Bio
Ouri Wolfson’s main interests are in big data, intelligent transportation, mobile/pervasive computing, and smart cities. Ouri Wolfson has authored over 230 publications, with eight of them winning awards. He holds seven patents, has over 16,000 citations on Google Scholar, and has an H-index of 61. Wolfson is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), a University of Illinois Scholar in 2009, and he has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Computing Machinery. His research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NATO, the US Army, NASA, the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, Hughes Research Laboratories, Informix, Accenture, and Hitachi Co.

Talk
Title: An Autonomous Modular Public Transit Service Description: In this work, we present a proof-of-concept investigation of autonomous modular public transit (AMPT) at a network scale and compare it with the traditional fixed-route, fixed-capacity transit service in terms of total cost, which consists of both an agency’s capital and operational cost, including energy cost and passenger time cost. We formulate and solve stylized design models for AMPT on a grid network in a range of demand density scenarios with both homogenous and heterogeneous distributions. The AMPT models explicitly account for pod joining and disjoining (and therefore en route transfers of passengers) and potential energy savings due to pod train formation (pod platooning), which represent major departures from the traditional transit models in the literature. Numerical results find that AMPT, if designed properly, may save the total cost compared to traditional transit systems thanks to demand-responsive pod train capacity, particularly in low-demand scenarios. In addition, the load factor of AMPT generally improves over the traditional transit service.

Bio
Jane Lin is a professor in the civil, materials, and environmental engineering department and holds a joint appointment with the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy. Her research involves three areas of focus, namely transportation emissions and air- quality modeling and exposure, green freight transportation and urban logistics, and computational transportation science.

Talk
Title: A Hierarchical Wi-Fi Log Data Processing and Analysis Framework for Human Mobility. Description: Wi-Fi log data, including communication actions between clients and access points (APs), can be used to infer human movement and travel activity and thus would serve as a reliable data source for human mobility analysis. As more and more modern cities or communities provide free public Wi-Fi services, a vast amount of public Wi-Fi log data will be generated and have the potential to be used to characterize human travel patterns and thus develop more effective urban transportation management strategies. However, Wi-Fi log data processing is not trivial. Wi-Fi networks established by various internet equipment manufacturers and devices have different network settings and log file formats. Additionally, the complexity of Wi-Fi log data, along with the "ping-pong" phenomenon and invalid messages, can result in analysis bias and errors. This study proposed a hierarchical and general Wi-Fi data processing and analysis framework to extract client travel activities from Wi-Fi log data. Based on that, travel user activities, including visited location sequence, travel route, and travel mode across different communities, are compared and analyzed to provide community human mobility and travel activity insights and the correlation between human travel and Wi-Fi network features.

Bio
Lei Zhu is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Before joining UNC at Charlotte, he served as an Advanced Transportation Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), CO. He has worked at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), as a postdoctoral fellow. His research interests include smart and sustainable mobility systems and spatial sensing technologies.