Author: sshao45

Georgia Tech’s Baabak Ashuri, assistant professor in the School of Building Construction, was recently selected to Engineering News Record (ENR) Southeast’s “Top 20 Under 40” list for 2014. 

Each year, ENR’s regional editions celebrate the excellence of young construction professionals by highlighting 20 individuals under the age of 40 who represent the “Best-of-the-Best” in the construction and design industry. Recipients are selected by an independent panel and evaluated based on their industry experience, leadership skills and community service.

Baabak Ashuri is an assistant professor in the School of Building Construction and director of the Georgia Tech Economics of the Sustainable Built Environment (ESBE) Lab. His educational, research, and service activities focus on sustainability conscious infrastructure investment valuation, a multidisciplinary field that lies at the confluence of construction engineering and management, infrastructure asset management, project finance, and innovative project delivery systems. Work in this area is essential for improving long-range planning and decision-making processes for buildings and civil infrastructure assets, advancing economic/financial valuation methods for investments in capital projects while preserving environmental and social conditions to foster sustainable development.

To see the complete list, visit http://bit.ly/1joOm8E. The recipients will be covered in-depth in January, 2014 print edition of ENR. Engineering News Record Southeast provides local, in-depth and comprehensive coverage on heavy, highway, building and industrial construction news in the four-state area of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Congratulations go out to Dr. Randall Guensler and his research team whose Sidewalk Quality and Safety Assessment  was recognized by the Atlanta-based Pedestrians Educating Drivers for Safety (PEDS) on October 29 during the group’s annual Golden Shoe Awards.

                       Dr. Randall Guensler                                                                        Alexandra Frackelton                                                                 Alice Grossman

Funded by STRIDE (Southeastern Transportation Research, Innovation, Development and Education Center) and GDOT(Georgia Department of Transportation), the sidewalk project is producing a precedent-setting database of sidewalk condition information that the Atlanta Department of Public Works (DPW) officials will be able to use to evaluate and prioritize repairs in a city that boasts 2,100 miles of sidewalks.

Recognized during the evening reception were Guensler and two graduate students, Alexandra Frackelton and Alice Grossman, who have worked together on the $400,000 project. This is not the first award that the team has garnered for its work; in September, the Colorado-based Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professions (APBP) recognized Frackelton and Grossman with a Ken Cross Scholarship for a poster the duo produced on the same project.

Dr. Baabak Ashuri was recently awarded a 2013 AASHTO High Value Research “Sweet Sixteen” Award for his research project for the Georgia Department of Transportation: “Recommended Guide for Next Generation of Transportation Design-Build Procurement and Contracting in Georgia”. 

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), in partnership with Georgia Tech, developed a Design-Build (DB) guidebook to improve the efficiency of DB contracting in highway construction. A DB selection tool was developed to evaluate the appropriateness of DB for transportation projects. This tool helps GDOT to: 
(1) Determine suitability of DB for projects. 
(2) Assess whether project risks can be managed if DB is selected for a project. 
(3) Evaluate authorized procurement methods and selecting the most appropriate method. 
(4) Implement DB transparently and consistently. 

A post-research workshop was held to facilitate adoption of DB contracting in Georgia. Effective July 1, 2012, Georgia legislators raised the cap for DB by 50 percent (in dollars), based on the total amount of construction projects awarded in the previous fiscal year. This was made possible, in part, by solid DB project suitability assessments that this research enhanced for future use.

The Research Advisory Committee (RAC) for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Standing Committee on Research (SCOR) awarded its 2013 Sweet Sixteen High Value Research Projects at its annual summer meeting held in July in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Each year, RAC collects High Value Research highlights from member states across the nation. These highlights showcase projects that are providing transportation excellence through research. From these submittals, each of the four RAC regions selects its top four projects to form the Sweet Sixteen Awards. Continually challenged to deliver more efficient transportation systems, State DOTs are committed to utilizing research and innovation to meet these challenges. All aspects of transportation, from planning and design to construction and maintenance, benefit from the power of research. The “Sweet 16” projects are just a sampling of the many pioneering works from across the nation. 

The Georgia Department of Transportation and the Georgia Transportation Institute are jointly hosting a transportation research poster session. All researchers in the Georgia Transportation Institute are invited to bring posters displaying active and recently completed GDOT-sponsored research projects. Posters should be limited to 3.5’x’4. Easels will be provided. Researchers may bring 1-2 students per poster.

Date: Tuesday, September 24

Time: 11am – 1pm (please arrive between 10:45 and 11:00 to set up your poster)

Location: Rooms 402-404, One Georgia Center (600 West Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA 30308)

This invitation is open to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia Southern University, Southern Polytechnic State University, Mercer University, and Albany State University who have/are conducting GDOT-sponsored transportation research.

This poster session provides an opportunity for GDOT employees and administration to see the multitude of excellent projects that are underway and the scope of resources available at our universities.  It is important that we have as many of our project represented as possible.

