Smart Car Researcher Wants to Eliminate Stoplights

Christos Cassandras has spent more than 40 years studying how computers and machines make decisions. Lately, his work has focused on a problem nearly every driver knows well: sitting at a red light with no cross traffic in sight, wondering why it takes so long for the light to turn green.Cassandras, an IEEE Life Fellow, is a professor at Boston University, where he headed its systems engineering division, a graduate program he helped create.Christos CassandrasEmployer Boston UniversityTitle ProfessorMember grade Life FellowAlma maters Yale, Stanford, and HarvardHe is the recipient of this year’s IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Research Award for his work on autonomous vehicles and the systems that help them drive—work that could one day get rid of traffic lights altogether.That idea—proving with mathematical models and intelligent algorithms using cars’ relative speeds, mass, and distance as inputs that self-driving cars will behave safely before they are ever let loose on the streets—has become the foundation of Cassandras’s career and the reason his name keeps coming up in conversations about transportation.In the 1990s he theorized that a machine suc…

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