July 17, 2020
Posted in Events

As the nature of transportation continues to evolve, Carnegie Mellon University has students and faculty conducting transportation related research in data analytics, robotics, public policy, engineering, architecture and design, and more. Since not all of these efforts are co-located in the same building, or even the same department, there was a need to help building a “community space” to bring together people interested in transportation on CMU’s campus. This was the impetus for Mobility21’s launching of the Smart Mobility Connections (SMC) seminar series. One of the University Transportation Center (UTC) faculty is featured at each hour long session.

July 17, 2020
Posted in Events

As the nature of transportation continues to evolve, Carnegie Mellon University has students and faculty conducting transportation related research in data analytics, robotics, public policy, engineering, architecture and design, and more. Since not all of these efforts are co-located in the same building, or even the same department, there was a need to help building a “community space” to bring together people interested in transportation on CMU’s campus. This was the impetus for Mobility21’s launching of the Smart Mobility Connections (SMC) seminar series. One of the University Transportation Center (UTC) faculty is featured at each hour long session.

July 17, 2020
Posted in Events

As the nature of transportation continues to evolve, Carnegie Mellon University has students and faculty conducting transportation related research in data analytics, robotics, public policy, engineering, architecture and design, and more. Since not all of these efforts are co-located in the same building, or even the same department, there was a need to help building a “community space” to bring together people interested in transportation on CMU’s campus. This was the impetus for Mobility21’s launching of the Smart Mobility Connections (SMC) seminar series. One of the University Transportation Center (UTC) faculty is featured at each hour long session.

July 17, 2020
Posted in Events

As the nature of transportation continues to evolve, Carnegie Mellon University has students and faculty conducting transportation related research in data analytics, robotics, public policy, engineering, architecture and design, and more. Since not all of these efforts are co-located in the same building, or even the same department, there was a need to help building a “community space” to bring together people interested in transportation on CMU’s campus. This was the impetus for Mobility21’s launching of the Smart Mobility Connections (SMC) seminar series. One of the University Transportation Center (UTC) faculty is featured at each hour long session.

July 17, 2020
Posted in Events

As the nature of transportation continues to evolve, Carnegie Mellon University has students and faculty conducting transportation related research in data analytics, robotics, public policy, engineering, architecture and design, and more. Since not all of these efforts are co-located in the same building, or even the same department, there was a need to help building a “community space” to bring together people interested in transportation on CMU’s campus. This was the impetus for Mobility21’s launching of the Smart Mobility Connections (SMC) seminar series. One of the University Transportation Center (UTC) faculty is featured at each hour long session.

April 24, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

April 24, 2020

Today’s Smart Mobility Connection session featured Srinivasa Narasimhan and Robert Tamburo, CMU Principal Project Scientists and Mobility21 UTC researchers.  They discussed their UTC project, “Visual Understanding of Traffic at Intersections: Access to real-time information.” Watch the full video here.

April 17, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

April 17, 2020

Today’s Smart Mobility Connection session featured Christoph Mertz, a CMU Principal Project Scientist and Mobility21 UTC researcher.  He discussed his UTC project, “Bus on the edge: Continuous monitoring of traffic and infrastructure,” and how transit buses are now routinely recording their surroundings with cameras for security and liability reasons.  Watch the full SMC video here.

February 7, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

February 7, 2020

Today’s Smart Mobility Connection session featured Mobility21 UTC Researcher Venkat Viswanathan.  He discussed how weight, computational load, sensor load, and possibly higher drag may increase the energy use of automated electric vehicles relative to human-driven electric vehicles.   Watch the full SMC video here.

January 24, 2020
Posted in What's Happening

January 24, 2020

The first Smart Mobility Connection session of spring semester was held today featuring Mobility21 Executive Director, Stan Caldwell and CMU PhD student, Rick Grahn.  They provided an overview and took questions about the project, Research Results and Technology Trends to Inform Policies for Smart Mobility of People and Goods.  Everyone in attendance was also provided with a hard copy of the “Recommended Policies for the 21st Century Trends in US Mobility” policy guide.  Watch the full SMC video here.

December 6, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

December 6, 2019

This Smart Mobility Connection session featured Ding Zhao who described how his team is trying to build the world’s first scenario-based driving database that is dedicated to connected and autonomous vehicles.  Watch the video here.

