Outstanding ITS Service Award 2025-2026: Mr. Qingyang Li & Mr. Hui Wang

The Outstanding ITS Service Award recognises the individual(s) who exceptionally dedicated and contributed to the Institute in the most recent academic year. ITS proudly announces the awardees for academic year 2025-2026:

Mr. Qingyang Li (Chairperson of the ITS Student Committee 2025-2026, PhD candidate in the Department of Data and Systems Engineering, HKU)

Mr. Hui Wang (Deputy Chairperson of the ITS Student Committee 2025-2026, PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, HKU)

The award ceremony was held on Sep 8, 2026 at Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two. ITS Director, Prof. W. Y. Szeto presented the certificates to the awardees.

Outstanding ITS Service Award 2025-2026: Mr. Qingyang Li

Outstanding ITS Service Award 2025-2026: Mr. Hui Wang

ITS Director, Prof. W. Y. Szeto and the Awardees of 2025-2026

Sep 16 2026 (Wed) 11:00-12:00 | Seminar by Dr. Elnaz (Elli) Irannezhad

Building the Digital Backbone of Freight Models and Tools: a Toolkit for the Next Freight Transport Transition

Speaker:

Dr. Elnaz (Elli) Irannezhad

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

University of New South Wales (UNSW)

Date:    Sep 16 2026 (Wed)

Time:   11:00 am – 12:00 nn

Venue: HW 103, 1/F, Haking Wong Building, the University of Hong Kong

Abstract

Freight transport is being reshaped simultaneously from two directions: the push to decarbonise, and the arrival of automation. Both transitions demand decision-support tools that planners, operators, and researchers can trust — yet the freight system is too fragmented for any single model to capture it. This seminar presents a number of research toolkit and computational tools built to address emerging challenges across freight transport systems: electric truck charging and battery-swap network planning, rail electrification infrastructure optimisation, agent-based and system-dynamics simulation tools for decarbonisation and automation of freight transport systems. The seminar zooms into a number of the toolkit's empirical extensions, illustrating a common approach: pairing optimisation, machine learning and simulation tools with empirical, human-centred evidence to design an efficient and low-carbon freight system.

About the speaker

Elnaz (Elli) Irannezhad is a Senior Lecturer in Transport Engineering at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). Her research focuses on the automation, digitalisation, optimisation, and decarbonisation of transport and mobility systems, with a particular emphasis on freight transport. Elnaz received her PhD in Transport Engineering from the University of Queensland (UQ) in 2018. She served 3 years as Postdoctoral researcher at UQ and two years as Principal Engineer and Portfolio Leader of Future Mobility at the Australian Road Research Board. In March 2022, she joined the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Her research trajectory underscores a dedicated commitment to research translation and industry engagement. Her professional journey spans significant roles within the transportation sector, contributing over seven years as a transport engineer and senior transport modeller in Iran before undertaking PhD, fostering invaluable experiences in client interaction and applying engineering expertise in real-world settings.

-   ALL ARE WELCOME   -

Sep 4 2026 (Fri) 16:00-17:00 | Seminar by Dr. Pengbo ZHU

Scalable Cooperative Control and Planning for Future Mobility Systems

Speaker:

Dr. Pengbo ZHU

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Cornell University, USA

Date:    Sep 4 2026 (Fri)

Time:   4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Venue: HW612B, 6/F Haking Wong Building, The University of Hong Kong

Abstract

Emerging transportation systems are rapidly evolving toward highly connected and automated mobility networks, where connected vehicles, shared mobility fleets, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) interact continuously with transportation infrastructure and human users. Enabling efficient cooperation among multi-agents remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex interactions, communication constraints, and computational demands of large-scale transportation systems.

This talk presents scalable cooperative control and planning approaches for future mobility systems.  Coordination strategies are developed for on-demand mobility services, including detour planning for ride-pooling vehicles that improves vehicle utilization, sustainability, and passenger service quality. Decentralized planning algorithms are further introduced for dual-task urban air mobility (UAM) systems, enabling autonomous drone fleets to simultaneously perform parcel delivery and urban traffic monitoring. The talk also discusses the co-design of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) routing and adaptive traffic signal control, demonstrating how coordinated optimization of vehicles and smart infrastructure can enhance network-wide traffic efficiency in mixed traffic environments. Across these applications, scalable learning and control methodologies are developed with rigorous theoretical guarantees to enable decentralized decision-making while maintaining low communication and computational overhead. Together, these research efforts contribute to the development of efficient and sustainable mobility systems for future smart cities.

About the speaker

Dr. Pengbo Zhu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, where she works with Prof. Andreas A. Malikopoulos. She received her Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Her research lies at the intersection of control theory, optimization, and intelligent transportation systems. Her current research spans mobility-on-demand systems, connected and automated vehicles, and urban air mobility systems, with an emphasis on developing scalable, theoretically grounded methods for large-scale multi-agent systems. She is the recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship. Her work has been published in leading journals and conferences, including Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). She received the Best Paper Award at the 13th Symposium of the European Association for Research in Transportation (hEART 2025) and got selected into the 2026 cohort of CEE Rising Stars.

-   ALL ARE WELCOME   -