Speakers 2024

Keynote Speaker Ⅰ

Maria Pia Fanti

IEEE Fellow

Polytechnic University of Bari

Speech Title: Machine learning and deep reinforcement learning applied in different fields

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have the potential to bring about significant impacts in automation across various industries and domains. The talk will explain how ML and DRL techniques can be applied in different automation fields: automotive, traffic management and structural health monitoring. Moreover, in each application the role of the simulation is of basic importance for training the agents. Some case studies will be presented in different application areas.Autonomous braking systems based on an intelligent agent trained with DRL can interact with the environment, collect data and react by controlling the vehicle speed when uncontrolled events require an action. DRL approaches are used for efficiently handling by intelligent traffic lights road traffic in road intersections where priority issues are important and autonomous vehicles are involved. Innovative methods based on ML tools are used for detecting damages in steel truss railway bridges to classify raw strain multivariate time series data.  

Bio: Maria Pia Fanti received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. She was a visiting researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, in 1999. Since 1983, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, where she is currently a Full Professor of system and control engineering and Chair of the Laboratory of Automation and Control. Her research interests include management and modeling of complex systems, such as transportation, logistics and manufacturing systems; discrete event systems; Petri nets; consensus protocols; fault detection. Prof. Fanti is IEEE fellow and has published more than 340 papers and two textbooks on her research topics.