Adriana-Simona Mihăiță

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Technology in Sydney, founder of the Future Mobility Lab. I am an industry-focused academic aiming to improve people's movement via artificial intelligence in a smart city context. Winner of the 2022 Women in AI Infrastructure award in Australia and New Zealand, 2023 iAwards, a triple finalist in the 2022 Women in AI awards, 2021 IoT Awards – Smart Cities, 2021 ITS Australia for Transport Data and R&D Excellence, winner of the 2018 ITS Australia National Awards for Research Excellence, finalist in Smart City Awards 2019, awarded Monash Business School Scholarship for Women in Leadership 2018, nominated for the 2019 Prime Minister's Science Awards, and interviewed by Channel 7 News and The Guardian.



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  • 27th if July 2023: our Future Mobility Lab is the Winner of the iAWARDS 2023 NSW in Sustainability for our Digital Twin Platform for smart cities.


  • 31st of March 2022: I am the winner of the 2022 Women in AI Awards - Australia and New Zealand , category AI in infrastructure for my work in building resilient cities via AI, digital twin modelling and optimisation. I want to thank my UTS Future Mobility Lab team and the UTS Data Science Institute for their hard work and continuous support even after these hard years of lockdowns – it means a lot to me.


  • November 2021: I am happy to announce that the UTS Data Science Institute- Future Mobility lab is a triple finalist among 2 different awards (ITS Australia 2021, IoT Awards 2021) in 3 different Categories for our following work:
    1) Estimating the Impact of Electric Vehicles Across Transport and Energy Systems, Category: Excellence in R&D
    UTS collaborated with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) using data from Transport for NSW to deliver a new transdisciplinary approach for estimating electric vehicle adoption impact on consumer waiting times, traffic congestion and energy demand across multiple EV uptake scenarios. Special thanks: Joachim Tan (AEMO), Virginie Vernin (TfNSW)
    2)Next Generation of Digital Twin, Category: Excellence in Transport Data
    UTS Data Science Institute has been working in the last years on building the Sydney Real-Time Digital Twin Platform, integrating at once several types of data sources such as all the city 3D layout with top layers like the public transport movement in real-time, transport simulation for incident scenario management in real-time, water pipes layout via IoT sensing data transmission and air quality real-time transmission from monitoring stations in Sydney.
    Congratulations to everyone involved: Fang Chen, Distinguished Professor Dr. Adriana-Simona Mihaita, Adam Berry Yuming Ou Mao Tuo Lelin (Merlin) Zhang Yang Wang Seunghyeon Lee Michael Blumenstein Artur Grigorev

  • November 2021: Artur Grigorev, my 2nd year PhD student in FMlab was awarded the Runner up for the 2021 FEIT Research Showcase (ORAL PRESENTATION) (Prize: $1,000).

  • November 2021: I delivered a Plenary Lecture at the IEOM 2021 - 6th North American Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, 3-5 Nov 2021, Monterrey, Mexico on the topic of “Next Generation of Digital Twins”.

  • September 2021: The media release of our project iMOVE-TfNSW RoadsAI Data Mining has reached a 13.2 million online readership, covered by 21 media news outlets such as ZDNet, iTNews, Australian manufacturing, Industry update, Roads and Infrastructure Magazine, Fuentitech, MediaNet, The Mandarin, OpenGov Asia, etc.

  • September 2021: I was recognised at as one of the Future Movers in Australia by Compass IoT.

  • July 2021: FMlab has won the pitch contest for two research projects with TfNSW on the topics of a) “Data Analytics for Train Level Crossings” with the purpose of investigating the top 50 most-riskiest train level crossings in NSW, and b) “V2X freight and emergency vehicle priority trial” via an iMOVE CRC, with the purpose of analyzing the accuracy of the current freight priority trial in Wollongong.

  • 23rd of June 2021: I presented at the 2021 Advancing Public Sector Data Analytics with the topic of: Data Analytics for transportation System optimization.

  • 17th of June 2021: I was an invited Program Committee member for AJCAI2021 (the 34th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence).

