Smart Car Researcher Wants to Eliminate Stoplights

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Smart Car Researcher Wants to Eliminate Stoplights, according to IEEE Spectrum. Christos Cassandras has spent more than 40 years studying how computers and machines make decisions. Lately, his work has focused on a problem nearly every driver knows well: sitting at a red light with no cross traffic in sight, wondering why it takes so long for the light to turn green.

Cassandras, an IEEE Life Fellow, is a professor at Boston University , where he headed its systems engineering division , a graduate program he helped create. Christos Cassandras Employer Boston University Title Professor Member grade Life Fellow Alma maters Yale, Stanford, and Harvard He is the recipient of this year’s IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Research Award for his work on autonomous vehicles and the systems that help them drive—work that could one day get rid of traffic lights altogether. In the 1990s he theorized that a machine such as a car could be understood as two things at once: an object obeying the laws of physics and a computer processing information and making decisions.