Hi, I'm Hao Cheng, an Assistant Professor at the ITC Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation from the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

Prior to this appointment, I was a recipient of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) European Postdoctoral Fellowship with the 101062870 - VeVuSafety project that aims to learn the interactions between vehicles and vulnerable road users to facilitate safer Intelligent Transportation Systems and Autonomous Driving.

My research interests include accessible and responsible GeoAI, deep learning of road user behavior modeling in Intelligent Transport Systems, and Autonomous Driving and Safety Analysis between vehicles and vulnerable road users.

I acquired my M.Sc. degree (with distinction) in Internet Technologies and Information Systems from TU Braunschweig, Leibniz University Hannover, TU Clausthal, and University Göttingen, Germany, in 2017, and my Ph.D. (with distinction) at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geodetic Science, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, 2021.

Find more about me in my CV and my research on Google Scholar.

📧h(dot)cheng-2(at)utwente.nl

PhD students:

Mingbo Hong, MSc, 2025-now

Mengmeng Liu, MSc, 2024-now

Qingyu Xian (collaborator), MSc, 2024-now

Weiqin Liao (collaborator), MSc, 2023-now

News

2025

16/06/2025 Two papers accepted at IROS'25.
02/06/2025 one paper on "Explainable few-shot learning workflow for detecting invasive and exotic tree species" was accepted in Scientific Reports Nature
09/05/2025 Our "Are You Happy with AV?" workshop is accepted at IROS'25.
09/04/2025 One paper was accepted in journal ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
27/01/2025 One paper was accepted at ICRA 2025, more information is coming soon.
19/01/2025 One workshop on "Navigating Uncertainty: High-Integrity Localization, Mapping, and Perception for Autonomous Driving" has been accepted at IV 2025.

2024

06/08/2024 One paper entitled "Feature pyramid biLSTM: Using smartphone sensors for transportation mode detection" was published in the TRIP journal.
16/07/2024 I was appointed as an assistant professor at the Department of EOS at ITC, University of Twente.
08/04/2024 One paper entitled "LAformer: Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Lane-Aware Scene Constraints" was accepted CVPR2024 workshop MULA.
30/03/2024 One paper entitled "Controllable Diverse Sampling for Diffusion Based Motion Behavior Forecasting" was accepted at IV2024.
11/01/2024 One paper was accepted by the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI).
01/01/2024 Our UX workshop at IV2024 at Jeju Island in South Korea is online for call-for-papers.

2023

02/10/2023 One paper was accepted in journal ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
11/09/2023 Best paper award at iccv2023 workshop ROAD++ , paper is available here.
01/11/2023 Special issue of User Experience (UX) in AV-Human Interaction on Multimedia Tools and Applications open for submission.
28/08/2023 One paper was accepted in journal ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
07/08/2023 One paper accepted at ROAD++ @ ICCV2023.
12/07/2023 One paper accepted at ITSC2023.
01/07/2023 One paper published in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
31/05/2023 One PhD scholarship secured.
30/03/2023 One paper accepted at IV2023.
01/03/2023 Two workshops (iLoc and UX) accepted at ITSC2023.
10/02/2023 One paper was published in the journal Expert Systems with Applications.

Research Projects

🚗VeVuSafety

🚙i.c.sens

🛻Socialcars

Selected Publications

Hailong Liu, Yang Li, Zhe Zeng, Hao Cheng, Chen Peng, Takahiro Wada, Is Silent eHMI Enough? A Passenger-Centric Study on Effective eHMI for Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles in the Field, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction

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Yunshuang Yuan, Hao Cheng, Michael Ying Yang, Monika Sester, Generating evidential BEV maps in continuous driving space, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Volume 204, 2023, Pages 27-41, ISSN 0924-2716, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2023.08.013.

📃PDF, 💻Code

Cheng, H., & Chen, L. (2023). An End-to-End Framework of Road User Detection, Tracking, and Prediction from Monocular Images. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.05026. ITSC 2023.

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Liu, M., Cheng, H., Chen, L., Broszio, H., Li, J., Zhao, R., ... & Yang, M. Y. (2023). LAformer: Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Lane-Aware Scene Constraints. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13933.

📃PDF, 💻Code

Liu, M., Cheng, H., & Yang, M. Y. (2023). Tracing the Influence of Predecessors on Trajectory Prediction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.05634. Accepted at ICCVW 2023.

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Cheng, H., Liu, M., Chen, L., Broszio, H., Sester, M., & Yang, M. Y. (2023). Gatraj: A graph-and attention-based multi-agent trajectory prediction model. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 205, 163-175.

📃PDF, 💻Code

W. Zhang, H. Cheng, F. T. Johora and M. Sester, "ForceFormer: Exploring Social Force and Transformer for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction," 2023 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Anchorage, AK, USA, 2023, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/IV55152.2023.10186643.

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Sojahrood, Z. B., Taleai, M., & Cheng, H. (2023). Hybrid POI group recommender system based on group type in LBSN. Expert Systems with Applications, 219, 119681.

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Li, Y., Cheng, H., Zeng, Z., Deml, B., & Liu, H. (2023). An AV-MV negotiation method based on synchronous prompt information on a multi-vehicle bottleneck road. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 20, 100845.

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Y. Yuan, H. Cheng and M. Sester, "Keypoints-Based Deep Feature Fusion for Cooperative Vehicle Detection of Autonomous Driving," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 3054-3061, April 2022, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3143299.

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H. Cheng, W. Liao, X. Tang, M. Y. Yang, M. Sester and B. Rosenhahn, "Exploring Dynamic Context for Multi-path Trajectory Prediction," 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Xi'an, China, 2021, pp. 12795-12801, doi: 10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9562034.

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Cheng, H., Liao, W., Yang, M. Y., Rosenhahn, B., & Sester, M. (2021). Amenet: Attentive maps encoder network for trajectory prediction. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 172, 253-266.

📃PDF, 💻Code