John Polak - iCore Inaugural Workshop Speaker
John Polak is Professor of Transport Demand, Chairman of the Centre for Transport Studies
and Director of Research in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London.
Professor Polak is a mathematician by background with over 30 years experience in transport research and teaching,
specialising in the areas of mathematical and statistical transport modelling and analysis. He is a past President
of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research and a past Council Member of the Association for
European Transport and a past member of a number of TRB Committees and serves on the editorial advisory boards
of a number of leading international journals. He has served as an advisor to central and local government and
industry on a wide range of transport issues, both in the UK and overseas. Professor Polak has been in the
forefront of innovative transport model development in the UK for a number of years and has published
extensively on a number of aspects of travel demand modelling, network performance estimation, network
control and traffic management and intelligent transport systems. Much of his recent research has been
concerned with the collection, analysis and interpretation of very large scale real-time datasets related
to operational, behavioural, attitudinal and environmental aspects of transport. He is currently leading
the development of Imperial's new Urban Systems Laboratory.
Talk Title: "Comms and the City"
Abstract: The presentation will discusss the changing role of communications and communications technology in the context of urban infrastructure, systems and services. Drawing on example from transport, logistics and the environmental management, it will highlight how development in communictaions technology are transforming lifestyles and disrupting incumbent business models and explore the implications of these changes for future collaboration between communications engineering and cognate disciplines.