NYU Tandon transportation researchers are driving the future of the field

When the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held its 26th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems this fall in Bilbao, Spain, NYU Tandon’s US Department of Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center – Connected Communities for Smart Mobility towards Accessible and Resilient Transportation for Equitably Reducing Congestion (C2SMARTER) – was well represented.

Researchers from the Center led by Professor Kaan Ozbay, which uses cities as living laboratories to study challenging transportation problems and find solutions from the unprecedented recent advances in communication and smart technologies, presented six papers on a variety of topics at the high-profile, five-day gathering. 

These included: 

“Urban Work Zone Detection and Sizing: A Data-Centric Training and Topology-Based Inference Approach,” which aims to address the challenges of automatically recognizing and sizing work zones in complex urban environments.

“Robust Queue Length Estimation for Ramp Metering in a Connected Vehicle Environment,” which proposes a novel ramp queue length estimator that employs both traditional traffic sensors and emerging connected vehicle data. 

“Learning When to See for Long-term Traffic Data Collection on Power-constrained Devices,” which introduces a novel learning-based framework that strategically decides observation timings for battery-powered devices and reconstructs the full data stream from sparsely sampled observations, resulting in minimal performance loss and a significantly prolonged system lifetime.

“Investigating Safety of Evasion Maneuver Choices by Human-Driven Vehicles in Response to High-Density Truck Platoons Near Freeway Diverging Areas,” an investigation of the new safety challenges presented by High-Density Truck Platoons (HTPs) near freeway diverging areas due to their extensive spatial and temporal occupancy.

“Naturalistic Driving Data Analytics: Safety Evaluation With Multi-state Survival Models,” which discusses ways to meet the modeling challenges of multi-state and recurrent vehicle interactions. 

“Choice-based Service Region Assortment Problem: Equitable Design with Statewide Synthetic Data,” which acknowledges the importance of incorporating individual user preferences in statewide transportation planning and seeks to address the scarcity of consistent population travel data, particularly in underserved and rural areas.

“ITSC 2023 was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with fellow researchers and hear about their work,” Ozbay says. “And of course it was gratifying to present our own work, which received a great deal of interest and praise. Thanks to the support of the US DOT, the research being carried out by C2SMARTER’s faculty members and students is quite literally world-class, as our showing in Bilbao proves.”