Author: Elena Chung

Street-level Flooding Platform: Sensing and Data Sharing for Urban Accessibility and Resilience

Elena Chung

Access to real-time information on flooding can improve resiliency and efficiency by allowing residents to identify navigable transportation routes and make informed decisions to avoid exposure to floodwater contaminants. While there exist commercially available sensors that detect the presence of water inside homes, there is an unmet need for hyperlocal information on the presence and depth of street-level floodwater.

Wearables to Command More Access and Inclusion in a Smarter Transportation System

Elena Chung

This project will increase the safety profile and ease-of-use of the VISION (Visually Impaired Smart Service System for Spatial Intelligence and Onboard Navigation) platform toward ‘connected’ dynamic navigation in complex urban environments, providing a new level of security to the end user and permitting one to break down significant barriers to employment and social interaction.

Learning to Drive Autonomously

Elena Chung

Autonomous vehicles (AV) and connected vehicles (CV) technology has been much of the focus of transportation industry lately, and they will likely make a vast impact on the future of transportation systems. This project will combine AV and CV technologies for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to reduce congestion and improve network performance and safety by developing new tools and methods using reinforcement learning and nonlinear and optimal control techniques.

Securing Intelligent Transportation Systems against Spoofing Attacks

Elena Chung

Game theory is a powerful tool for security risk analysis that has been extensively used in various engineering systems, and game-theoretic approaches have been applied to studying the security of routing in transportation and communications. This project will be the basis for a synthesis of game theory and queuing theory, essential for capturing the interaction between the queuing dynamics and players decisions, in order to protect the ITS system from spoofing and attacks.

Development and Tech Transfer of an Integrated Robust Traffic State and Parameter Estimation and Adaptive Ramp Metering Control System

Elena Chung

Dr. Zhou and Dr. Ozbay found that, if the traffic flow parameters are time-varying and/or the knowledge of these parameters are biased, the performances of a traffic state estimator that has assumed them to be known and fixed-valued can be significantly downgraded. Moreover, only augmenting these parameters into the state vector and then resorting to nonlinear recursive estimation techniques such as extended Kalman filter (EKF) cannot solve the issue. This is because, under a CTM-based traffic estimator, the critical density is unobservable under free-flow conditions, and hence biased initial knowledge of the critical density can cause false switching of the working model of the estimator and distort the estimation afterward.

Sustainability of Urban Consumption Practices

Elena Chung

This work will be conducted with the research group 6-t: Bureau de Recherche, based in Paris. The project aims to better understand and compare the consumption practices and mobility behaviors of the residents living in two of the major cities in the world (Paris and NYC). The work will be conducted through a simultaneous survey in both cities, analysis, stakeholder meeting and narrative.

Statewide Mobility Services Program Strategic Procurement Planning

Elena Chung

The current Statewide Active Transportation Demand Management (ATDM) program is nearing the end of its contract period. This assignment will assist NYSDOT in setting a strategic direction and executing a procurement strategy for a new Statewide Mobility Services Program, building on the strengths of the evolving ATDM Program while leveraging the opportunities now available in the private marketplace.

Utilizing Social Media Data for Estimating Transit Performance Metrics in a Pre- and Post-COVID-19 World

Elena Chung

This perception of transit can be captured through the sentiment of posts made by users on social media. Performance metrics based on user perception can provide the service provider a customer-facing view of their service and help enhance their service and address the user concerns, especially from a public health standpoint in a post-COVID lockdown world, appropriately.