January 27, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

January 27, 2020

Lijun Yu, research master student in Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University  produced a video for the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s 9th Annual “Student Transportation Video Contest.” Yu won the post-secondary/college/graduate level in the Safety category of ARTBA’s 2019 Student Transportation Video Contest.  Watch the winning video here.

January 16, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

December 13, 2019

Lijun Yu, a first-year research master student in Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Alexander G. Hauptmann presented their recent work at the International Workshop on Big Data for Intelligent Transportation Systems (BITS 2019) at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Los Angeles. On behalf of the authors Lijun Yu, Peng Chen, Wenhe Liu, Guoliang Kang, and Alexander G. Hauptmann, he presented the paper entitled “Training-free Monocular 3D Event Detection System for Traffic Surveillance.”

January 11, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

January 11, 2020

Matt Battifarano was honored tonight as a “Student of the Year” at the Council of University Transportation Centers awards banquet held during the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

Annually the United States Department of Transportation honors the most outstanding student from each participating University Transportation Center for his/her achievements and promise for future contributions to the transportation field. Students of the year are selected based on their accomplishments in such areas as technical merit and research, academic performance, professionalism, and leadership.

Meet the 2019 Mobility21 winner:

Matt Battifarano grew up on the buses and subways of New York City and never stopped thinking about transportation. After completing a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at the University of Chicago, Matt worked for three years as a Data Scientist and Software Engineer for Bridj, a smart mobility start up. Matt is currently a PhD student in the Mobility Data Analytics Center at Carnegie Mellon University where he studies network modeling of ride-hailing systems and connected and autonomous vehicles. Over the summer, Matt interned on the Strategy Team at Uber’s Advanced Technology Group, building a simulator to model Uber’s autonomous vehicles. In 2018 Matt was selected as a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Research Fellow. 

His nominator, CMU Associate Professor Sean Qian said “Matt’s research interest and strength well match the UTC’s goal on improving mobility and what I envision the future of transportation infrastructure, data-driven decision making for mobility systems….Discussing research with him is always inspiring. I found his attention to details and intent to understand the material and investigate further depth is excellent. He has taken advantage of every opportunity to gain knowledge, experience and participate in problem solving. He offers in-depth understanding for the machine learning model, and was able to apply it to the transportation problem quickly and thoroughly.”

Educating, recruiting and training new workers is critical to managing our country’s infrastructure safely and efficiently.  Mobility21 UTC strives to help develop a transportation workforce capable of designing and maintaining the complex transportation systems of tomorrow. Help us congratulate our 2019 UTC Student of the Year!

To view the Student of the Year program booklet click here: Booklet.

December 5, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

December 5, 2019

Students of the CMU Heinz College engage in semester long “Capstone Projects” to apply coursework to real-world scenarios.  Today, students shared the results of their semester long research projects during the final day of the poster fair.  The projects featured today included 3 transportation related projects:

• • A Public Transportation Accessibility Index for Allegheny County
  • Selection Standards Analysis for Subsidized Public Housing
  • Bringing Employers “On Board” to Reduce SOVs in Downtown Pittsburgh– Mobility21 Program Manager Lisa Kay Schweyer was the adjunct instructor for this project

December 5, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

December 4, 2019

Students of the CMU Heinz College engage in semester long “Capstone Projects” to apply coursework to real-world scenarios.  Today, students shared the results of their semester long research projects during a poster fair (the fair continues tomorrow).  The projects featured today included 3 transportation related projects:

• • Qualified Municipal Infrastructure Bonds:  Improving Infrastructure Finance in the US – Traffic21 Director Chris Hendrickson served as an advisor for this project
  • Optimization of Security Checkpoints through Wait Time Forecasting
  • Unsupervised Auto Insurance Fraud Detection

September 18, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

“Each fall, computer science researchers gather across the nation in celebration of diversity in STEM, the Tapia Conference. For two consecutive years, Hameed Abdul (Robotics Institute Summer Scholar ’18 working with Dr. Christoph Mertz) has presented his undergraduate research results and shared his journey as an increasingly accomplished STEM scholar.”   Learn more here.   Mobility21 UTC sponsored Hameed’s Robotics Institute Summer Scholar experience.

