Have you ever wondered why they call it rush hour?! No one is rushing anywhere! Do you get angry? Do you ever get in a fistfighting mode? You are not the only one. It did happen to me, in real life, on the freeway! Whose fault is it?

This talk will show how when we ‘rush’ we end up slowing down. Traffic breaks down at the time we are desperate to move. The solution, you ask? Pace yourself down. Pace traffic into the freeway, and everyone will arrive faster. We need intelligent systems to do that though, i.e. control traffic and pace cars onto the road, methodically. And artificial intelligence is there to help. Baher Abdulhai has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1998. Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1966, and earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA, in 1996. Areas of expertise include: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), modelling and simulation of largescale dynamic transportation networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based street and freeway traffic control, traveller information systems, emergency evacuation optimization, dynamic road pricing, smart cities under automated and transformative transportation systems. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx