BACKGROUND
The Distinguished Transport Lecture Series (DTLS) was launched in 2009. Each year, we invite internationally renowned and distinguished scholars to visit Hong Kong to deliver public lectures in the transport field, with the aim of promoting excellence in transport research and development in Hong Kong, as well as providing a platform for discussions and the exchange of views between international experts, scholars, local researchers, and professionals.
Distinguished Transport Lecture by Prof. Srinivas Peeta , 06 Oct 2026 (Tue) 21:00 (HKT)
AI-enabled Travel Choice Modeling and Autonomous Driving Decision-Making
SPEAKER
Professor Srinivas Peeta Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
DATE AND TIME
06 OCT 2026, 9 pm - 10 pm (HKT)
ORGANISED BY
Institute of Transport Studies, The University of Hong Kong
REGISTRATION LINK
https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/B5NbjzsnYy
ABSTRACT
Advances in large language models (LLMs), vision-language models, and other foundation models are creating new opportunities for travel choice modeling and autonomous driving through their capabilities for information synthesis, contextual reasoning, and complex decision support. However, their outputs can be inconsistent, difficult to verify, and uncertain, creating challenges for transportation applications where decisions must be interpretable and reliable. This talk will discuss approaches that integrate Generative AI methods with travel choice models, traffic rules, human driving behavior, and autonomous driving decisions. Applications will span travel choice modeling, where LLMs support the development of explicit choice models, and autonomous driving, where foundation models are combined with traffic-rule representation and uncertainty-aware driving decisions. These approaches illustrate how AI can be integrated with domain knowledge to develop interpretable travel choice models and support safer, context-aware autonomous-driving decisions.
SPEAKER’S BIO
Dr. Srinivas Peeta is the Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also Principal Research Faculty at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Transportation Research Part B: Methodological. He was a past Chair of the Transportation Network Modeling Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the U.S. National Academies. Prior to Georgia Tech, he was the Jack and Kay Hockema Professor at Purdue University up to 2018, where he served as the Founding Director of the NEXTRANS Center, the USDOT Region 5 University Transportation Center (2006-2018). Dr. Peeta has authored over 530 technical publications, including about 460 in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He has received 10 best paper awards and 7 students have received best dissertation awards. His research interests are multidisciplinary and broadly span transportation and infrastructure systems as well as several methodological domains. He received his B.Tech., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), Caltech, and The University of Texas at Austin, respectively. He is a Fellow of ASCE and a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras.
















