speakers

Klaus Noekel

Head of Innovation
PTV Group

As Head of Innovation at PTV Group, Dr. Noekel is responsible for novel applications and methodological development of the PTV Vision Traffic Suite of transportation planning software, including PTV Visum (demand modelling), PTV Vissim (traffic microsimulation), PTV Optima (real-time traffic management). He participates in numerous collaborations with the academic community in transportation modelling and has published on diverse topics, particularly traffic assignment. Dr Noekel joined PTV Group in 1997 and has worked on numerous consultancy and software development projects in transportation planning and traffic engineering for more than 25 years. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern and a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Operations Research from RWTH Aachen.

Martin Wedderburn

Independent Transport Consultant
and Associate
Walk21

Martin is an independent transport consultant and an Associate of Walk21, the global network for walking. He is an experienced transport planner who has worked on a range of multi-modal studies internationally, and has a particular interest in all aspects of the quantitative analysis and forecasting of active travel modes.

Yaron Hollander

Director
CTthink!

Yaron Hollander has developed many statistical and econometric models, originally in the field of travel behaviour and more recently in other fields, such as health technology and care management. Until 2015 Yaron led TfL’s policy appraisal and modelling team, where he introduced TfL’s mapping website (tfl.gov.uk/WebCAT), TfL’s strategy for using mobile data for planning (Project EDMOND) and London’s cycling network model (CYNEMON). His current work focuses on designing optimal software architecture to meet strategic objectives, and embedding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into policies and business processes.

Tom van Vuren

Divisional Director
Mott MacDonald

Tom van Vuren has been Chairman of Modelling World since its inception in 2006.  As his Twitter profile states, he is passionate about transport modelling and always on the look-out for better ways to collect data, enhance the efficiency of methods and improve accessibility of model results. He holds an MSc from the University of Delft and a PhD from the Institute for Transport Studies and the University of Leeds. Tom is a Divisional Director at Mott MacDonald and a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds; and is a qualified Transport Planning Professional.

Gordon Stokes

Visiting Research Associate
Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford

Gordon Stokes has worked in transport research for 35 years, in government research, universities, consultancies and government agencies. His work has mainly combined travel behaviour data analysis and writing on transport policy. During the 2000s he worked for the Countryside Agency and extended his analytical work outside the area of transport. He has also dabbled in modelling. Since 2010 he has been a visiting research associate in Oxford University. His interest in the ethics of modelling has arisen from involvement with community groups concerned about the use of prediction in transport assessments for development proposals.

Tom Worsley

Visiting Fellow
Institute of Transport Studies, Leeds University

Tom worked as an economist in the public sector for 41 years, spending most of his time on transport forecasting, appraisal and modelling, developing techniques and advising decision-makers. He was awarded a CBE in the 2012 New Year's Honours list for services to the Department for Transport and made a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport and Logistics in 2011. 
 
Tom joined ITS as Visiting Fellow in June 2011, following his retirement from the Department for Transport (DfT). He has held a number of senior economist posts during his career. He was responsible for setting up NATA (the New Approach To Appraisal) in 1997 and for the development of the Department’s National Transport Model in 2000/1. When the Rail Group was established by the Department in 2005, he led the team responsible for Network Modelling Framework, a forecasting model used to provide the evidence to inform the 2007 Rail White Paper and High Level Output Specification (HLOS). More recently he has managed the team of economists who provide economic advice on aviation and shipping and on transport and the environment.

Stephen Joseph

Director
Campaign for Better Transport

Stephen became the executive director of Campaign for Better Transport in 1988. His transport policy expertise is widely regarded, and he is regularly called to serve as a governmental advisor. He has led numerous successful policy campaigns, is frequently quoted by the national press, and is a regular author of research and opinion pieces. He was awarded the OBE in 1996 for services to transport and the environment. In 2008 he was honoured with a PTRC Lifetime Achievement Award 'for furthering the role of transport planning in society'.
'People desperately need real travel choices,' says Stpehen. 'Our over-reliance on the car is ruining our towns and countryside, with town centres dying and acres of space being swallowed up by car parks.'
 

