On Wednesday, April 19, at 6 PM, the third session of Barcelona Global Duets will take place, a series of dialogues on current issues resulting from the perspective of two global Barcelona residents who are partners of Barcelona Global, one residing in Barcelona and the other outside of Spain. With the collaboration of The New Barcelona Post, in this new session we will address the future of urban planning and the radical changes that the emergence and future generalization of autonomous vehicles will imply for city mobility.
We will feature two experts: Ramon Gras, City Science Researcher at Harvard and co-founder of Aretian Urban Analytics and Design, and Aleix Paris, software engineer at the Californian autonomous vehicle company Waymo. The journalist and CEO of TheCreativeAgency, Bibiana Ballbè will moderate the session, which can be followed live via streaming through the Barcelona Global blog or in the broadcast window that will be available on the homepage of The New Barcelona Post. REGISTER HERE TO be able to follow the event and ask questions through the online platform.
Under the motto The urban planning of the future and autonomous vehicles, we will address the challenges that large cities like Barcelona must face in multiple areas, such as the demographic challenge, access to affordable housing, gentrification, new mobility, the emergence of new economic drivers, the effects of climate change, and technological transformations, accelerated by the massive use of data and the application of artificial intelligence in urban management.
In the cities of the future, autonomous vehicles will play a key role, as they can ensure smoother and more rational traffic and minimize the number of accidents, since it is estimated that more than 90% of traffic accidents are caused by human error. "Autonomous cars are going to save many lives. It's no longer a question of 'will they ever arrive? when?', no: they have to arrive, it's a necessity. We are going to be much safer," explained Aleix Paris in an interview with Business Insider.
The Barcelona Global Duets cycle restarted on February 23, with a session dedicated to the Barcelona brand, featuring publicists Toni Segarra and Ignasi Puig. This was followed by a dialogue on March 13, about how sleep influences the quality of aging, which featured two highly authoritative voices: Dr. Antoni Esteve, president of AdSalutem Institute for Healthy Sleep, and Luis de Lecea, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. The videos are now available to revisit these conversations, along with the corresponding summary chronicles.
Ramon Gras is an Urban Designer and Civil Engineer trained at Harvard'18, MIT'15, and BarcelonaTech'10. He combines his role as co-founder at Aretian Urban Analytics and Design with leading research in City Science at Harvard University. He is originally from Barcelona and has lived in Boston and London in recent years. Before developing his joint thesis with Jeremy Burke ---co-founder of Aretian--- at Harvard, Ramon worked in Ferrovial's Innovation office in London, where he led design and technology projects at London Heathrow Airport and the London Underground.
At MIT, Gras developed urban design projects for the expansion of Kendall Square and the Somerville innovation districts in the Boston area. Ramon Gras's thesis at MIT addressed the problem of consolidation in air cargo transport by designing an advanced Business Intelligence platform. He furthered his training at MIT after working as a designer on major infrastructure projects related to bridge design, maritime infrastructure, high-speed trains, and architectural design. Ramon's early research at BarcelonaTech focused on bridge design, high-performance materials, and nanotechnology applications for structural engineering. He is interested in improving innovation around cities, technology, and infrastructure by designing creative and rigorous interdisciplinary solutions to address the large and complex challenges facing the cities of the future.
Based in Cambridge (Massachusetts), Aretian comes from the ancient Greek concept of Areté or excellence and is defined as a boutique urban design and analysis company. "We develop new methods at the forefront of technology to generate solutions to problems in the fields of urban design, mobility, and economic development," the firm states.
For his part, Aleix Paris is a Barcelona native based in Silicon Valley who works as an engineer at Waymo, the autonomous vehicle development company owned by Alphabet, the conglomerate to which Google belongs. He boasts a brilliant academic record ---always achieving perfect scores--- and excelled as a student at the Center for Interdisciplinary Higher Education (CFIS) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where he earned degrees in Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering. In 2018, he moved to the United States to pursue a scientific master's degree at MIT, specializing in robotics and machine learning. There, he had the opportunity to intern at Amazon Prime Air, where he worked on an ambitious project involving autonomous drones for home package delivery.
In 2020, he moved from Boston to Mountain View (California) after joining Waymo as a software engineer and roboticist, one of the world's most advanced companies in autonomous cars, a discipline he considers the new space race. At Waymo, he is part of the behavior team for these new autonomous vehicles, meaning he contributes to programming the brain of the cars of the future, developing the software that plans their movement and on-board decision-making based on the hundreds of parameters captured by their sensors.
In this regard, Paris works to "create the world's most experienced driver" through the use of software engineering, robotics, and machine learning. His lines of work address the planning of autonomous vehicle behavior in complex and dense urban driving scenarios; the modeling of interactive situations, taking into account how other road users might react to the way we drive, with a focus on keeping vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, safe.