  • 18th of June 2021: I was Interviewed by Channel 7 News Adelaide and The Guardian with regards to the Premiere launch of the World’s First Electric Frying Car, the Alauda Airspeeder Mk3 EXA, article reported by Hanna Foord, respectively Donna Lu.

  • June 2021: FMlab has organised a joint half-day seminar together with the Monash University Monash Institute of Transport Studies, Faculty of Engineering on the topic of AI in transportation Applications.
  • 12th of April 2021: Guest Speaker ITS Asia Pacific 2021 on Intelligent congestion management organized by Michael Towke, Transport for NSW. Slides: and Video presentation.

  • January 2021: Finally received the IEEE Senior Member certificate after more than half a year of delays due to COVID-19. Hopefully, 2021 will bring more stability and no-boundaries research activity!


  • November 2020: The Data Science Institute is Finalist in the ITS Australia Awards 2020 for the work on Improve Train Network Operation Performance via Machine Learning Techniques.


  • 23rd of October 2020: Guest Lecturer in the class of “Introduction to Data Analytics”, organized by Mukesh Prasad at UTS. See the online recorging of the class..


  • October 2020: Presentation delivered for IEEE ITSC 2020 conference on the topic of Graph modelling approaches for motorway traffic flow prediction. During the same conference we prepared as well a presentation given by Yuming Ou on our accepted work for IEEE ITSC 2020 conference on the topic of Dynamic Train Demand Estimation and Passenger Assignment.


  • May 2020: The Future Mobility Lab has started a collaborative project with AEMO for Modelling the impact of Electric vehicle adoption in Northern Sydney using energy and transport modelling integration (more details).


  • 30th of May2020: Book chapter accepted: Ou, Yuming; Mihaita A. S.; Chen, Fang; "Big Data Processing and Analysis on the Impact of COVID-19 on Public Transport Delay", in Data Science for COVID-19, (Edited by Utku Kose, Deepak Gupta, Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque, Ashish Khanna), to be published by Elsevier, accepted May 2020.


  • 15th of May 2020: Two Papers accepted for the IEEE ITSC 2020 Conference as follows:
    - Mihaita A. S.; Papachatgis, Zac, Rizoiu, M.A., Graph modelling approaches for motorway traffic flow prediction, IEEE Intelligent Transport Systems Conference 2020, Rhodes, Greece. September 20-23, 2020.
    - Ou, Yuming, Mihaita A. S., Fang Chen, Dynamic Train Demand Estimation and Passenger Assignment, IEEE Intelligent Transport Systems Conference 2020 , Rhodes, Greece. September 20-23, 2020.


  • 13th of January 2020: Paper accepted for presentation only at the TRB 2020 Annual Meeting in Washington D.C., USA. Citation:"Shafiei,Sajjad, Mihaita, A.S., Nguyen, Hoang, Bentley, Christopher D B, Cai, Chen, Short-Term Traffic Prediction under Non-Recurrent Incident Conditions Integrating Data-Driven Models and Traffic Simulation, Transportation Research Board (TRB) 99th Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., Jan 2020.


  • 6th of November 2019: The Future Mobility Lab has hosted the Transport in the cloud Research Forum , which saw around 100 representatives from government, academia and industry joining forces here at University of Technology Sydney for presenting their ongoing works and future needs in terms of data processing, concerns, AI needs, etc. All the photos and description of the event can be found on our FM-lab website. Transport in the cloud Research Forum


  • 1st of November 2019: The Future Mobility Lab has started a collaborative project with the V/line Victoria for building a traffic and simulation modelling of the train lines which would be able to evaluate the resilience of planned timetables, and the impact of traffic disruptions on the whole train network system


  • 31st of October 2019: The UTS Data Science Institute was a Finalist in the 2019 Australian Smart Cities Awards for our research work in transportation (Future Mobility Lab research work in AI applied for transport modelling), water and energy. Smart City Awards 2019


  • 27-30 October 2019: Attended the IEEE Intelligent Transport Systems Conference 2020, Auckland, New Zealand to present the paper "Motorway Traffic Flow Prediction using Advanced Deep Learning" Preprint , presentation slides . IEEE ITSC 2019


