Navjyoth Sarma JS and Jiarui Tao, PhD students at ITS Irvine, have been selected to receive 2020/21 Gordon Hein scholarship from UCI Graduate Division. The Gordon Hein Scholarship provides financial support to students who demonstrate outstanding past academic achievement as well as future promise, have financial need, and are blind or legally blind.
Category: News
Faculty and students associated with Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) at the University of California Irvine will present 23 papers at the 100th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council of the Academies of Engineering and Science, which takes place in January 2021.
List of ITS-Irvine Presentations
The team formed by Rezwana Rafiq (researcher at ITS Irvine), Tanjeeb Ahmed (ITS Irvine graduate student), and Md Yusuf Sarwar Uddin (Assistant Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City) won the 3rd place in the COVID-19 Grand Challenge hosted by C3.ai. The team will be awarded $12,500 for developing “meaningful data-driven insights that will help the global community understand and mitigate not only the spread of COVID-19, but also prepare the world to fight future pandemics, improve the medical community’s ability to respond, and help policymakers navigate decisions about COVID-19.”
Their project “Structural Modeling of COVID Spread in Relation to Human Mobility”, “models causal relationships between human mobility indicators (trips, distance traveled, staying at home, and social distancing) and COVID-19 spread to inform how policymakers should take action.”
See details here.
Youngeun Bae, a 5th year PhD candidate of Transportation System Engineering at ITS Irvine, has been selected to receive 2020/21 Henry Samueli Fellowship Award from Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine. This award is in recognition of her achievements as an outstanding Civil & Environmental Engineering graduate student who shows exceptional potential for success.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant ($150,000) to ITS-Irvine faculty team led by Michael Hyland.
Quote from UCI School of Engineering News: “Led by Michael Hyland, assistant professor, the researchers are partnering with the San Diego Association of Governments (the region’s metropolitan planning organization) to develop mathematical models for evaluating potential impacts of these new innovations on transportation systems and community outcomes.”
USDOT today announced selection of our consortium proposal for a new Tier 1 University Transportation Center on Highly Automated Transportation Systems Research.
ITS-Irvine teamed with Ohio State University (as lead), University of Texas at Austin, and University of Cincinnati for this $1.925M, 2 year award. The new Center’s Director will be ITS-Irvine Faculty Associate Zak Kassas, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCI.
USDOT provided this background: “Progress on the path toward integrating automated systems into the transportation domain for all modes of transportation (surface, aviation, and maritime) will be aided by additional research addressing challenges associated with ensuring resilient Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services to support automated systems. This University Transportation Center will complement the new Center of Excellence for Highly Automated Transportation Systems being implemented within the US DOT. Among the critical needs is research to support securing cyber resilient PNT receivers for use in automated systems. This UTC will carry out research to support the development of standards and or prototypes and incorporate existing U.S. Government guidance. ”
Please see details here.
Amelia Regan, Professor of Computer Science and Transportation Systems Engineering, and De’Von Jennings, a third year Traffic System Engineering PhD student at ITS Irvine, have been selected to serve as a project application evaluators for the 2021 California Transportation Commission’s Active Transportation Program. The team of selected volunteers will help evaluate and score applications for the next round of Active Transportation Program (ATP) funding.
Brian Casebolt, Siwei Hu, and De’Von Jennings, PhD students of Traffic System Engineering at ITS Irvine, have been selected to receive Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DETI) Summer Fellowship. “DTEI Graduate Fellows will work with faculty to develop high quality remote courses for the 2020-21 academic year. Fellows will receive training from DTEI in fundamentals of pedagogy and remote learning as well as specific tools that may be useful in creating a high quality remote learning experience.”
Amelia Regan and Jean-Daniel Saphores examine the potential impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the shortage of truck drivers in the United States, and more specifically in California. In addition to the structural reasons for this chronic shortage, they discuss the sharp slowdown in economic activity, but also truck driver demographics and restrictions on freight movement between jurisdictions that may impact the job market for truck drivers. Finally, they look back at what can be learned from previous recessions and discuss the impact of civil unrest on the economy. The video is available HERE.
Naila Sharmeen, a 4th year PhD candidate of Transportation Science at ITS Irvine, has been selected to receive Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship Award from UCI Graduate Division. This fellowship is one of UC Irvine’s most distinguished and is intended to release the student from non-academic obligations till the completion of the degree.