Argonne National Laboratory researcher Prasanna Balaprakash presented an invited Tech Hub talk at the WCX17: SAE World Congress Exposition on April 5, 2017, in Detroit.

An assistant computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Balaprakash was the only speaker from a DOE national laboratory. The Tech Hub, traditionally the most popular of the SAE World Congress sessions, features leaders from a spectrum of industries to present their visions of the future of transport technology, with potential mobility engineering applications.

Balaprakash’s talk, titled ​“Artificial Intelligence for Transportation and Mobility,” focused on AI approaches such as supervised and unsupervised learning and their relevance for vehicle modeling and autonomous vehicles. He discussed how supervised learning has been used for faster vehicle technology assessment and for evaluation of combustion engine stability in expensive computational fluid dynamics simulations. He emphasized the need for moving from machine learning to understanding, and he presented unsupervised learning as a promising approach toward that goal.

“The abundance of data, computational power and algorithmic innovations have allowed artificial intelligence to have a revolutionary impact on our increasingly data-driven lives, including self-driving cars,” said Balaprakash.

WCX17: SAE World Congress Experience marks an evolution of the SAE World Congress into ​“an immersive, interactive experience that matches the ever-changing world of transportation engineering.”