| Angelos Amditis
“Our transport future will be dependent on
open architectures and distributed
environments. That’s the easiest way we
know right now to implement the huge
computational power that we will need.”
In the more immediate future Amditis
has an important appointment back on in
the exhibition floor, hosting a reception on
the ERTICO stand. Chairman of ERTICO is
a busy role, but on the basis of our meeting,
it’s clear Amditis has the knowledge and
passion to help drive our industry forward.
Everything needs to connect with
everything else. This is why we’re using
a new term at ERTICO – the Internet of Mobility
January/February 2020 Traffic Technology International 015
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collaborative organisation, and alive to the
challenges involved.
“ERTICO is a unique kind of platform,
because it brings all these totally different
stakeholders together,” he says. “And we
really need that. Everything we’re
discussing is impossible without
cooperation. We have a multidisciplinary
sector. We have OEMs, we have suppliers,
we have service providers (who are
becoming more and more important) users,
public authorities, cities, all of them need to
sit at the same table and discuss – and you
really need a neutral table. And to chair this
is a big challenge, but it’s also a very
interesting job. It opens new horizons and
you see things from a new perspective.”
But, despite this high-level perspective,
Amditis is keen to point out that nobody
should be losing sight of the reason we are
all doing this. “At the end of the day, don’t
forget, it’s about serving our citizens,” he
says. “You don’t do technology for
technology and you don’t do mobility for
mobility, you do it in order to serve citizens
and their needs must be the top priority.”
And part of this conversation is not only
about sharing success stories, but also
lessons learned. ”You cannot afford to make
the same mistakes everywhere,” says
Amditis. “We cannot afford to do the same
tests and make the same effort to deploy
everywhere. It’s important that we share.
Yes, we share data, but we must also share
lessons learned. Mistakes have the same
importance as successes, in my opinion.”
Academic roots
Amditis’s first love is not outreach, but
research. He has been in the field of
computer systems research for over 30 years,
and it is a function he continues in his role
as research director of the The Institute of
Communication and Computer Systems
(ICCS), a large institution (affiliated with the
National Technical University in Athens, in
Amditis’s homeland of Greece) where he is
in charge of over 100 staff.
“I’m trying as much as I can to continue
to keep in touch with the research,” he says.
“Because I strongly believe that if you lose
touch with the state of the art, then you
cannot manage or guide stakeholders in the
sector. I think it’s very important that people
in key positions have a background in
knowledge creation, deployment or
development, so they can really understand
the subject and they can understand where
things are going. Some of the projects we
are working on at the institute include
connected-automated driving and MaaS .”
So, what does the future hold? Amditis
won’t be drawn on specifics – “Changes are
happening so fast that sometimes even
experts cannot follow them!” –but whatever
happens he knows cooperation will be key.
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