November 30, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

November 15, 2019

This Smart Mobility Connection session featured Fei Fang who highlighted her research entitled “Efficiency and Fairness in Ride-sharing.” Fang discussed the growth in location-tracking technology, the popularity of smartphones, and the reduced cost in mobile network communications have led to a revolution in mobility and the prevalence of ridesharing. Fang covered both commercial on-demand ride-sharing and peer-to-peer ride-sharing, focusing on how to find efficient vehicle-rider matching. Furthermore, she showed how her team evaluated the fairness level of matchings and propose several approaches to balance fairness and efficiency. Watch the full SMC here.

October 11, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

October 11, 2019

Today’s Smart Mobility Connection seminar featured Aaron Steinfeld, Associate Research Professor with the Robotics Institute at CMU. Steinfeld talked about “What’s Been Learned from the Tiramisu Transit Deployment.” Steinfeld was part of the team from the CMU Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center who researched, developed and deployed Tiramisu, a transit app with a universal design but focused on improving public transit for individuals with disabilities. Watch the full seminar here to learn more.

April 26, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

April 26, 2019

The last Smart Mobility Connection of the Spring ’19 semester featured Steve Quick, Adjunct Faculty in the School of Architecture at CMU. Quick highlighted his UTC project that is currently investigating how the integration of multimodal policies onto regional corridors will impact small towns differently from urban and suburban corridors. Watch the full series here.

April 5, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

April 5, 2019

This week’s Smart Mobility Connection Series featured Professor John Shen and PhD Student, Abhinav Jauhri from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. This talk highlighted their work with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and how they’re using data sets to improve ride sharing services, mitigating traffic congestion and even what-if scenarios for intelligent transportation systems. Watch the talk here.

March 22, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

March 22, 2019

The Smart Mobility Connection featured UTC Faculty and Research Professor, Steve Smith. Smith gave us an overview of Surtrac technology that his spin-off company, Rapid Flow Technology, is using to help solve 21st century mobility challenges. Smith is utilizing his research on a wide variety of projects. In addition to improving the flow of traffic, this technology is helping people communicate with buses and enabling populations with disabilities to safely navigate intersections. Watch the full talk here.

February 22, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

February 22, 2019

Today’s Smart Mobility Connection featured Chris Hendrickson, Director of Traffic21.  Based upon the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s study ‘Renewing the National Commitment to the Interstate Highway System: A Foundation for the Future’ Hendrickson led us through a look back at the impacts and innovations of the Interstate Highway System, including engineering, financing and planning challenges.  Read the study here.  Watch the seminar here.

February 15, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

February 2018

If you’ve ever traveled through Cranberry Township, you’ve probably had to wait at more than one traffic signal. Cranberry Township’s unique geographical location at the junction of Interstate 79 and the PA Turnpike (PA 376) poses unique challenges in coordinated signal operations. Furthermore, the Township operates a Coordinated Signal System that relies on historically Generated Signal Timings, coupled with real time technology to manage day to day operations on the local network.  Any scheduled or unscheduled events on the limited access highways can cause havoc with operations on roads in the business district.

Jason A. Dailey, Director of Public Works in Cranberry Township saw an opportunity with the Smart Mobility Challenge to reduce havoc and maintain efficiency. Together with CMU faculty, Sean Qian, and PhD

student, Weiran Yao, the Mobility Data Analytics Center (MAC) received funding from Traffic21.  This research project incorporated real time data inputs monitored from both social media and other public data sources against historical data to trigger predictions of traffic delays at least 30 minutes ahead.  These predictions could then be directed to dynamic message boards, smart phone applications, social media, and text messages to alert the public of the anticipated delay.  These predictions also alert the Cranberry Traffic Operations

Center of the incidents to allow for pro-active adjustments to the operating traffic plan on a real-time basis.

At the conclusion of the project, in a real-world demonstration, the system proved to successfully alert the Townships traffic operators of the upcoming traffic gridlock 50 minutes in advance compared to the actual reporting time, which allowed more prompt and effective traffic management.

Dailey’s feedback after working with Traffic21 faculty Sean Qian included:

“This was another great experience working with CMU through the Traffic21 program.  Our project was able to pull existing technology and crowd-sourced data, combine it with other publicly available data that is driven by a multitude of sources including vehicle reporting data and roadway sensors, and produce a recommendation on how to manage our signal system when an event is triggered.  We are very fortunate to work with Traffic21 and MAC to help us take advantage of current technology and make sense of it, in a way that industry professionals can then turn it into real world solutions.  This project built on another project we had been working on with Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission where we developed contingency plans that were preplanned and would need to be first identified manually, and then entered manually into our traffic signal system.  What Sean and his team were able to do, was to create a program that looks locally at traffic inputs, looks regionally at what is happening, identify issues far enough in advance for us to get an alert that then would recommend what signal plan would best resolve the issue that is occurring.  While we still need to manually enter the plan, this project far exceeded our expectations and is showing us just how valuable regional data access is for us.” 

