Efficient, Safe, Trustworthy and Causal Autonomous Systems

Distinguished Research Seminar Series

Add to Calendar

Date

18 Sep 2026
Organiser

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, PolyU
Time

11:00 - 12:30
Venue

Online via ZOOM

Speaker

Prof. Dezong Zhao

Remarks

Meeting link will be sent to successful registrants. If you have enquiries regarding E-certificate after the seminar, please contact david.kuo@polyu.edu.hk.

Summary

Autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars and robots, are evolving rapidly. They are reshaping modern society and are being widely adopted in industry and daily life. In many ways, they act as an extension of human perception and action, providing new ways to explore and make use of the world. At the same time, because these systems and the environments in which they operate are complex, ensuring their reliability and scalability presents both exciting opportunities and significant challenges. Developing such systems requires advances in perception, planning, control, and decision-making. In this talk, I will introduce some of our recent work, focusing on four aspects of autonomous system design: improving energy efficiency, ensuring safe planning and control, building trustworthy models and perception, and applying causal inference to support reasoning and decision-making.

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dezong Zhao

Professor
James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK

Dezong Zhao is a Professor of Autonomous Systems at the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK. He obtained his BEng and MSc degrees from Shandong University and his PhD degree from Tsinghua University, all in Control Engineering. His research focuses on autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine intelligence, control engineering, and digital twinning. He was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering / Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2025, a Turing Fellowship in 2024, a Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship in 2020, and an EPSRC Innovation Fellowship in 2018. He has secured multiple major grants from EPSRC, Innovate UK, the Royal Society, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is leading research activities in the £46m EPSRC Digital Twinning Hub for Decarbonising Transport (2024–2029) and the £1.82m EPSRC Network+ Hub on Multimodal AI (2025–2027). He has published over 170 papers in high-impact journals and conferences and has received many accolades.