Plenary Session 1

Dr. Jiaqi Ma is the Director of FHWA/UCLA Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles, an Associate Professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, the Director of the UCLA Mobility Lab, and the Associate Director of UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. He has led and managed many research projects funded by U.S. DOT, state DOTs, National Science Foundation, and other federal/state/local programs covering areas of smart transportation systems, such as vehicle-highway automation, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), connected vehicles, shared mobility, large-scale smart system modeling and simulation, and artificial intelligence and advanced computing applications in transportation. He is the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, and an associate editor of multiple journals such as Nature Scientific Reports and ASCE Open, and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. He is the current Vice Chair (and incoming Chair) of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Standing Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation, and a publication board member of the IEEE ITS Society.

David Webb, Head of Innovation, is a leading expert in self-driving vehicles and connected and automated mobility (CAM).
An engineer by education, David has chosen to tackle complex challenges in the automotive industry. Since 2015, they have supported over £600 million in joint government and industry funded R&D projects and are currently securing funding for future initiatives.
David’s work focuses on supporting and securing safe CAM technologies, products, enabling services, and deployments of CAM; bridging the gap between research and real world implementation.
David’s expertise and strategic vision continue to shape the future of autonomous transportation.

Randy Iwasaki is an accomplished speaker, executive, and now founder of his own firm, Iwasaki Consulting Services – providing strategic advice and technical innovative solutions to founders, entrepreneurs, and C-level executives with a focus on transportation technology and organizational growth. With extensive experience navigating the challenges that face both public and private organizations, Randy is able to guide his clients towards successful outcomes.
Prior to establishing his own firm, Randy was the Leader of State and Local Transportation for Amazon Web Services (AWS). In that position he led Amazon’s data support and analysis services for state and local transportation agencies, including; artificial intelligence support; use of AWS services in development of new technology in transportation; and other uses of AWS services by state and local transportation agencies.
Randy’s career is rooted in nearly four decades of public service. Before his time at AWS, he served over ten years as Executive Director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority. He founded GoMentum Station, the largest secure automated vehicle test facility in the nation. Prior to that he was a 27-year employee of the California Department of Transportation, where he rose through the ranks to become Chief Deputy Director from 2004 to 2009 and Director from 2009 to 2010.
Randy is an internationally recognized leader in transportation research and innovation, and is frequently called upon to speak to the latest developments in automated and connected vehicle technology development and testing.

Steffen Kuhn graduated in 1999 as an electrical engineer at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.
After working for Thales and Altran, he changed to Porsche Consulting and, in 2015, to Elektrobit Automotive.
There, he joined as a Consulting Manager, later became Head of Consulting and now has the role of Director SDV Business Solution Architecture.
Steffen Kuhn has been consulting automotive companies for over 20 years in topics like AD/ADAS, electronics maps and localization, high-performance and SDV architecture, functional safety and others.
He led a working group within the Open Auto Drive Forum (OADF) about highly reliable maps for automated driving and published a whitepaper on this topic together with Baidu. He also contributed to the upcoming technical specification ISO TS 5083 (safety for driving automation systems).
In 2024, Steffen Kuhn took on the role of spokesperson for the Open Auto Drive Forum, which connects multiple consortia in the context of AD/ADAS: NDS, ADASIS, SIP-adus, SENSORIS, TISA, and TN-ITS.

Dr. Folsom received a BS from Villanova University and MA from the University of Maryland, both in mathematics. He holds MS and PhD degrees from the University of Washington, both in electrical engineering. His dissertation examined visual signal transformations performed by the brain and how they can be used algorithmically. He was part of a team writing the real-time command and control system for two unmanned spacecraft at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. He has written industrial software used for advanced metal cutting, industrial inspection, vision-guided machining, robotic control, composites layup, flight test telemetry and reconditioning of nuclear reactors. He has been Principal Investigator on projects from National Science Foundation, US Army, Air Force and Navy. He participated in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge races for autonomous vehicles and was involved in two startup companies commercializing the technology.

At Digipen Institute of Technology and the University of Washington he has taught classes on Machine Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning. Computer Graphics, Robotics, Software Engineering, Digital Electronics, Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture and Autonomous Vehicles. He has been a visiting professor at Northwest University (Xian, China). With his wife, he has led three workshops in Japan to help women succeed in STEM.His current research on sustainable urban transportation from minimal energy emphasizes reducing the vehicle to passenger weight ratio, as well as eliminating stop-and-go to produce smooth traffic flows. He has mentored over 100 students on undergraduate research projects, assisted by a grant from Amazon.

Takayuki Morikawa received B.E. and M.E. from Kyoto University in 1981 and 1983, respectively. He received M.S. and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1987 and 1989, respectively. In 1983, he started to work as research associate at Kyoto University and then became an associate professor and professor at Nagoya University in 1991 and 2000. From 1996 to 1997, he worked as a visiting associate professor at MIT. He served as the research leader of Nagoya University Center of Innovation Project (COI) and currently is the project leader of Nagoya University COI-NEXT My-mobility Center and of Nagoya University Consortium of SIP/SMIP. His research areas are travel behavior analysis, transportation policies, and advanced mobility systems.