News

Yiran successfully defended her dissertation research on ” Modeling Bias in Passively Collected Mobility Data: A Data Generation Process Perspective” on Monday. Congratulations to Dr. Yiran Zhang!

Dr. Jeff Ban visited the University of Minnesota in September 19, 2025, and delivered A Warren Distinguished Lecture at the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering.

iUTS faculty and students attended TRB in January 2026 to present research results and network with colleagues and friends from the US and around the world.

Dr. Jeff Ban and colleagues from the US, Europe, and Asia organized the Exploratory Workshop on Intelligent Vehicles and Road Infrastructure in Bottrop, Germany in July 2025.

iUTS welcomes two new Ph.D. students: Peeratach (Chris) Ritthikarn and Zepu Wang. Chris Ritthikarn is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) and joined the iUTS lab in Winter 2024. His research interests lie at the intersection of optimization tools and their applications in transportation networks, such as the EV station allocation problem. Before enrolling at UW, he earned a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Rochester and an M.S. degree in Management Science and Engineering from Columbia University. Chris then worked as a research intern at MPI, where he focused on combinatorial optimization and matching problems. In his free time, he enjoys soccer, Formula One, as well as history and cooking. Zepu Wang is a first-year Ph.D. student in the iTUS lab. His research interests include time series analysis and spatiotemporal data mining, with a particular focus on machine learning and deep learning. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Data Science from Duke Kunshan University in China and a Master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Pennsylvania. In his free time, he enjoys playing board games, working out, swimming, and hiking. Welcome both Chris and Zepu!

iUTS Ph.D. student Dan McCabe successfully defended his dissertation research on “ Computational Tools for Battery-Electric Bus Systems: from Infrastructure Planning to Daily Operations ” on August 02, 2024. Congratulations to Dr. McCabe!

iUTS faculty and students collaborated with Mcity staff and students to test iUTS’ multiscale traffic control models and algorithms, in particular the signal-vehicle coupled control (SVCC) algorithm, on July 10^th, in the Mcity 2.0 mixed reality testbed. Mcity 2.0 provides remote access APIs to integrate iUTS’ algorithms with Mcity hardware systems (CAVs, signal controllers) and digital infrastructure (digital maps, simulation models, data center) and a visualization tool to monitor the testing performance.

More details about the field testing can be found here.

iUTS Ph.D. student Feilong Wang successfully defended his dissertation research on “Data Poisoning Attacks in Transportation and Infrastructure-Enabled Defense Methods” on February 02, 2023. He will be a postdoc researcher of iUTS. Congratulations to Dr. Wang!

iUTS Ph.D. student Rong Fan successfully defended her dissertation research on “Commuting Service Platform: Concept, Method, and Analysis” on December 05, 2022. She has joined Uber to start her next journey. Congratulations to Dr. Fan!

iUTS welcomes new Ph.D. / MS Research Students: Ms. Shakiba Naderian, Mr. Soheil Kesharvarz, and Mr. Xin Wang. They come with strong background in transportation, AI/Computer Sciences, Statistics/Applied Math, and will add more to iUTS research, education, and outreach activities. Welcome them All!