  • 21-25th of October 2019: Attended the 26th ITS World Congress 2019 to present the papers "Arterial incident duration prediction using a bi-level framework of extreme gradient-tree boosting" presentation slides . and "Demand Estimation and Prediction for Short-term Traffic Forecasting in Existence of Non-recurrent Incidents", presentation slides . Moderated as well the Special Interest Session on "Crowd Movement Analysis and Modelling" in which I invited as speakers: Christopher Bentley, Research Scientist, CSIRO's Data61, Mo Li, Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Muhamad Azfar Ramli, Lead Scientist Complex Systems at A*STAR - Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Paul Rybicki, Chief Country Officer of Singtel owned DSpark Pty Ltd, Saptarshi Saradindubasu, Lead ITS smart city solutions at Continental, moderated by Chen Cai, Research Director, Data61. ITS World Congress 2019


  • 16th of October 2019: Nominated in the “New Innovators” category and invited to attend the “Prime Minister’s prizes for Science” by The Hon Scott Morison. The Prime Ministers Prizes for Science


  • 27th of June 2019:Invited talk in the "Science in the city" talk series event organized by Research Director Simon Dunstall of Data61, together with Arthur Maheo from Monash university, Fiona Calvert from the Department of Transport Victoria. Science in the city talk


  • 13th of June 2019:Prof. Fang Chen, Dr. Simona Mihaita and A/Prof. Adam Berry attended a national workshop organized by Fortescue Metal Group in Perth, together with representatives from: Queensland University of Technology, Australian National University, Curtin University, University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University. The main purpose is the building of the new Karratha Living Lab with integrated autonomous and connected vehicle systems. Karratha Visit


  • 14th of May 2019:: Dr. Mihaita and Dr. Fang Chen received the National Research Foundation from Singapore for discussing future collaboration discussions between UTS and Singaporean research Institutions on topics such as Urban Mobility, CyberSecurity and Artificial Intelligence. NRF visit at UTS


  • 9th of May 2019:Dr. Mihaita and Dr. Adam Berry met with Transgrid representatives in an official visit to UTS Techlab given by Ray Kirby (Tech Lab Director) with the purpose of establishing future collaborations and projects in a DXC Digital Transformation Centre. Dr. Mihaita delivered a presentation on the UTS Australian Institute of Data Excellence capabilities in data analytics and artificial intelligence, while Dr. Berry provided insights on energy research capabilities.


    • Transgrid visit at UTS tech Lab





  • April 2019:: 3 papers accepted for presentation for the 26th ITS World Congress 2019, Singapore, 21-25 Oct 2019. Details below:
    1. Mihaita, A.S., Liu, Z., Cai, C., Rizoiu, M.A “Arterial incident duration prediction using a bi-level framework of extreme gradient-tree boosting”, Preprint .
    2. Mao, T., Mihaita, A.S., Cai, C., Traffic Signal Control Optimisation under Severe Incident Conditions using Genetic Algorithm. Preprint .
    3. Shaffiei, S. Mihaita, A.S., Cai, C., Demand Estimation and Prediction for Short-term Traffic Forecasting in Existence of Non-recurrent Incidents. Preprint .
  • March 2019: invited to be a program committee member for ITS Summit 2019, Melbourne, Australia and the Australian Data Science Conference AusDM.
  • February 2019: the ARC Linkagpe Project LP180100114 has been accepted as part of the Australia Singapore Strategic collaboration. I will be working together with Data61, Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and international partners from Singapore such as: NUS (National University of Singapore) and NTU (National University of Technology in Singapore). The purpose of the collaborative ARC LP is to build “Data-driven Traffic Analytics for Incident Analysis and Management” (see description here).
  • January 2019: I have started to work as a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology in Sydney.
  • November 2018: Thank you ITS Australia for giving us the ITS Research Award for the 3rd time in the last 5 years! What an achievement for the ADAIT group in CSIRO's Data61! This is a proof of our ongoing collaboration with Transport for NSW and strong capabilities in transport modelling and artificial intelligence.

