The I-SENSE Group of ICCS, coordinator of the EU-funded HIDDEN project, participated in the project’s 2nd Plenary Meeting held on 1–2 July 2026 at IMBIT/BrainLinks-BrainTools, University of Freiburg, Germany.
The two-day meeting brought together 22 experts from research institutions and industry across seven European countries. Dr. Elena Daskalaki represented the I-SENSE Group and chaired the meeting in her role as day-to-day project manager, joined on-site by Emmanouil Gkigkilinis, while the ICCS CCAM division’s research team also contributed to the discussions remotely.
HIDDEN addresses one of the key challenges in autonomous driving: occlusions. A child emerging from behind a parked car, a road worker hidden by vegetation, or a cyclist concealed by another vehicle, are vulnerable road users that may be partly or fully occluded within the vehicle’s perceived scene and their early detection is of outmost importance to guarantee their safety. To achieve this, the project is developing fail-safe, AI-based collective awareness systems and predictive decision-making agents that align with human driving behaviour and ethical principles.
During the plenary meeting, the consortium reviewed progress across all technical work, including occlusion-aware perception, driver monitoring, trajectory prediction, human-aligned decision-making, and system validation. Partners also advanced the architecture and integration plans for the project’s four use cases, while discussing its ethical, legal, and societal framework. The programme included an invited research talk by Prof. Sotiris Chatzis from Cyprus University of Technology and a visit to Prof. Abhinav Valada’s Robot Learning Lab.
The meeting highlighted the consortium’s steady progress towards safer, more reliable autonomous driving in complex urban environments. We thank our hosts at the University of Freiburg and all project partners for two productive days of collaboration.
