UFTI welcomes Panos Michalopoulos to the External Advisory Board

UF alumnus Dr. Panos Michalopoulos has more than 50 years of consulting, research, teaching, professional, and business experience in traffic engineering, management operations and control; additionally, he started a public company. He has been a professor of Transportation and Traffic Engineering since 1976 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Minnesota from 1977 to 2009. From 1970 to 1976 he worked as a research associate at the University of Florida and as a traffic engineer for the Florida Department of Transportation. He cofounded the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) at the University of Minnesota in 1986 which is currently one of the largest and most respected in the United States. 

His principal fields of interest include traffic engineering, operations simulation and control, traffic flow theory, advanced traffic management and intelligent transportation systems including connected and automated vehicles (CAV). He has published over 120 papers in professional journals, made over 75 presentations in international conferences, and prepared numerous research and project reports. He has been a distinguished member of many professional societies and received awards from the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the Transportation Research Board, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and others.

Dr. Michalopoulos developed a patented process for machine vision based vehicle detection and founded a company (Image Sensing Systems, Inc.) for commercializing the technology. Image Sensing Systems, Inc., pioneered the field of wide area vehicle detection (widely known as Autoscope). He took the company public in 1995 (NASDAQ: ISNS). Currently he serves as Scientific Advisor of Image Sensing Systems Inc., and as Manager of Transatlantic Technology Exchange LLC, a consulting firm he established in 2003.

Dr. Michalopoulos served as PI in transportation research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Program of University Research of the US Department of Transportation (US DOT), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Florida and Minnesota Departments of Transportation, the European Union commission, and others.

Dr. Michalopoulos has been involved in numerous traffic management and control projects worldwide, including the Barcelona, Atlanta, Seoul, and Athens Olympic Games. He developed the first known mesoscopic PC based traffic simulation software in 1981 (called KRONOS), state of the art artificial vision based sensors, a portable wireless rapidly deployable   surveillance and data collection system, and led numerous advanced traffic management systems for the Federal Highway Administration as well as Florida, New York, and Minnesota Departments of Transportation.