  • July 2018: 1) How to integrate machine learning and traffic simulation for incident impact analysis? Our latest journal article recently published in the Transportation Research Record journal presents an innovative framework which combined data-driven models for recurrent incidents and traffic simulation modelling for non-recurrent incidents to evaluate their impact and best possible response plan. The official and final version of the paper can be found on on the TRR website, while the free version on my Publication List.

    2) Another journal article has been finally published this month in the International Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems Research in which we have proposed an integration of mesoscopic traffic simulation modelling and air quality models for NO2, SO2 and PM10 in order to predict the air quality in Loraine, France. The official and final version of the paper can be found on on the IJIT website, while the free version on my Publication List.
  • June 2018: IoT Festival 2018: I had the pleasure to be a speaker in the "Connected and Autonomous vehicles" panel together with Neil Wong from the National Transport Commission, Denise Christie from Intelematics and Sue Wiblin from Keolis Downer. Read my summary report of the discussion here.


  • May 2018: How to choose best traffic control plan for neighborhood traffic optimization? My previous approach published in the Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory journal was to apply a "Multi-objective traffic signal optimization using 3D mesoscopic simulation and evolutionary algorithms". The free version before publication can be found in my Publication List.
  • Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018: my colleague Dr. Tao Wen presented our latest work on "Integrated Incident Decision Support using Traffic Simulation and Data-driven Models" during the 97th TRB Annual Meetingin Washington D.C, USA. Preprint: .
  • ITS World Congress October 2017 in Montreal Canada: our ADAIT group was present at the congress with a live booth presenting our latest innovations on the traffic congestion monitoring and situation awareness. This year, my activity summary during the congress is listed as follows: 1) Presenter of my latest findings on the positioning accuracy of light vehicles equipped with DSRC in the TS96 technical session together with Billy Kihei, Ph.D. from Georgia Tech USA, Jean Marchal from University of Sherbrooke Canada, Phil Pfeiffer from ETS University USA and JaChing Chou from IT Taiwan. Preprint:

    2) Organiser and moderator of the Special Interest Session about ”On-Demand Transport Initiatives" together with David Adelman from Via, Carol Schweiger from Schweiger Consulting LLC, Andreas Mai from Keolis North America, Kevin Orr from LiftandGo Australia, Gorazd Marinic from IRU Brussels and Prof. Yasuhiko Kumagai from Kochi Technology University of Japan.
    3) Organiser and presenter of the Special Interest Session on Evaluation of CV/AV trials around the world, together with Alexandre Torday (Aimsun), Angelos Amditis (IN-PREP Greece), Henry Wu (JYW Consulting Australia), Dean Economou (Telstra Australia) and Scott Belcher (SFB Consulting USA) for presenting in my Special Interest Session 109 on "Evaluation of CV/AV trials", moderated by Chen Cai (Data61|CSIRO).



  • It was an honor to be chair and presenter of the Traffic Control Session WeM12 during IFAC World Congress 2017 which took place last week in Toulouse, France. Many thanks to all presenters for their interesting research work and presentations during this session: Dr. Rödönyi Gábor, PhD Mohseni Fatemeh, Prof. Ramezani Mohsen , Dr. Kouvelas, Anastasios and PhD Aguiar, Braulio.

  • From 8th to 12th of January 2017 I attended the Transportation Research Board Annual Conference in Washington D.C. for presenting my paper on "An investigation of positioning accuracy transmitted by connected heavy vehicles using DSRC".
  • From 10th to 14th of October 2016 I will be at the ITS World Congress 2016 in Melbourne to present the paper "Integrating a mesoscopic traffic simulation model and a simplified NO2 estimation model" (Friday 14 October 2016, 08:30 - 10:00, Meeting room 103). Listen to the presentation here.
    I will also be the moderator of a Special Interest Session regarding the "Roles of data analytics and transportation modelling for fast-changing urban infrastructure" (Wednesday 12 October 2016, 14:00 - 15:30 (Meeting room 219). Listen to the entire session here.
    Mbr> If you have some time, join our ADAIT team at the stand 3118 to talk about our new cloud hosted real-time transport data analytic platform as well as hot topics in connected vehicles.