Graham Fletcher

Transport Systems Catapult

Richard Bradley

Technical Director, Intelligent Mobility
Atkins

Richard Bradley is part of Atkins’ Intelligent Mobility team. Intelligent Mobility is about connecting people, places and goods across all transport modes. His primary focus is around data and the holistic simulation of multi-sector systems. This includes understanding the interaction of a wide spectrum of industries, focused around transport, and how personal and corporate behaviour can be influenced to optimise overall effects to society, the economy and the environment. He has over 26 years experience in transport planning and engineering, and developing modelling and appraisal software, and has worked for numerous consultants as well as running his own practice for 11 years.

Paul Richmond

Department of Computer Science, Sheffield University

Dr Richmond is a research focused Research Software Engineer who has recently been awarded one of only six EPSRC Early Career Research Software Engineering (RSE) Fellowships. The focus of this fellowship is in facilitating the use of accelerated architectures such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate scientific discovery. He is developing software techniques, a provision of skills and training material and building a community to help drive the use of accelerators into mainstream science and engineering.

Dr Richmond has a proven track-record of forming inter-disciplinary collaborations to achieve agenda-driven research. His work focuses on developing software which facilitates the pioneering use of emerging high-performance computing architectures for complex systems simulation within computational science and engineering. He is an excellent communicator with a long term record of engaging scientists and engineers from diverse interdisciplinary fields to deliver requirement-driven software solutions.

Peter Heywood

PhD Student
Department of Computer Science, Sheffield University

Peter Heywood is a PhD Student in the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, his research is focussed on the acceleration of transport system micro-simulation using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Under the supervision of Dr Paul Richmond and working closely with the Transport Systems Catapult, Peter is currently developing techniques to extend FLAME GPU (an open-source agent-based modelling environment) specific to transport system simulation to enable simulations of significantly greater scale and complexity than currently possible.

Michael Oliver

Solution Director
PTV Group

As Solution Director for PTV Visum, Michael is responsible for the global market of PTV Visum; PTV Group’s leading transport planning software. Michael consults with customers around the world to gather feedback and ensure successful solutions whilst working with product developers to shape the software to current and future market needs. Michael graduated from the University of Birmingham with a Masters in Mathematical Sciences. He then worked as a consultant for Mott MacDonald before joining PTV Group in 2015.

Paul O'Neill

Managing Director
Intelligent Data

Paul O’Neill is the Managing Director of Intelligent Data, with over 18 years experience in transport modelling, consultancy and data collection. Paul is the Director at Intelligent Data responsible for major project delivery and has worked as the lead partner on some of the largest infrastructure modelling projects in the UK in the past 5 years. Pauls attention to detail is second to none and his specialist advise on methods and data collection techniques have been invaluable to the success of large scale strategic projects such as HS2 over the past few years.  

Paul is also an accomplished speaker and has presented nationally and internationally.

Dale Campbell

Operational Research & Analytics Manager
Transport for London

Dale Campbell is the Operational Research and Analytics Manager for the Analytics team in Transport for London’s Customer Experience Directorate. He is responsible for the team that is developing TfL’s understanding of customers and travel behaviour through the analysis of customer data collected through our automated ticketing systems. He has the remit to provide analysis and insight which supports TfL’s operational and planning area in the delivery of services to customers.
He joined TfL in 2001 and has worked on a range of projects such as the first Mayor’s Transport Strategy, the London Travel Demand Survey, Travel in London Reports and the introduction of contactless payments on rail service in London.

Jonathan Raper

TransportAPI

Jonathan Raper is CEO of Transport API, Britain's leading provider of open public transport data to over 600 operators, media, developers and government users. Jonathan has led http://transportapi.com/ from Placr Ltd. from startup to first funding round and into residency at the UK government's Open Data Institute. He is a Visiting Professor at City University London and sits on the Department for Transport Transparency Board and the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network Board.

