Xingnan Zhou

Education

Ph.D. Candidate, Civil Engineering (Transportation) — Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Research: trajectory prediction and perception for autonomous vehicles. Supervisor: Prof. Ciprian Alecsandru. Defense expected August 2026.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Zhou, X., Alecsandru, C., Bashbaghi, S., Jeong, Y., & Chen, Y. (2026). “Turn-Aware LSTM Model for Vehicle Trajectory Forecasting.” Advances in Transportation Studies, Vol. LXVIII, pp. 381–396, April 2026. Published  Project Page
2. Chen, Y., Zhou, X., & Alecsandru, C. (2025). “Performance of Autonomous Vehicles at Lane-drop Bottleneck under Mixed Traffic Environment.” Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering Annual Conference 2025 (CSCE 2025), General Conference, Paper No. GC-200, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, May 28–30, 2025.
3. Zhou, X., Wang, J., & Zhu, Y. (2019). “Research on Cooperative Lane-changing Behavior Based on System Dynamics.” ICAMMCE 2019.
4. Zhou, X. (2019). “Study on Vehicle Uncooperative Lane-changes Based on System Dynamics.” China Safety Science Journal, Vol. 28.
5. Zhou, X., Wang, J., & Zhu, Y. (2018). “Simulation Research of Vehicle Lane-changing Behavior Evolutionary Game Model Based on NetLogo.” AIIT 2018, November 2018.
6. Zhou, X. (2017). “Traffic Channelization for X Shaped Intersections in Mountain City.” Shandong Jiaotong Technology.

Manuscripts Under Review

1. Zhou, X., & Alecsandru, C. “The Sampling Cascade: How Data Collection Bias Creates Systematic Safety Blind Spots in VLM-Based Autonomous Driving.” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles — under review (submitted March 2026, Manuscript ID: T-IV-26-03-0194). Under Review  Project Page
2. Zhou, X., & Alecsandru, C. “Local Lane Graph Conditioning as a General Inductive Bias for Trajectory Prediction: A Multi-Architecture Study on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset.” Sustainability (MDPI) — under review (submitted July 2026). Under Review  Project Page
3. Zhou, X., & Alecsandru, C. “Spatial Attention Visualization for Interpretable Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving: Discovering Safety Blind Spots Through Counterfactual Analysis.” Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting 2027 — under review for presentation and publication (submitted July 2026, Paper No. TRBAM-27-00729). Under Review  Project Page

Awards & Honours

• 2026 ITE Canada Student Paper Competition Award — Excellence in Transportation Awards and Scholarships, ITE Canada District & Future Transportation Leaders Fund; awarded for “Road Structure as an Underutilized Prior for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Prediction”, ITE Canada Annual Conference, Victoria, BC, May 2026. Advanced to the international ITE Daniel B. Fambro Student Paper Award competition. ↗
• Top-15 Global Finish (solo participant), Waymo End-to-End Driving Challenge, 2026 — vision-language-model-based end-to-end driving on the Waymo Open Dataset. Project Page
• Utility Model Patent (China) — traffic police duty cap with heat and stain protection and automatic badge alignment, Patent No. CN 201520473512.X.
• Graduate and undergraduate scholarships.