[AI Seminar Series] REMINDER: Seminar by Jiaqi Ma, Friday April 3rd, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

Reminder for the AI Seminar this Friday (noon at the MRB Seminar Room).
Please use the link below if you plan to attend.

Sincerely,
V. Tsotras

----------------------

On Sun, Mar 29, 2026 at 7:45 AM Vassilis Tsotras <vassilis.tsotras at ucr.edu>
wrote:

> The next AI Seminar will be on Friday April 3rd, 12-1pm, in the MRB
> Seminar Room (1st floor).
>
> The talk will be given by *Prof. Jiaqi Ma*, Department of Civil &
> Environmental Engineering and Department of Computer Science, UCLA
>
> *** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****
>
> To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-1986095318562
>
> TITLE: Physical AI for Autonomous Driving and Open-World Mobility: From
> Structured Reasoning to Deployable Decision-to-Control
>
> ABSTRACT:
> Open-world mobility describes dynamic real-world environments in which
> vehicles, robots, infrastructure, and people interact under partial
> observability, distribution shift, long-tail events, and changing
> operational conditions. These settings require AI systems that can jointly
> perform perception, semantic reasoning, prediction, and closed-loop action
> under real-time constraints. In this talk, I present our recent work on
> physical AI for autonomous driving and open-world mobility, focusing on
> model architectures and system designs that connect foundation models to
> deployable autonomy. I begin with Driving with Regulation, which treats
> traffic laws, norms, and safety guidance as structured inputs to
> decision-making through retrieval-augmented regulation understanding. I
> then present AutoVLA, a vision-language-action model for end-to-end
> autonomous driving that unifies scene understanding, semantic reasoning,
> and trajectory generation within a single autoregressive framework. Next, I
> discuss a central systems problem for deployable VLA-based autonomy: the
> temporal mismatch between slower high-level inference and fast,
> safety-critical control. Our work explicitly models delayed semantic
> updates during action generation and enables latency-aware integration of
> reasoning and control in dynamic environments. Finally, I discuss our work
> on multi-agent perception and prediction, including V2XPnP, to show how
> these ideas extend beyond single-agent autonomy toward cooperative
> intelligence. Overall, these efforts illustrate our pathway toward
> scalable, trustworthy, and deployable physical AI systems that bridge
> foundation models, structured reasoning, and real-world control for
> open-world mobility.
>
> Bio:
> Dr. Jiaqi Ma is a professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering with
> joint appointments in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Computer
> Science, and he serves as Director of the FHWA/UCLA Center of Excellence on
> New Mobility and Automated Vehicles. Dr. Ma’s research focuses on Physical
> AI for autonomy, building foundation-model-driven systems that tightly
> integrate multimodal perception, world modeling, semantic reasoning, and
> closed-loop control for autonomous driving and mobile robotics. He has led
> and managed a large portfolio of projects funded by the U.S. and state
> Departments of Transportation, National Science Foundation, IARPA and
> ARPA-I, as well as industry partners including NVIDIA, Motional, and
> Amazon. Dr. Ma is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent
> Transportation Systems. He also serves as Chair of the Transportation
> Research Board (TRB) Standing Committee on Connected and Automated Vehicle
> Systems and is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent
> Transportation Systems Society.
>
> ------------------------------------
> Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents
> speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or applying AI in their
> research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community about
> current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between faculty
> in this emerging field. These seminars are open to interested faculty and
> graduate/undergraduate students. Please forward this email to other
> colleagues or students in your lab that may be interested. After the
> seminar a discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for
> possible collaborations etc.
>
> Sincerely,
> Vassilis Tsotras
> Professor, CSE Department
> co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
>
> Amit Roy-Chowdhury
> Professor, ECE Department
> co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
>
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