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Abbas Mohaddes: AI in ITS must have 'human focus'

Abbas Mohaddes, chairman of the board at Umovity (pictured), has attended all but two of the 30 ITS World Congresses held over his long and distinguished career. And in his role on the Congress board of directors, he knows – looking ahead to Atlanta 2025 - what makes successful global events tick: trust, in particular, is crucial.
September 19, 2024
Abbas Mohaddes, chairman of the board at Umovity
Abbas Mohaddes, chairman of the board at Umovity

“What are the use cases that we could learn from each other?” he says. “What are the deployments that we could share? How could we bring people together?” Making sure that all regions of the world feel included, wherever a Congress is held, is an important part of the mix.

And there have been significant shifts in the way the ITS industry thinks since the first Congress in Paris in 1994. “When we first started, it was about vehicular movement and public transit,” he recalls. “But the mindset is changing. What do we have to do to serve people? How do we see mobility from the eyes of the consumer? What are the services we need to provide to our constituencies? This is very different from one region to another – and very different from metropolitan areas versus rural ones.”

In Atlanta, it will likely be hard to get away from the subject of generative AI and its applications in ITS but Mohaddes insists: “The technology has to be leveraged for the safety and sustainability of mobility for humanity.

We need to design and develop it based on a human focus. That’s got to be our base.”

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