In recent years we've seen both an explosion in new mobility options, and a tragic increase in injuries and fatalities among the community of vulnerable road users (VRUs). While advances in vehicle onboard sensors help mitigate that trend, transportation stakeholders, including automakers like Toyota, infrastructure owner operators (IOOs), and the US Department of Transportation, believe that cooperative wireless communication is a critical and complementary safety technology. This talk explains so-called Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, provides a snapshot of how V2X is being used around the world, and focuses specifically on how V2X can improve VRU safety.

Dr. John Kenney is an Executive Researcher at Toyota InfoTech Labs in Mountain View, California. He is part of a Toyota team that develops connected mobility services and technologies for vehicular communication, cooperative automated driving, cybersecurity, edge computing, and mobility system architectures. His research focuses on V2X, including channel congestion control, V2X protocols, regulations, and performance. He represents Toyota in international standards organizations and industry research consortia, including ITS America, Alliance for Auto Innovation, SAE, IEEE, ETSI and the Car2Car Communications Consortium. Prior to his work with Toyota, John was a member of the Tellabs Research Center and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He has graduate degrees from Stanford and Notre Dame.

Cities are dynamic systems, constantly shaped by the movement of people, goods, and ideas. In this talk, Dr. McKenzie explores these movements through the lens of electric micromobility and shared mobility services that are rapidly reshaping urban transportation networks. Drawing on large-scale mobility datasets, Dr. McKenzie introduces work from the Platial Analysis Lab at McGill University in Montreal, including new methods for measuring urban vitality, examining equitable access to e-micromobility across different socio-demographic groups, and reflecting on how the adoption of electric modes intersects with the 15-minute city ideal. This work integrates spatial analysis and behavioral geodata to explore the uneven geographies of access and participation in everyday urban life, with the aim of showing how large mobility datasets can deepen our understanding of e-micromobility and help shape more inclusive, human-centered cities.

Grant McKenzie is an associate professor of spatial data science in the Department of Geography at McGill University. At McGill, Grant leads the Platial Analysis Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that works at the intersection of information science and behavioral geography. Much of Grant's work examines how human activity patterns vary within and between local regions and global communities. This has driven his applied interests in new mobility services as well as the broader role that geographic information science plays at the intersection of information technologies and society. Outside of academia, Grant has worked as a data scientist and software developer for a range of NGOs and leading technology companies.