August 15, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

August 15, 2019

Mobility21 Executive Director, Stan Caldwell, led a class entitled “Smart Transportation: Issues of Equity” for the The Public Policy and International Affairs Program (PPIA) students during Summer 2019. The classes featured UTC researchers who presented on different topics of intelligent transportation systems (ITS).  The class was able to develop hands on experience of ITS concepts by applying them to a group project with the Port Authority of Allegheny County.

August 14, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

August 14, 2019

Today, Tessa Guengerich, Mobility21 UTC’s Robotics Institute Summer Scholar participated in the end of session poster showcase. Her poster highlighted the work she did on project:  Statistical Simulation for Multi-Agent Scheduling Under Uncertainty.

July 29, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

July 29, 2019

In June, Mobility21 welcomed Tessa Guengerich as part of this year’s  CMU Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) program. Currently an undergraduate student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, she arrived in Pittsburgh hoping to learn more about machine learning and programming and learn more about the implementation of robots outside of academia. Tessa said she was excited to learn about things she wasn’t exposed to before (computational statistics and machine learning) and was also excited to be surrounded by other students from around the world.

Six weeks later, Tessa provided this update on her experience:

On my project with Isaac [Isukapati, Project Scientist, at CMU’s NREC: National Robotics Engineering Center], I’m learning a lot about computational statistics and algorithms, and I’m coding in C++ for the first time. I’ve faced a bit of a learning curve, but it’s a challenge I’ve been able to face thus far. The overall project is to write a scheduling program for robotic arms performing specific tasks — for example, given X robotic arms and Y objects, what’s the best course of action for the robotic arms to move those objects safely and efficiently? My contribution to the project is to write a statistical simulator to test the performance of the scheduler with a specific set of parameters, to see where the scheduler performs well and where it fails.

Participating in RISS has also exposed me to other areas in robotics I’ve never seen before, like the DJI and UBTECH workshops. During the DJI workshop we had to set up the software development kit for a small drone, and then use that SDK to program the drone for a race of sorts. First of all–I’ve never worked with drones or been forced to think about their specific challenges, so working with my team to think about wind and tuning parameters was surprisingly fun to me. Second, I found it fun to work with four students from such different backgrounds to complete the challenge. Two of the students had experience with drones and were able to take the lead, helping and teaching along the way. It was new for me to be in the situation of getting help from a peer on a common goal (and not for individual assignments or school group projects, where most students have similar sets of skills.)

For the UBTECH workshop, we were again placed in teams and tasked with programming a humanoid robot to complete a task of “rescuing” stuffed animals and placing them in “safe” zones. The challenge was two-fold. First, we were expected to connect to the humanoid robot via bluetooth and control it with a gaming controller. Then we needed to connect specific buttons on the controller to specific movements in the robot, and test that functionality. My contribution ended up being to set up the software development kit for the gaming controller to connect via bluetooth (which I had learned a lot about in the DJI workshop). I also helped my teammates to fine-tune the movements of the robot for walking to and grasping the animal. Again, all of this was pretty far out of my comfort zone, but I had a great team that managed to balance each other’s skill set.

We’ve also had the privilege of hearing and seeing a lot of presentations from different faculty members at CMU about their research. That has also been an eye-opening experience. As a Chemical Engineering student, most of the talks were outside of my traditional curriculum, but that’s exactly what I’ve enjoyed most about RISS — learning about research I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise, and trying my hand at tasks that initially intimidated me.

