Category: News

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.

Two UTIL graduate students, Alex Poznanski and Candace Brakewood, were part of the Georgia Tech team named “Honorable Mention” in the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Data Competition. The competition included nearly 30 teams from universities and companies competing on two different transportation-related problems.  To read more about the team and the competition, please follow this link.

UTIL Graduate student James Wong was recently featured in the innaugural issue of FHWA’s Fast Forward program to encourage middle and high school students to get involved in transportation. Listen to his interview here.

The Georgia Tech National Center for Transportation Productivity and Management is proud to present a talk by noted transportation expert, Dr. Alexandre Bayen, on Tuesday, February 19 at 11:00 a.m. in room 109 of the Instructional Center.

The talk is free and open to students, faculty, staff, and the public.

Bayen is the principle investigator behind Mobile Millenium, a research project sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley  that launched a pilot traffic-monitoring system using the GPS in cellular phones to gather traffic information, process it, and distribute it back to the phones in real time.

In his talk, Bayen will explore the problem of real-time estimation and control of distributed parameters systems in the context of monitoring traffic with smartphones. He will present theoretical results, algorithms and implementations designed to integrate mobile measurements obtained from smartphones into distributed parameter models of traffic.

Bayen will also employ a game theoretic framework to explore Stackelberg routing games on parallel networks with horizontal queues, applicable to transportation networks. Assuming that a central authority can incentivize the routes of a subset of the players on a network, and that the remaining players choose their routes selfishly, can one compute an optimal route assignment that minimizes the total cost?

The results will be illustrated using Mobile Millennium, which is operational in Northern California and streams more than 60 million data points a day into traffic models. The talk will also present a new program recently launched in California, called the Connected Corridor program, which will prototype and pilot California’s next generation traffic management infrastructure.

TransportationCamp South is coming to Atlanta on Saturday, February 9, 2013!
The sixth TransportationCamp to date and the first to be held in the Southern U.S., TranspoCamp South will bring together thinkers and doers in the fields of transportation and technology for a day of learning, debating, connecting, and creating.

Registration
Registration is now open! To register, please visit http://transpocampsouth.eventbrite.com/

Venue
TranportationCamp South will be held at the new Clough Commons, a state-of-the-art learning facility in the heart of the Georgia Tech campus in Midtown Atlanta.

Schedule
The event will run from 9:30am to 5:00pm on Saturday, February 9, 2013. Lunch and a light breakfast will be provided. Stay tuned for a more detailed schedule.

Sponsors
Support for TransportationCamp South is being provided by the Georgia Tech Urban Transportation Information Lab, The Sierra Club – Georgia Chapter, Imagine Atlanta, and Citizens for Progressive Transit.

For more information, visit http://transpocampsouth.eventbrite.com/