Please RSVP no later than Tuesday, September 10 if you plan to display your work. RSVPs can be sent to audrey.leous@coa.gatech.edu. Be sure to Include your project title and an abstract.

For questions, please feel free to contact me at michael.hunter@ce.gatech.edu or 404-385-1243 or contact Audrey Leous at audrey.leous@coa.gatech.edu or 404-385-5134.

Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) has announced its 2013 recipients, and six Yellow Jackets were honored.

The DDETFP awards fellowships to students pursuing degrees in transportation-related disciplines. This program advances the transportation workforce by attracting the brightest minds to the field through education, research, and workforce development.

Doctoral student Evangelos Palinginis received a 2-year, $69,500 scholarship to continue research focused on the development of video processing algorithms to automatically detect, track, count and analyze pedestrian behavior; indoors and outdoors, by integrating transportation principles, motion tracking elements and optimization. A native of Greece, Palinginis earned a diploma in civil engineering and a master’s in transportation from the National Technical University of Athens. He also holds a master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech.

Connecticut native Candace Brakewood received a 1-year $35,500 scholarship to continue her research quantifying the impact of new information sources – namely, real-time bus and train-tracking information – on rider behavior in public transportation. She has dual masters of science degrees in transportation and in technology policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she earned her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Chicago native Alice Grossman received a one-year, $11,000 award to support her graduate work in transportation, an area that combines her interest in science and in urban planning. Her main research focus is on sustainable transportation and the relationship between transportation infrastructure and urban communities.

Receiving $5,000 scholarships to support their attendance at the January 2014 Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference were Denise Smith, Gregory Macfarlane, and Felipe Castrillon.

A group of students at Georgia Tech have won the 1st and 2nd places for this year’s “Thinking Outside the Box” competition sponsored by GMU.

The competition is held annually asks the committed and striving students and young professionals in transportation field to come up with a creative, outside-the-box solution to today’s complex transportation policy challenges.

Josie Kressner, a fourth year graduate student and a PhD candidate at Tech, won first place and a $10,000 award with her submission which presented her idea to achieve the Household Travel Survey with less than 1/10th of current cost. (Presentation video available here)

The team of Margaret Carragher, Aaron Gooze, Landon Reed, and James Wong finished second with their proposal entitled PopTransit which strengthens the advantages of BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), achieving decreased carbon emissions, improved travel times and a better use of commuting time.

Congratulations!

NCTSPM is committed to providing quality leadership on research, education, and technology transfer to address issues related to transportation system productivity (including both passenger travel and freight of all modes), economic growth, and finance. The center works with local, state and regional agencies to identify research problems and opportunities.

Work zones can be dangerous, confusing environments for drivers.  A daily-driven road can suddenly have an unfamiliar traffic pattern delineated by a sparse and sometimes inconsistent configuration of temporary traffic control devices.  

At Georgia Tech, Dr. Michael Hunter and his PhD student Aaron Greenwood, are working with the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) to study driving environments in order to improve work zone safety. 

In this project, individuals are shown still images of different freeways, roadside environments, and road work equipment. Their responses inform future designs that can make work zones more user-friendly. This project focuses on developing both short-term solutions (e.g. better ways of configuring existing devices) and long-term strategies (e.g. building traffic control devices specifically designed for complex road work environments.  But before deploying those solutions in the field, a driving simulator will be used to refine this work; participants will drive through simulated freeways similar to those they would encounter in Georgia.  

Simulation offers several advantages to field-testing; specifically:  it allows for rapid testing of devices that don’t exist outside of a virtual world while measuring an array of performance metrics in a safe, controlled laboratory environment. The results and feedback from participants allows  researchers to quickly develop new devices and virtual worlds to develop better configurations and devices that we can deploy in the field faster and with greater confidence.

Congratulations to Margaret Akofio-Sowah and James Wong, two Georgia Tech graduate students, who were recently recently selected by the Board of Regents of the Eno Center for Transportation to participate in the 21st annual Eno Leadership Development Conference in Washington, DC, June 2-6, 2013.

Akofio-Sowah is a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering and Wong is a joint degree student in Civil Engineering and City & Regional Planning. Each year, the intensive Eno Fellowship provides twenty graduate students a first-hand look at how transportation policy is developed and implemented, and offers participants an opportunity to meet with top government officials, leaders of associations, and members of Congress and their staff. The Eno Leadership Conference introduces students to the intricacies of policy development in transportation and provides opportunities for students to meet transportation leaders from across the country. Both students will attend the one week conference in Washington D.C.

NCTSPM is committed to providing quality leadership on research, education, and technology transfer to address issues related to transportation system productivity (including both passenger travel and freight of all modes), economic growth, and finance. The center works with local, state and regional agencies to identify research problems and opportunities.