  • Starting June 2016 I took the lead of the project: "An investigation of Basic Safety Message Positon Reporting of selected vehicles in CITI" . CITI is a Transport for New South Wales Cooperative Intelligent Transport Innitiative. The aim is to analyze the GPS positioning accuracy as signalized from connected vehicles equipped with DSRC, through Basic Safety Messages (BSM). The data analyzed consists of almost 400 million BSMs recorded by trucks and light vehicles belonging to the Road Safety and Technology Centre in Wollongong. I am responsible with the project proposition, budgeting, and delivery.
  • 25th of April 2016: ADAIT team from Data61 releases new Traffic Watch Application on Google Play or monitoring real-time tweets about car incidents in Sydney. Follow the updates in your Sydney area by installing and testing the app on your Android device.
  • 20th of April 2016:ADAIT team launches our official Twitter account: #ADAIT_AU

  • 8th of April 2016: Transport for New South Wales announces new project collaboration with ADAIT team from Data61 to work on Big Data Integration and traffic analysis in order to reduce congestion in Sydney. The project aims to compile data from Opal cards, GPS devices, traffic signals and buses in order to provide better information for the Transport Management Centre and increase alerts on congestion incidents. I will be working mostly on the transport modelling and simulation of the Sydney network. I also play the role of Scrum master in order to apply the Agile Methodology in the project, by organizing daily and weekly Sprint meetings, as well as tracking and prioritizing tasks for the project.
  • 1st of April 2016: Our ADAIT team has recently released its official website: adait.io ,describing our vision and goals as a research team working on various projects in transportation.

  • 5th - 9th of October 2015: The ADAIT team (Advanced Data Analytics in Intelligent Transportation) of NICTA has been participating at the 22nd ITS World Congress 2015 in Bordeaux, France. As a speaker/moderator I presented: the "Sydney Large-scale Traffic Insights" project and the Traffic Watch platform, a real-time online platform which offers rapid insights about accidents in the city of Sydney, as reported from various Twitter accounts.


  • On the 21st-22nd of November 2014 the ENSGSI held "The 48 hours of Innovation", an international event where students had to work together to generate new innovative ideas on specific industrial subjects. A presentation video can be seen here . As well, all the ideas were saved using the platform "The 48 hours Innovation Maker".
  • On the 12th of June 2014 the ENSGSI inaugurated the opening of the 4D Lorraine Fab living lab ( a 360 meters platform which reunites 3D printers, laser cutting machines, eye-tracking systems and creativity platforms in the scope of assisting the production of new and original ideas) and of the NOM4D lab, which is currently the 1st FAB LAB MOBILE of France! For more pictures and information, check out the Facebook page of the ENSGSI, and watch the presentation video of the 4D LFLL .


    I was responsible of the collaborative platform for managing new creativity ideas, using interconnected objects such as the Surface SUR40 Tablet, Saumsung Galaxy tablets, as well as personal laptops.
    As well, my team of students from ENSGSI was present on the spot to show our latest 3D Simulation of the Ecological-Neighbourhood Nancy Grand Coeur, currently under reconstruction.


  • February 2014: the article "Optimization of a complex urban intersection using discrete event simulation and evolutionary algorithms" has been accepted for publication (see the Publications list ).
  • January 2014: the article "An Agent Based System to build project memories during engineering projects" has been accepted for publication (see the Publications list ).
  • Responsible of the new lecture: "Flux simulation in FlexSim" , held at ENSGSI, Nancy, France.
  • In June 2013, the 3D traffic simulation project which has been developed by my team of students from ENSGSI, Nancy, France, has won the first prize at the International Competition organized by FlexSIm with the help of SimConseils.
  • In June 2013 I held the Project management seminar at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.
  • In January 2013 the article : A multi Agent System to Manage Ideas during Collaborative Creativity Workshops has been accepted for presentation at the ICFCC Conference 2013 and for extension in the IJFCC journal. For more details see the publication list.
  • On the 18th of September 2012 I have defended my PhD Thesis at the Gipsa-laboratory, Grenoble, France. More details of the manuscript and the presentation can be found here.