Nicolas Hautière
Laboratoire Central des Ponts et Chaussées (LCPC)
Nicolas Hautière has an MS degree in civil engineering from the National School of State Public Works (ENTPE), Lyon, France and MS and PhD degrees in computer vision from the University Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, France. From 2002 to 2005, he was a PhD student at the Vehicle-Infrastructure-Driver Interactions Research Unit (LIVIC), a mixed research unit between INRETS (French National Institute for Transportation and Safety Research) and LCPC (French Public Works Research Laboratory). He was also involved in the French ARCOS project. He is currently involved in the FP6 integrated project SAFESPOT (Cooperative Systems for Road Safety) and is co-leader of the French ANR DIVAS project (Dialogue between the Infrastructure and Vehicle to Improve the Road Safety). He is establishing a partnership with the California PATH in the area of cooperative systems in the framework of the DIVAS America project.

Improving the credibility of, and compliance with, speed limits: a realworld approach
Drivers learn to anticipate difficulties in a natural way. This behaviour may provide insights into how all drivers should behave, and it may not be always consistent with information as simple as mandatory speed. In the French ANR DIVAS project, the speeds adopted by experienced drivers were used to obtain a nominal speed profile. A composite risk function was then used to compute a customised adaptive speed profile, which takes into account the current state of the road. Compared to purely computational approaches, this hybrid empirical and computational approach may be used to update speed limits and improve their credibility.