AI is heralded as the next big thing in road safety but what is achievable, useful. or even practical? This session will help demystify what AI really means, what AI technologies are already in use, and how road authorities can deliver safety outcomes based on these emerging technologies. 

Citing examples from real-world cases, this presentation will show how AI tools are being used to replace existing, legacy technologies - for example by making use of big data or video images. It will also cover AI models used to assess road risk and compare these to traditional methods using historic collision data. Finally it will look at emerging applications from the academic and private sectors that may help us better understand infrastructure safety, road user behaviour, and vehicle technologies.

Richard Owen, CEO, Agilysis

Richard Owen is an established international expert in the field of road safety and has extensive experience in assisting organisations turn road safety policy into practice.

With more than 16 years’ experience of collecting, analysing, visualising, and evaluating road safety data he has worked with local authorities, police forces, national governments and research organisations. He has been responsible for the creation of bespoke practitioner workshops covering safe system implementation, evaluating road safety interventions, and measuring risk on roads.

He is a member of several road safety panels working with PACTS, CIHT and the International Transport Forum at the OECD. He regularly presents at conferences across the globe, helping to share much of the excellent work carried out by UK road safety organisations.

Nathan Harpham, Principal Consultant, Agilysis

Nathan Harpham is a Principal Consultant at Agilysis, where he specialises in safety data, analysis and evaluation. Nathan loves the challenge of communicating actionable insight from data for clients to support evidence-based decision making and is particularly passionate about our vision zero targets.

He has delivered a wide variety of data driven projects in road safety for public and private sector clients based in the UK and internationally. These include developing an English network level model to forecast the potential impacts of countermeasures across the safe system pillars and his current work on AI for road safety as part of the European project IVORY.

Nathan has a strong academic background with a first-class Masters’ degree in Mathematics from the University of Oxford.