MoSAIC Year in Review: 2024

MoSAIC continues to leverage a window of opportunity over the next decade to accelerate AV innovation and deployment at scale, towards the public interest —creating sustainable mobility that addresses climate change and social inequity. Our vision is to support research, technology transfer, educational opportunities, and inform public policy that leads to the creation of truly sustainable and equitable transportation. We will engage partners in industry, government, NGOs, and academia, contributing to the new emerging field of “Mobility Science” by integrating AI, vehicle automation technology, policy science, behavioral/social sciences, social justice, and health science. 

• MoSAIC’s CarDreamer project to enhance automated vehicle safety was highlighted in the College of Engineering News (here) and the UC Davis Egghead Blog (here).
• The MoSAIC lab in West Village, houses a number of GPU servers and hardware including experimental steering wheels and a vehicle chassis. MoSAIC has hired 7 Ph.D. students in Engineering and 1 political science Ph.D, 3 students in Law, and 2 postdoc scholars. Leveraging the computing facility, we are building a hardware-in-the-loop simulator platform for autonomous driving.
• MoSAIC has hired seven PhD students in engineering and one in political science, three students in law, and two postdoctoral scholars. Leveraging the computing facility, the Center is building a hardware-in-the-loop simulator platform for autonomous driving.
• The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a $500,000 research grant to launch and fund the UC Davis Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures (CAIEF). MoSAIC will lead a “Driving with AI” component of the CAIEF. The UC Davis College of Letters and Science, Office of the University Provost, Office of Research, and Office of Graduate Studies have committed voluntary matching funds for the start-up period and subsequent 2-years.
• MoSAIC is a finalist for a Department of Energy VTO Research & Development grant, for a project entitled “C-V2X Enhanced Foundation Model for Prediction and Dynamic Control in Mixed Traffic with Connected Automated Vehicles: Energy Saving and Efficiency Improvement.”
• MoSAIC graduate student researcher Samuel Fuller was recently awarded a postdoctoral fellow position at the Center for American Political Studies in the Department of Government at Harvard University.

Featured Publications

AI foundations and deep learning algorithms

• Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning (Conference Paper; 2024)
• Warm-Start Actor-Critic: From Approximation Error to Sub-optimality Gap (Conference Paper; 2023)
• Continual Learning of Generative Models with Limited Data: From Wasserstein-1 Barycenter to Adaptive Coalescence (Journal Article; 2024)
• CLARE: Conservative Model-Based Reward Learning for Offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (Conference Paper; 2023)
• Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning: An Overview (Journal Article; 2023) 

Societal Outcomes of AVs and Related Policy

• A Blueprint for Improving Automated Driving System Safety (Report; 2024)
• Experiences with Autonomous Vehicle in U.S. Cities (Report; 2024)
• Jobs and Automated Freight Transportation: How Automation Affects the Freight Industry and What to Do About It (Report; 2022)
• California Automated Vehicle Policy Strategies (Issue Paper; 2021)