Mobility expert Carlo van de Weijer (TU/e) outlines the lessons learned from the Covid-19 lockdown and the acceleration this might bring to the existing trends in mobility.
PLEASE NOTE: This program bears the SG&USE label and is therefore part of education. This means no 1.5 meter of social distancing is required, and no COVID-19 certificate is needed. This program can also be watched online via livestream.
Every day, at set times, we travelled en masse from A to B to carry out our daily activities and to provide services; we transported goods around the globe, and we booked our holiday destinations further and further away. This was the trend before the pandemic-- and there’s a serious risk that we won’t do any differently after the Covid-19 lockdown, despite our deep concerns about the effects on climate change as well as the positive side-effects we experienced during the lockdown. It is expected that long traffic jams, packed trains at rush hour, and crowded airports will reappear not long after the lockdown. However, society will simultaneously experience an accelerated change in terms of mobility, boosted by the lessons learned from the lockdown (including our crash course in working and studying from home)but also, most importantly, driven by digitalization.
What will mobility look like in the future? Will we soon be transported by robot taxis or by drones? Or, will travelling just become a virtual activity? How will we get food and merchandise to people? And will we adjust our course time slots and working hours to optimal travel schemes? Carlo van de Weijer will answer these questions and explain his view on the future of mobility: a future in which the car as a 'data-producing embedded software platform' plays a key role, a future in which the internet links supply and demand to meet our transport needs increasingly more effectively, and a future in which we will fly even more than we do now in airplanes that will be the most sustainable means of long-haul transport.
Dr.ir. Carlo van de Weijer has a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the TU Eindhoven and a PhD degree with honors from TU in Graz. He carries broad experience in the automotive industry, with executive positions at companies such as Siemens and TomTom, and in the field of research as TU/e’s Director of the Strategic Area Smart Mobility. Currently, he is Managing Director of the newly founded Eindhoven AI System Institute EAISI at Eindhoven University of Technology. He advises ministries and industries around the world on the future of mobility and is a member of the supervisory boards of several high-tech companies and start-ups. Together with prof.dr.ir. Maarten Steinbuch (TU/e), he recently published the book Forward, The future of mobility (DATO, November 2020).
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SG & USE registration
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More information about SG & USE can be found here.