Martin Higgitt

Associate Director
JMP

Martin Higgitt is an Associate Director at JMP, with over 17 years’ consultancy experience, specialising in sustainable transport strategies and behaviour change programmes. He leads JMP’s “Influencing Travel Behaviour” work area. In this role, he has overseen many of our large-scale community-based behaviour change programmes which have involved Personal Travel Planning, workplace travel planning, school travel planning, marketing campaigns and on-line and social media campaigns.

Martin has developed a research interest in technology and behaviour change. He has been working collaboratively with Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, looking at how to utilise emerging technologies to promote flexi-mobility and offer mobility as a service.

Luis Willumsen

Independent Consultant, Transport Planning, Demand Modelling and Forecasting, and KIneo Data Analytics

Luis (Pilo) Willumsen has over 35 years of experience as a consultant, transport planner and researcher with a distinguished academic career. He is an internationally recognised authority in transport and traffic modelling. Based in Britain since 1975, he has been a researcher and lecturer at Leeds University and at University College London. From 1989 to 2009, he was a Director of Steer Davies Gleave. He left the company to set up his independent practice in 2009. He has written over 50 technical papers, books and book chapters. He is co-author with Prof. Ortúzar of 'Modelling Transport', now in its fourth edition, and more recently has published 'Better Traffic and Revenue Forecasting', dealing with the issues of risk and uncertainty in demand projections for transport concessions. His experience covers transport modelling assignments and leadership of numerous traffic and revenue forecasting studies for toll roads, managed lanes, rail, metro, etc., undertaken either for the private sector, financial institutions or government sponsors. He has also experience in transport planning for large cities and regions. Within Kineo, he is in charge of identifying and developing business opportunities as well as providing scientific advice for the development of our solutions.

Matt Pettit

Product Applications Engineer
Citilabs

Matt is a Product Applications Engineer with Citilabs in Decatur, Georgia in the United States. After receiving his Masters concentrating in transportation systems analysis at Northwestern University he gained valuable experience working as a transportation engineer for both a public transport agency and a transportation consulting firm. At Citilabs, Matt has played an integral role in the development of a new transportation accessibility analysis software. He also works with local government agencies to best utilise their transportation modeling software.

Katarzyna Sila-Nowicka

Research Associate
Urban Big Data Centre, Glasgow University

Katarzyna Sila-Nowicka (Sila) is a research associate in urban methods, modelling and simulations at the Urban Big Data Centre at University of Glasgow. She previously worked as a research fellow in Centre for Geoinformatics at the University of St Andrews, under Marie-Curie Fellowship (FP7 Geocrowd)  on the topics  related with extracting knowledge from VGI and enriching GPS trajectories with contextual information (PhD Studies). Her research interests cover a wide range of areas in GISc, urban studies, geodesy and cartography including spatial analysis, statistics and spatial modelling, urban planning and remote sensing.

Miguel Picornell

Technical Manager
Kineo Data Analytics/Nommon

Miguel Picornell graduated as a Civil Engineer from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and holds a Master’s Degree in Planning and Management in Civil Engineering from the UPV. He started his professional career as a project manager in the construction industry, and has also worked as an Assistant Professor and Associate Researcher at the School of Civil Engineering of the UPV. In October 2012 he joined Nommon, where he has led different research and consultancy projects related to spatio-temporal data analysis and transport modelling and simulation. He has a broad experience in mobile positioning technologies, spatio-temporal data analysis, statistics and socio-economic aspects of human location and mobility patterns. He leads Kineo's technical team in charge of developing the algorithms and software tools behind our analytics solutions, and is also in charge of managing projects and customer relationships.