Carnegie Mellon’s RISS Program is an eleven-week summer (June 1 to mid-August) undergraduate research program that immerses a diverse cohort of scholars in cutting-edge robotics projects that drive innovation and have real-world impact. Launched in 2006, RISS is among the best and most comprehensive robotics research programs for undergraduates in the world.

July 26, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

July 26, 2019

Students advised by Chris Hendrickson, Director of Traffic21 and UTC Faculty, were featured in a poster session that highlighted the work the students have been doing on the Forbes Avenue reconfiguration. Their research included topics like air quality, bus ridership, speed and multi-vehicle detection.

July 15, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

July 15 – 18, 2019

Throughout the week in Orlando, Florida, more than 1,800 leading researchers, regulators, technologists and decision makers converged to discuss the future of automated vehicles. Keynote speakers included Carnegie Mellon alumni and Aurora founder, Dr. Chris Urmson. Also participating in the event were Mobility21 supported PhD students, Allante’ Whitmore and Jake Ward.  The students represented Mobility21 research and development as well as collaborated with industry leaders on the future of mobility.

July 11, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

July 11-12, 2019

DJI, a leader in commercial and civilian drone industry, visited CMU as part of the RI Summer Scholars (RISS) event program. DGI’s time on campus included meeting with leaders in robotics at CMU, providing attendees with demonstrations of their drones, and a drone flying contest for RISS students.  Mobility21 program manager, Lisa Kay Schweyer, attended the event with PA Rural Robotics Initiative Director, Tim Heffernan.

July 3, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

Article By Bruce Gerson

June 12, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

June 12, 2019

Traffic21 welcomes and is pleased to sponsor Tessa Guengerich as part of this year’s CMU Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) program. Currently an undergraduate student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, she arrives in Pittsburgh hoping to learn more about machine learning and programming and learn more about the implementation of robots outside of academia.  Tessa says she is excited to learn about things she wasn’t exposed to before (computational statistics and machine learning) and is also excited to be surrounded by other students from around the world.

Carnegie Mellon’s RISS Program is an eleven-week summer (June 1 to mid-August) undergraduate research program that immerses a diverse cohort of scholars in cutting-edge robotics projects that drive innovation and have real-world impact. Launched in 2006, RISS is among the best and most comprehensive robotics research programs for undergraduates in the world.

May 29, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

Mobility21 welcomes Women in Transportation Fellow for 2019– 2021, Carlee Benhart.

Carlee developed an interest in smart transportation, urban infrastructure, and transportation equity during her time studying Regional Planning at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. While pursuing her degree, she undertook internships with the Indiana County (PA) Office of Planning and Development where she worked as the Indiana County WalkWorks community liaison to address the challenges of introducing alternative transportation infrastructure, and with Quaker Valley Council of Governments in Allegheny County, where she served as manager of an pilot online geographic information systems implementation for the rollout of a new municipal property and structure condition assessment. After graduating, Carlee maintained her professional relationship with the Quaker Valley Council of Governments to work on the Route 65 Corridor Study Multi-Municipal Project as a research intern.

She would like to incorporate a synthesis of technical and social science methods to improve the equity of all types of mobility. Upon completion of graduate school, Carlee hopes to work to improve the accessibility and integration of a spectrum of transportation modes with humans and the built environment. She is excited for the opportunity to hone her knowledge and skills in Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College Public Policy and Management program, and to continue her academic career in transportation planning and smart mobility as a Traffic21 Women in Transportation Fellow.

Learn more about the current Women in Transportation Fellow, Bonnie Fan, here: https://mobility21.cmu.edu/about/leadership/student-leadership/.

————–

The Traffic21 Women in Transportation fellowship provides financial support to an incoming female student who is entering either the Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College MSPPM (Public Policy and Management) or MISM (Information Systems Management) degree programs. Female students who have demonstrated an interest and commitment to Intelligent Transportation Systems are eligible to apply for the fellowship. The fellow’s work supports the Mobility21 University Transportation Center’s activities.