Farzana Khatun, a 4th year PhD candidate of Transportation Science at ITS Irvine, has been selected to receive Women Transportation Seminar (WTS) 2019 graduate scholarship from Orange County (OC) chapter. WTS OC chapter provides multiple scholarships in four different divisions (graduate, undergraduate, community college and high school) to encourage girls and women in Southern California to pursue careers in transportation. The award will be presented to the winners at the Awards and Scholarship Gala at Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel in Anaheim on Thursday, December 5, 2019. Under the supervision of Professor Jean-Daniel Saphores, Farzana is currently working on projects that focus on bus transit ridership of Orange County, travel behavior of Uber and Lyft users in California and in USA, active transportation and GIS application in transportation planning. Please also check out her WTS interview here.
Category: News
The paper “Spatio-Temporal Clustering of Traffic Data with Deep Embedded Clustering” by Reza Asadi and Professor Amelia Regan has won the best paper reward at ACM PredictGIS 2019 Workshop.
Farzana Khatun won an award for securing the 2nd highest score at the doctoral level abstract in the International Conference on Transport and Health (ICTH) 2019 that held between 4th to 8th November in Melbourne, Australia. Her study, tilted as “DON’T HOP ON THE BUS GUS: An Analysis of recent changes in bus ridership in Orange County, California”, focused on how recent (2014 to 2015) changes in OCTA bus ridership can be explained by the implementation of California Assembly-Bill 60 (AB-60), after controlling for changes in transit supply, socio-economic variables, gas prices, and the built environment.
De’Von Jennings was selected as one of 20 Eno Future Leadership Development Conference participants.
“Each year, the Eno Future Leaders Development Conference (LDC) gives 20 of the nation’s top graduate students in transportation a first-hand look at how national transportation policies are developed. Students apply to the program early in the year, and those selected as “Eno Fellows” come to Washington, DC for a week of meetings with federal officials and leaders of business and non-profit organizations. This year’s LDC will be held June 2-6th, 2019 in Washington D.C.”
See details here.
A data analysis research on the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, authored by Suman Kumar Mitra, Youngeun Bae, Stephen G. Ritchie, is spotlighted in CNN news. Suman Kumar Mitra was interviewed by a CNN reporter and shared his view about the adoption of ride-sharing. See details at “Why it’s so hard to give up ridesharing”
The Second Graduate Colloquium on Innovation in Transportation was held at UCI student center – Doheny Beach Room on January 31. This Colloquium began as a modest effort to primarily bring together UCI transportation graduate students in Sarah Catz’s Urban Planning class and other graduate students in the Institute of Transportation Studies, to have planners and engineers discuss the innovations in transportation the world is experiencing and to share and understand different perspectives. Given the great success of the 1st Colloquium we have been able to secure a larger venue and another outstanding panel of speakers:
Rani Narula-Woods, Senior Director of Special Projects at the Office of Extraordinary Innovation at LA Metro. She manages the design and implementation of a new demand-responsive transportation service, Metro MicroTransit.
Ramin Massoumi, Senior Vice President and General Manager – Transportation Systems, Iteris, Inc. (Iteris provides municipalities and government agencies around the world with the necessary design, real-time analytics and actionable informatics to improve mobility within communities and to ready roadways for connected/autonomous vehicles and smart cities.)
Danielle Kochman, Assistant Transit Planner, San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG).
Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International 2019 Board Member Meeting was held at Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences & Engineering at Irvine, CA, on January 29.
At the meeting, Dr. Mircea Gradu, SAE International President and Chairman of the Board, was joined by several UC Irvine faculty, including Prof. Pramod Khargonekar, Vice Chancellor for Research, Prof. Gregory Washington, Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering, Stephen Ritchie, Director of ITS-Irvine, and Prof. Scott Samuelsen, Director of Advanced Power and Energy Program. The discussions during the meeting were focused around perspectives on future of transportation and priorities for research and collaboration.
UC Irvine team “Traffic Flaw Theory” is the WINNER of TRANSFOR19. The team consisted Dr. Jared Sun (System Manager), Yiqiao Li (PhD Student), Pratiik Malik (PhD Student), Lu Xu (PhD student) and Dr. Qinglong Yan (Recent PhD graduate) at ITS-Irvine.
The international competition challenged the teams to develop short-term traffic forecasting models to predict the five-minute average speed on a road section along Chang’an North Road in Xi’an, China. The dataset is provided by DiDi Chuxing Technology Co., a Chinese ride-sharing company through Gaia Open Data Initiative. The submissions are evaluated based on prediction accuracy (50%), degree on novelty (25%), quality of the code (10%), and quality of the presentation (15%).
With the highest prediction accuracy, ITS-Irvine teams ranked #1 in the pre-selection stage and finished top after the final presentation at TRB 2019 Workshop 1058 “Big Data Without Machine Learning Is Just Lots of Data: A Guided Tour to Big Data and Machine Learning”.
The competition was organized by the TRB committee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications (ABJ70) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE’s) Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) Technical Activities Sub-Committee “Smart Cities and Smart Mobility” and sponsored by DiDi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-sharing and technology firm.
The TRB paper “Individual Truck Speed Estimation from Advanced Single Inductive Loops” by Yiqiao Li, Dr. Andre Tok, Prof. Ritchie, was selected as the best paper submitted to Travel Time, Speed, and Reliability Subcommittee (ABJ30(3)) in the 2019 Annual Meeting. Fifty-four Papers were evaluated based on the quality and impact of the work on practice and the research profession, and both the poster and written paper were reviewed. A certificate will be presented to the winners at the 2020 TRB Annual Meeting during ABJ30 subcommittee meeting.
The Institute of Transportation Studies-Irvine is hosting a reception for UC Irvine transportation alumni, students, and faculty during the 2019 Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting. A standing dinner will be provided.
Date & Time
Tuesday, January 15th, 2019
5:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Location
Matchbox Chinatown
713 H Street NW
Washington D.C. 20001
RSVP by Dec. 20th: RSVP Form Link