Eime Tobari

Associate Director
Space Syntax

Eime Tobari is a qualified architect in Japan. She has extensive research experience in architecture and sociology, focusing on the relationship between space and its behavioural, social and economic outcomes. Eime joined Space Syntax Limited in 2007. She has been involved in a variety of projects in the UK and internationally and supported private and public sector clients in their design development and planning applications. Her expertise covers a wide range of scales from the internal layout of buildings to city-wide masterplanninng. Eime is also in charge of the Space Syntax Academy which offers a range of training programmes to practitioners and academics.

Rachel Aldred

Senior Lecturer in Transport
University of Westminster

Dr. Rachel Aldred is a Senior Lecturer in Transport at Westminster University. Her specialist area is cycling and in relation to this, she has used a range of methods from qualitative interviews, to mathematical modelling, to surveys and GIS. Her research has been funded by research councils, DfT, TfL and others and she has published this work in outlets from the Journal of Transport Geography to The Guardian. Rachel's personal website is at rachelaldred.org and she Tweets at @RachelAldred.

Hugh Neffendorf

Katalysis Limited

Hugh Neffendorf is the founder and Managing Director of Katalysis. Prior to 1997, Hugh was Managing Director of MVA Systematica, a prominent consultancy in software and information management. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton, Department of Geography and a member of the UK Government's Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information.

Hugh is well known for his work in geographic information, demographics, official statistics, social research surveys, IT and mathematical modelling. His range of experience is unusually broad, allowing a comprehensive appreciation of the needs of complex projects. In addition to a sound technical and business grasp, he usually leads projects, involving expert teams.

Katalysis is very well known for developing creative initiatives and for forging and motivating partnerships.

Chris Sharpe

Director
Holistic City

Chris designed the CityCAD and Streetscape Pro applications and leads the urban design software and consultancy business of HCL. Over the last 14 years, Chris has worked as a software consultant, urban masterplanner and design consultant for several major public, private and third sector organizations in the UK and overseas.

His experience includes the masterplan design of major urban extensions, new towns and retail-led masterplans, as well as public design policy documentation, conservation studies, street design and transport planning projects. He gained a BArch DipArch, Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow.

Simon Nielsen

Head of Strategic Analysis
Transport for London

Simon has 28 years experience in transport planning in the UK. He joined TfL in 2010. His current role involves providing evidence to support the transport strategies, policies and interventions contained within strategic documents such as the Mayor’s Transport Strategy (MTS).

Simon’s team is the centre of expertise for the development and use of strategic transport models including multi-modal demand models. The models have been used to support both London-wide and more local land-use and transport strategies as well as major transport infrastructure schemes such as Crossrail and Crossrail 2.

He is responsible for the annual Travel in London report and the annual London Travel Demand Survey, a household survey of 8,000 households.  This analysis is used to ensure that forecasts produced by his team are grounded in a detailed understanding of travel trends and behaviour. The scope of his work also encompasses air quality monitoring and modelling which feeds into the Mayor’s Air Quality Strategy.

Before joining TfL in 2010 Simon led the Policy and Planning team in one of the UK’s leading transport planning consultancies, Steer Davies Gleave and worked on a variety of projects in both the UK and overseas.

Mike Batty

Chairman
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London

Michael Batty CBE FRS FBA is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London where he is Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s and has published several books, such as Cities and Complexity (MIT Press, 2005) and most recently The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2013). He is the editor of the journal Environment and Planning B. His research group is working on simulating long term structural change and dynamics in cities as well as their visualisation, as well as urban analytics for smart cities.

James Woodcock

Programme Lead, Public Health modelling
CEDAR, Cambridge University

James Woodcock is an MRC Population Health Scientist fellow. James joined CEDAR in 2011 and started leading the new Public Health Modelling Group in 2013. James has led on the development of policy relevant transport health impact models (ITHIM) and spatially detailed behaviour change potential models (NPCT).  
James graduated in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Keble College, Oxford and then took an MSc in Public Policy at UCL, where he developed his interest in public health.  In 2009 James joined LSHTM as a lecturer in epidemiology, completing his PhD there in 2010.
Current work and interests
James’ research focuses on modelling health and sustainability. He has particular interest in how we can improve health in the transition to a low carbon transport  system.  His work investigates both the health impacts of changes to transport and food systems, developing detailed and realistic exposure scenarios, and modelling and how changes could be brought about.

