Ethos Events in collaboration with the financial and business portal banks.com.gr and the magazine CHRIMA are organizing for the second consecutive year the 2nd Auto Forum titled: “Change your car!”. The conference took place with great success on 7 November 2018 in Athens. The subject of the 2nd Auto Forum was the latest technological advances in the field of passive safety in the automotive sector and the need for consumers to understand the potential of the new technology in order to “escape” untouchable or at least slightly injured after a violent collision caused by a traffic accident. 
The Road to Traffic Automation
A paper titled “Which factors affect accident probability at unexpected incidents? A structural equation model approach” authored by Panagiotis Papantoniou, Constantinos Antoniou, George Yannis and Dimosthenis Pavlou is now published in Journal of Transportation Safety & Security. A driving simulator experiment was carried out, in which 95 participants were asked to drive under different types of distraction (no distraction, conversation with passenger, cell phone use) in different road and traffic conditions. Then, in the framework of the statistical analysis, driving performance is estimated as a new unobserved (latent) variable based on several individual driving simulator parameters while a structural equation model is developed investigating which factors lead to increased accident probability at unexpected incidents. Regarding driver distraction, results indicate that cell phone use has a negative effect on accident risk confirming the initial hypothesis that when talking on the cell phone drivers find it difficult to handle an unexpected incident and as a result are more likely to commit an accident. 
The American College of Greece – Institute of Public Health is organizing a workshop on “Road Accidents and Safe Traffic Behaviour: Are they prevented or are they just cured?”, which will take place on 14 November 2018 in Athens, Greece. Key note speaker will be Prof. George Yannis. 
Under the theme “Smart Mobility, Empowering Cities“, 26th Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress, the world’s leading transport technology congress, will arrive at the shores of Singapore from 21 – 25 October 2019, organized by Land Transport Authority (LTA), Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) and co-hosted by ERTICO – ITS Europe together with ITS America, ITS Asia. With a comprehensive format of plenary and interactive sessions, as well as a dynamic exhibition with technical demonstrations and tours, the World Congress 2019 will be an opportunity for our sponsors and partners to network, discuss and share ground-breaking transport technology, and forge mutually beneficial partnerships to further unleash the power of ITS. 
ERTICO – ITS Europe is organizing, in partnership with the European Commission and will be hosted by the Municipality of Eindhoven and Municipality of Helmond, the 13th ITS European Congress, which will be held in Eindhoven, on 3-6 June 2019. The ITS Congress in Europe, is the largest event entirely dedicated to smart mobility and digitalisation of transport.
The National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) is organizing the Road Safety & Simulation International Conference 2019 (RSS2019) which will be held on 14-17 October 2019 in Iowa City, Iowa, USA. The conference theme focuses on Transformations in Transportation, and conference topics include, but are not limited to: Automated Vehicles Technology, Connected Vehicles Technology, Vulnerable Road Users, Roadway Infrastructure Design, and Distributed Simulation Technology.
The International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) of the International Transport Forum (ITF) organised a Meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, on 17-18 October 2018, in which the latest international road safety developments were discussed. NTUA contributed actively with 3 presentations:
The Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland (CARRS-Q) is organizing the 8th International Cycling Safety Conference (ICSC2019) which is going to be held in Brisbane, Australia, on 18-20 November 2019. The ICSC is a forum for researchers and experts in the field of cycling safety to exchange their knowledge and bring up new research topics or safety solutions. The conference facilitates interaction between participants and offers a premium forum to share scientific results and ideas, and favours networking in the cycling safety community.
The UN Road Safety Collaboration is organizing the global campaign for the Fifth UN Global Road Safety Week, 6-12 May 2019, under the theme “leadership for road safety”. Enlightened leaders are able to provide a vision of what the future might look like and to mobilize action to achieve this. The goal of the Week, which will be held from 6-12 May 2019, is to generate a demand from the public for stronger leadership for road safety worldwide. Its objectives are to provide an opportunity for civil society to generate demands for strong leadership for road safety, especially around concrete, evidence-based interventions which will save lives and to inspire leaders to take action by showcasing examples of strong leadership for road safety within governments, international agencies, NGOs, foundations, schools and universities, and private companies, among others.
The Emirati Traffic Safety Society (ETSS) along with the Arab Road Safety Organization (AROSO), La Prevention Routière Internationale (PRI) and the International Road Federation (Geneva, Switzerland) co-organized an International Conference on: “Safer Roads & Mobility” which was held with great success in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on 24 – 25th, October, 2018. The conference program focused specifically on Pillar II “Safer Roads and Mobility” of the Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011-2020) due to its sensitive impact on reducing road traffic fatalities.
Critical Safety Choices in Urban Mobility Policies
The 31st ICTCT conference was held with great success in Porto, Portugal on 25-26th October 2018, under the main topic “On the track of future urban mobility: safety, human factors and technology”. The conference was organised in close co-operation with the Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal. The objective of the conference was to support the understanding of future trends in urban mobility and their implications for the safety of all road users.
