2015 ITS America annual meeting opens in Pittsburgh

For anyone involved in the ITS industry, the Opening Plenary of the 2015 ITS Annual Meeting will be an unmissable event. It will fully explore the event’s theme – Bridges to Innovation – and speakers will include the newly announced President and CEO of ITS America, Regina Hopper, Kirk Steudle, Director, Michigan DOT and Chairman, ITS America Board of Directors, Daniel G. Corey, Chairman, Pittsburgh Organizing Committee as well as Federal, State and Local Officials along with additional speakers. The sessi
May 1, 2015 Read time: 3 mins
Chris Urmson, Google’s Director of Self-Driving Cars.

For anyone involved in the ITS industry, the Opening Plenary of the 2015 ITS Annual Meeting will be an unmissable event. It will fully explore the event’s theme – Bridges to Innovation – and speakers will include the newly announced President and CEO of 560 ITS America, Regina Hopper, Kirk Steudle, Director, Michigan DOT and Chairman, ITS America Board of Directors, Daniel G. Corey, Chairman, Pittsburgh Organizing Committee  as well as Federal, State and Local Officials along with additional speakers.

The session, from 9.00-10.30am on Monday, June 1, will also see the Best of ITS Awards finalists being recognised and the winnners announced.

The Opening Plenary keynote speech will be provided by Chris Urmson, Google’s Director of Self-Driving Cars, and will focus on “Realising self-driving vehicles.” For the last five years or more, Google has retrofitted existing cars to experiment with autonomous driving.

However, the company is deploying a test fleet of about 100 fully functioning prototypes of a self-driving car that was designed from the ground up. It dispenses with such familiar automotive parts as steering wheel, brakes and accelerator pedal.

Urmson expects real people to be using them on public roads in two to five years and, as he will explain to delegates, in setting out to design a self-driving vehicle from scratch, it was inspiring to start with a blank sheet of paper and ask, “What should be different about this kind of vehicle?”

The most important thing was safety so the Google cars have sensors that remove blind spots, and they can detect objects out to a distance of more than two football fields in all directions, which is especially helpful on busy streets with lots of intersections.

Delegates attending the Opening Plenary will also have an opportunity of hearing first-hand from ITS America’s President and CEO of ITS America, Regina Hopper who takes up her role on 18 May, just two weeks before the event. She is a veteran executive of major Washington industry associations. Her experience in public policy advocacy, communications, media and law spans the transportation, telecommunications and energy industries. Prior to her trade association work, Regina was a correspondent for CBS News where she earned an Emmy for investigative reporting on 48 Hours. She covered the George H.W. Bush and Clinton White Houses as well as breaking news for CBS network news programs and CBS Newspath.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Welcome to the 22nd ITS World Congress
    July 31, 2015
    As we reach the 22nd edition of the ITS World Congress, I look back to the first ITS World Congress in 1994 and feel so proud for all the achievements of these past decades. With less than 10 weeks away, the Programme is taking its final shape and form into one of the most exciting industry events of this year. Over 200 Sessions and meetings have been organised for the five days, including the impressive open
    Read More
  • America fires V2V starting gun
    April 7, 2014
    Leo McCloskey, ITS America’s senior vice president for Technical Programs, talks to Jason Barnes about what the recent NHTSA ruling on light vehicle connectivity means for cooperative infrastructures in North America. In early February the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it had decided to start taking steps to enable Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology for light vehicles. In so doing, the many safety-related applicati
    Read More
  • State DOT executives to share next generation ITS experiences
    May 9, 2016
    State Department of Transportation (DOT) executives in charge of intelligent transportation deployment will participate in a DOT roundtable, sponsored by HNTB, on 12June at 1500-1445 McEnery Convention Center as part of ITS America 2016 San Jose. These leaders will discuss their states’ experiences, successes, failures, challenges, and lessons learned in launching ITS projects while, on broader scale, endeavouring to prepare their states’ infrastructures to meet and support tomorrow’s ITS mobility dema
    Read More
  • Sidewalk Labs and Transportation for America partner on smart cities
    June 6, 2016
    Google’s smart cities research unit Sidewalk Labs has partnered with Transportation for America (T4A), an alliance of elected, business and civic leaders in an initiative to engage cities in developing efficient and affordable transportation options. The two organisations will work with dozens of US cities to define how technology can help them meet their pressing transportation challenges. This collaborative aims to help local leaders get more people where they want to go quickly and affordably, enhancing
    Read More

Highlighted Content