Anna Goodman

Public Health Researcher
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Anna Goodman is a public health researcher based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  She is particularly interested in using secondary analysis of existing data sources to study walking and cycling, and evaluate walking and cycling interventions.

Ali Inayathusein

Policy Appraisal and Sub Regional Modelling Manager
Transport for London

Ali Inayathusein manages Transport for London’s (TFL) Policy Appraisal and Sub Regional Modelling team. This includes responsibility for strategic highway modelling, cycling modelling and the recently launched Web based Connectivity Assessment Toolkit (WebCAT). He has extensive experience, having played a key role in developing TfL’s strategic highway modelling capability and leading development of an innovative approach to modelling cycling.  Current work includes initiation of a project to use data from mobile devices for modelling and transport planning; highlighting his strong interest in bridging the gap between insight directly from data and modelling practice.

Dr Mark Mawson

Computational Scientist
Hartree Centre

Dr Mark Mawson is a computational scientist at the Hartree Centre specialising in accelerating software through optimisation and porting to highly parallel architectures. He completed his PhD on the topic of highly parallel fluid-structure interaction in 2013 and since then has been helping academia and industry take advantage of the latest developments in computer architecture to reduce compute time and solve increasingly large and complicated problems.

Nicola Troll

SYSTRA

Nicola Troll is a specialist in transport modelling.  She currently heads up  SYSTRA’s Pedestrian Modelling work.  She has developed and used a wide variety of models including: modelling pedestrian flows, taxi models with both driver and customer responses, the effectiveness of noise levies for airports, the revenue modelling for airlines and the, well known, London Transportation Studies model.  She is also SYSTRA’s technical lead for modelling High Speed 2 demand.

Robin Cambery

Transport Modeller
Department for Transport

Robin Cambery is a transport modeller in the Transport Appraisal and Strategic Modelling team at the Department for Transport. His chief responsibility is maintaining and developing the Department’s WebTAG guidance and advises on modelling and appraisal issues for local and national schemes. Previously responsible for developing the NTEM data set, his current main interest is in demand forecasting uncertainty and communicating risks and opportunities of infrastructure investment to decision-makers via transport models. Having been working for the DfT for nearly ten years, Robin previously worked in consultancy for WSP and Marcial Echenique and Partners.

Steven Finch

Head of Evaluation
Department for Transport

Steven Finch is Head of Evaluation at the Department for Transport. He leads the Department’s Evaluation Centre of Excellence which develops and supports monitoring and evaluation projects to assess the real world effectiveness, efficiency and impacts of transport interventions and feed findings into policy making, delivery and appraisal systems. Prior to joining DfT in 2013, Steven worked for a number of years at NatCen Social Research where he led social research and evaluation projects for diverse government clients.

Luke Best

Technical Director/Owner
Multimodal

Says Luke: I am passionate about both the benefits of encouraging specialists within an industry, and about being one of those specialists myself. I believe that micro-simulation is one of a suite of expert tools available which can truly make a difference to how we manage our existing infrastructure assets, how we plan for the future and how we can affect everyone's experience of transport and travel.
I also want to ensure I am contributing to the progression of demystifying the entire process of transport planning, design and analysis by finding ever better ways of communicating scheme specifics and benefits to a wider, non-technical audience, to guarantee a full level of engagement from clients, stakeholders and the public.

Martijn Breen

Scientific Software Developer
TSS

Martijn Breen received an M.Sc in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Delft (TUD) in 2005. He has been involved in numerous  international simulation and state estimation projects within different companies. Martijn joined TSS-Transport Simulation Systems in 2010 and is mainly involved in macroscopic assignment and simulation, travel demand modelling, origin/destination estimation problems and Aimsun Online models. His current research interests include state estimation and data filtering techniques for online transportation problems.