Yonas Minalu Emagnu is a civil engineer specialized in transportation. He studied Urban Transport and Traffic Engineering at Nagoya University, Japan. He is well conversant with qualitative and quantitative approaches in transport research and has successfully led research projects. He was involved in different research projects including impact assessment of high-rise building projects on the pedestrians and vehicles traffic flow, development of an Urban Design manual in Addis Ababa, Advocating for legislative change in road safety etc.. His current areas of research interest are in mass transport system, travel behavior, urban road network structures, road safety, walking/cycling, application of AI/ML in transportation and overall researches related with sustainable urban mobility concepts. At the University of Michigan Yonas will focus on a project called “Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve Efficiency in Developing Countries’ Public Transit Systems and the future policy Implications.”
His aim in the MIDAS African Fellow program is to enhance his AI expertise in machine learning for the transportation sector and expand the knowledge to Africa. He aim to improve public transit systems using AI by analyzing traffic trends, extracting mobility patterns, and derive optimized solutions from large datasets. He target to lead the integration of AI technology with traditional scientific methods in Africa to drive innovation and provide impactful solutions.