Read the Full Report from Real-Time Traffic Monitoring and Prediction for Cranberry Township: https://ppms.cit.cmu.edu/media/project_files/61-Final.pdf

Inspired by Traffic21’s years of successful collaboration with the City of Pittsburgh to become a globally recognized smart city test bed, the goal of the Smart Mobility Challenge is to demonstrate how suburban and rural communities can also benefit from a similar collaboration.  This program is supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s Traffic21 Institute and its affiliated US DOT National University Transportation Center, Mobility21.

The Smart Mobility Challenge is an opportunity to connect suburban and rural communities to the technologies and resources being developed at Carnegie Mellon University.  The first Smart Mobility Challenge was held from 2017 – 2018, and included research done in collaboration with Millvale, McKees Rocks, Bethel Park, Greensburg, Mt. Lebanon, Dormont, Cranberry Township and Lawrence County.  Learn more by clicking here.

Traffic21 is currently kicking off its Second Smart Mobility Challenge.  The goal of this year’s challenge is work with these communities to use data and analytics to solve their municipality’s mobility problems.  Representatives of municipalities and public transit operators in southwestern PA are invited to request research assistance through the 2019-2020 Smart Mobility Challenge.   Learn more by clicking here.

January 25, 2019
Posted in What's Happening

January 25, 2019

Mobility21 kicked off the Spring ’19 academic year with a Smart Mobility Connection featuring Scott Matthews. Matthews presented “Applications of Connected Vehicle Technologies to Improve Safety, Mobility & Emissions.”  The talk highlighted ineffective processes for testing emissions and how we can use technology and data to make the process more affordable and efficient.

Link to recording: Video Link

November 30, 2018
Posted in What's Happening

November 30, 2018

The final Smart Mobility Connection (SMC) of Fall 2018 Spring featured Fei Fang, Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research at CMU. Fei described her work with peer-to-peer ridesharing programs, including incentivizing both riders and financial supporters and pricing.

November 28, 2018
Posted in What's Happening

November 16, 2018

Hae Young Noh presented “Structures as Sensors: Using Vehicle Structures to Indirectly Monitor Humans and Surroundings”. The talk introduced “structures as sensors” for the indirect monitoring of cyber-physical-human systems by sensing and analyzing their noisy physical structural responses. Watch the full talk from the series here.

October 5, 2018
Posted in What's Happening

October 5, 2018

Our (mostly) bi-weekly Smart Mobility Connection Series this week featured Pizza and Jon Peha, Professor in the Dept. of Engineering and Public Policy and the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. This Session was titled “Connected Vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems” and we learned how efficient and effective this can be for both metro areas and rural areas.

May 4, 2018
Posted in What's Happening

May 4, 2018

CMU Vulnerability Researcher Dan Klinedinst spoke as the last Smart Mobility Connection speaker of the semester on addressing cyber-security issues in intelligent transportation systems. The CERT researcher discussed how he gets to think like a bad guy to determine whether transportation systems are safe, and how he learned to text his car.

May 1, 2018
Posted in Events

Dan Klinedinst will discuss current and emerging cybersecurity issues in connected and autonomous vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems.  We will discuss a variety of tools and techniques for analyzing security risks in these systems, from policy-level risks to technical assessment.

April 24, 2018
Posted in What's Happening

April 24, 2018

Bob Koch, who leads Community College of Allegheny County’s Automotive Technology Program, spoke at this months UTC faculty meeting about how to prepare technicians for autonomous technologies. Koch noted that with direction from advisory boards, community colleges will be perfectly positioned to educate entry level intelligent transportation technicians in many different career areas.

March 30, 2018
Posted in What's Happening

March 30, 2018

UTC researcher Venkat Viswanathan talked to students at Heinz College about the safety and security of electric vehicles in his presentation, “Analyzing and Defending Cyberattacks on Electric, Hybrid, and AV Battery Systems.” Venkat’s discussion included the ways hackers could control your self-driving car, cracking Tesla’s wall of silence on the Model 3 battery, and the challenges of electric driving range and battery degradation.