MoSAIC Year in Review: 2025
Overview
2025 was a year of major growth and impact for the Mobility Science, Automation, and Inclusion Center (MoSAIC). Building on its foundation as the UC Davis hub for automated vehicle (AV), AI, and robotics research, the Center advanced several new scientific, policy, and educational initiatives. MoSAIC expanded its research infrastructure, welcomed new graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, deepened partnerships with state agencies and international organizations, and contributed to emerging AV regulatory frameworks in California and abroad. The highlights below capture a snapshot of MoSAIC’s expanding influence across research, policy, and workforce development.
Program Highlights and Partnerships
- MoSAIC will be partnering with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia (UNESCAP) on the Automating the Future project, in which MoSAIC will produce a guidebook chapter highlighting U.S. AV developments, policy progress, and judicial activity to inform member states across the UNESCAP Asia-Pacific region. Other regions represented in the guidebook will be China and The Republic of Korea.
- The Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures (CAIEF) has been reinstated about the National Endowment for the Humanities rescinded the $500,000 research grant in March, but a successful legal appeal in July has reinstated the Center. MoSAIC will once again 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 committed voluntary matching funds, which covered costs incurred while the grant was paused and will cover costs in the subsequent 2-years after the federal award is expended. The MoSAIC lab and research team has received multiple federal projects from NSF, DOD and Toyota.
- MOSAIC research team is collaborating with Caltrans on improving safety for work zones and intersection safety. MoSAIC’s CarDreamer project continues to operate. The MoSAIC lab in the West Village continues to expand its cutting-edge research infrastructure. The lab houses GPU servers for computationally intensive AI and simulation work, autonomous-vehicle hardware, and Franka robotic arms. New experimental steering interfaces support advanced driving simulation and training for an open-source platform that models the performance of edge-computing devices in AV systems.
- MoSAIC has grown its research community, welcoming seven Ph.D. students in engineering, one Ph.D. student in political science, three law students, and two postdoctoral scholars. Leveraging the computing facility, the Center is developing a hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform to support autonomous driving research and experimentation.
- The MoSAIC lab and research team has received multiple federal projects from NSF, DOD and Toyota, and more information on these projects and partnerships will be posted in 2026.
Outreach & Education Highlights
- MoSAIC convened a UNESCAP workshop that brought together California agencies, UC researchers, and international delegates to exchange best practices on AV testing, deployment, and regulation—helping shape a new regional platform for dialogue on automated mobility.
- Director D'Agostino was appointed to the new Transportation Research Board (TRB) Standing Committee on Developments and Advancements in Transportation Technology Law.
- MoSAIC and the Policy Collaborative welcomed two standout UC Davis Law Fellows to the team in 2025—Saleshia Ellis (former Congressional Fellow, named a CBCF Emerging Leader) and Ryan Joy (housing/land use policy expert). Their externships began in August 2025, strengthening our policy and legal bench.
- Recent examples of the impact of MoSAIC researchers can be seen in several draft California regulatory rules proposed in the summer of 2024. The California DMV released new Draft Regulations for Autonomous Vehicles. DMV was a key stakeholder and provided early feedback and a final review of the Blueprint for Automated Driving System Safety report. The rulemaking broadly reflects several findings from the workshop and report.
- Additionally, as a member of the GoMentum Innovation Alliance, Director D’Agostino contributed to the Workforce Gaps and Needs Assessment, ensuring policy perspectives are part of shaping high-tech, high-demand mobility careers.
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)
- Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning: An Overview (Journal Article; 2023)
Societal Outcomes of AVs and Related Policy
- In Search Of Less Parking: How Curb Management is Failing Future Mobility A Blueprint for Improving Automated Driving System Safety (White Paper in Production: 2025)
- Automated Vehicle Safety: Heavy Duty Safety Drivers and Remote Operators – Safety Metric Foundations (Report submitted for publication; 2025)
- 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)
Contact
Mollie D’Agostino, Executive Director [email protected]; Junshan Zhang, Faculty Director [email protected].