Road Safety and Automation
The European Union Road Federation (ERF) together with IRF Global and the support of NTUA, organised the European Road Conference “Corridors for Shared Prosperity”, which took place with great success in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on 22-24 October 2018. This conference offered an essential platform to deepen the understanding of these challenges, widen the engagement framework with regional road stakeholders, and achieve consensus on key policy, investment and planning measures.
The Association for European Transport organised the 46th European Transport Conference, which took place with great success in Dublin, Ireland, on 10-12 October, 2018. The European Transport Conference (ETC) is the annual conference of the Association for European Transport. Each year the conference presents the opportunity to interact with a range of speakers across the Transport Industry, including several Road Safety Topics. The range of topics, the multi-seminar approach and the networking environment makes ETC unique among transport conferences, making it the established premier event of its type.
The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims is observed on the third Sunday of November each year (this year on 18 November 2018) by an increasing number of countries on every continent around the world. From 1995, the European Federation of Road Traffic Victims (FEVR) observed this day, as European Day of Remembrance, that was adopted by the United Nations in 2005, and is dedicated to remembering the many millions killed or injured in road crashes and their families and communities, as well as to pay tribute to the dedicated emergency crews, police and medical professionals who daily deal with the traumatic aftermath of road death and injury. The Alliance’s social campaign for World Day of Remembrance 2018 includes both global and local elements.
The 5th International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS) will take place in Heraklion, Crete, on 3-5 May 2019. The purpose of VEHITS 2019 is to bring together engineers, researchers and practitioners interested in the advances and applications in the field of Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems. This conference focuses on innovative applications, tools and platforms in all technology areas such as signal processing, wireless communications, informatics and electronics, related to different kinds of vehicles, including cars, off-road vehicles, trains, ships, underwater vehicles, or flying machines, and the intelligent transportation systems that connect and manage large numbers of vehicles, not only in the context of smart cities but in many other application domains.
Dimitris Tselentis has successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled: Benchmarking Driving Efficiency using Data Science Techniques applied on Large-Scale Smartphone Data. This PhD thesis was carried out at the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens under the supervision of Prof. George Yannis. The main objective of this PhD is to provide a methodological approach for driving safety efficiency benchmarking on a trip and driver basis using data science techniques. It also investigates the way to achieve this by defining a safety efficiency index based on travel and driving behaviour metrics collected from smartphone devices. Furthermore, the present doctoral research proposes a methodological framework for identifying the least efficient trips in a database and for estimating the efficient level of metrics that each non-efficient trip should reach to become efficient. Finally, this dissertation’s objective is to study the temporal evolution of driving efficiency and identify the main driving patterns and profiles of the driver groups formed.
Every year Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, loses many valuable human lives and incurs enormous economic costs caused by road accidents. The Traffic Safety Agency of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in cooperation with the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) organized the 7th International Conference Road Safety in Local Community, which took place with great success in Banja Luca, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 25-26 October 2018 aiming to constantly strengthen and develop capacities at the local level and create groups of road safety experts who will have enough enthusiasm, courage and will to fight with this problem facing the country.
The 6th International Conference on Driver Distraction and Inattention (DDI2018) was held with great success in Gothenburg, Sweden, during October 15-17, 2018. Nearly 190 delegates from 26 countries attended DDI2018 which is a record number of delegates. The conference was hosted and co-organised by the SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers in Sweden, the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR), and the Australian Road Research Group (ARRB). The conference’s theme was “Driver engagement during assisted driving” and a majority of the research results gave new valuable knowledge about how self-propelled vehicles should be designed to enable drivers to handle them.
Since 54 years, the International Road Federation (IRF) World Road Statistics (WRS) continue to be the major comprehensive, universal source of statistical data on road networks, traffic and inland transport. Over the past years, the WRS have proved to be an invaluable and internationally accepted reference tool for governments, NGOs, investments banks, research institutes and anyone analyzing and reporting trends in key subject areas like traffic volumes and vehicle usage, road expenditure, road safety, energy consumption and emissions. This year, the WRS 2018 (data 2011-2016) features more than 205 countries, with data on over 45 road related topics, presented in nine substantive sections, with the active contribution of NTUA for the Greek data.
The 8th conference of European Association for Research in Transportation (hEART) will take place in Budapest on 4-6 September 2019. The conference is organized by the Faculty of Transportation Engineering and Vehicle Engineering at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and will cover relevant areas of transportation research with specific focus on methods, models and planning of transport systems. The aim of the conference is to connect researchers in transport modeling, transport economics and transport policy with advanced practice. Bringing together leading experts and promising young researchers, the symposium offers an opportunity for scientific discussion and interaction in relatively small groups. The conference will be accompanied by social events, and a summer school intended for PhD students the day before the symposium.
