UTokyo in 2011. He is a member of Mobility Innovation Collaborative Research Center (UTmobI) at UTokyo started in July 2018, & is in charge of education for the Department of Civil Engineering at UTokyo. He has assigned to Director of Advanced Mobility Research Center (ITS Center) of IIS, UTokyo, in 2018 & is serving as a Deputy Director of IIS, Utokyo in 2024. He also contributed to the Japanese national project SIP-adus (Cross-Ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program in the Innovation of Automated Driving for Universal Services) from 2016 to 2023. His major research field is Traffic Engineering, Traffic Management & Control including advanced traffic signal control, advanced highway network traffic management systems, integrated transport & mobility system design including utilization of automated vehicle technology, harmonized design of infrastructure facilities & hierarchical road transport system.

Ms. Jane Lappin chairs the National Academies of Engineering Transportation Research Board Vehicle-Highway Automation Committee and is co-founder of the annual Automated Road Transportation Symposium. She is a partner with Blue Door Strategy and Research where she focuses on automated vehicles and business strategy.  She recently retired as Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs for Toyota Research Institute where she monitored global regulatory affairs related to highly automated vehicles. Previously, Jane worked for the U.S. DOT Volpe Center managing large research projects assessing public response to advanced vehicle technologies and the impact of those technologies on safety and network performance. Jane served as U.S. DOT secretariat to the trilateral US-EU-JPN ITS Steering Committee, and as the U.S. co-chair of the US-EU-Japan Automation in Road Transportation Working Group. She was awarded a Gold Medal by the US Secretary of Transportation (2007) and the U.S. Government Special Award of Appreciation from NHTSA (2023) for outstanding contributions in the field of automated vehicle safety. Before discovering her true calling in transportation, Jane worked for Abt Associates in their business strategy group, for the Canadian International Development Agency evaluating women’s economic development programs in Bangladesh, and co-directing a public health survey in Haiti. She studied sociology as an undergraduate at Boston University and earned an MBA from the Simmons College Graduate School of Management, the world’s only all women’s business school.

Habib Shamskhou is CEO of Advanced Mobility Group and co-founder of the GoMentum Station Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Test Facility in Northern California.  He brings 35 years of experience managing a wide variety of transportation innovative projects. Habib is a recognized authority on new mobility options, emerging advanced transportation and digital infrastructure technologies with expertise in technology facilitation, public-private partnerships, and program management of large-scale technology-based infrastructure projects. 

His latest collaborations include technology facilitation and program management for two of Contra Costa Transportation Authority’s federal grants from the Advanced Driving Systems (ADS) and Advanced Transportation and Congestion Management Technologies Deployment (ATCMTD) programs. The ADS program is collecting and analyzing data to support federal policy and rulemaking around ADS safety measures. The ATCMTD grant is developing a Mobility as a Service application to provide travelers with multimodal complete trip planning service. Recent developments at GoMentum station include the Vehicle to Everything Signal Lab (V2X Signal Lab) and Dynamic Personal Micro Transit initiatives and demostration. Habib has been international speaker on the subject of the Quantum Computing Impact on the New Era of Next Generation Mobility, and the First Digital Transportation Infrastructure.

Tom Alkim is Strategic Advisor Connected & Automated Mobility at the Dutch company MAPtm, which provides consultancy, digital and operational services in the ITS domain. He has 25 years of experience in the public sector, working in the field of dynamic traffic management, C-ITS and Connected & Automated Mobility for Rijkswaterstaat, Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management and the European Commission, Directorate General Research & Innovation. Tom is CCAM Partnership delegate for Physical & Digital Infrastructure, International Member on the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Standing Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation (ACP30) and chair of the International Taskforce on Vehicle-Highway Automation (ITFVHA).

Kimihiko Nakano received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. After working for Yamaguchi University for six and a half years, he became an Associate Professor at Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo in 2006 and has been promoted to Professor in 2019. His major research fields are Dynamics and Control, Vehicle Engineering, Driver Assistance System, Automated Driving, and Energy Harvesting. He is a fellow of Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, a member of The Engineering Academy of Japan, Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan, The society of Instrument and Control Engineers, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.