Location
Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland
Date
May 20-22, 2026
Details
Organisation
ETHZ SVT | Traffic Engineering, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems (IVT), ETH Zurich: Kevin Riehl & Dr. Anastasios Kouvelas
Keynotes
About Prof. Dr. Oded Cats
Oded Cats is Professor of Passenger Transport Systems at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, and Head of its Department of Transport & Planning. He also serves as a Guest Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
His work develops theory and models for multi-modal passenger transport networks integrating tools from behavioural science, operations research, and complex network theory.
He co-leads the Smart Public Transport Lab, and his research spans topics such as assignment models, network design, system resilience, and resource allocation. He is the Principal Investigator of 3MARS, an ERC Consolidator Grant devoted to multi-modal long-distance transport and has also held an ERC Starting Grant, CriticalMaaS, devoted to double-sided mobility markets.
About Prof. Dr. Yoram Shiftan
Yoram Shiftan is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he holds the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Urban and Regional Planning.
His research focuses on travel behavior, transport policy, activity-based modelling, transportation system analysis, project evaluation, and the intersections of transport, land use, the environment and economics.
He heads the Israeli Smart Transportation Research Center, has been editor of Transport Policy, chaired the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR), and served as consultant on major strategic transport investments including policy formulation and cost-benefit evaluations.
About Prof. Dr. Cathy Wu
Cathy Wu is Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT (also core faculty in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems).
Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, control theory and urban/transportation systems, with particular emphasis on mixed-autonomy mobility — i.e. how automation such as self-driving vehicles can be integrated into existing urban systems in ways that are efficient, safe and sustainable.
She has been awarded major honors including the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Best Dissertation Award, the NSF Career Award, among others, and works to develop computational tools and decision-support systems capable of scaling to societal challenges in mobility and infrastructure.