pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Late last month, June 26 through June 29, 2016, PacTrans Director, Dr. Yinhai Wang, and PacTrans Communications and Research Manager, Cole Kopca, attended the 2016 ASCE International Conference on Transportation and Development. The four-day conference, co-sponsored by PacTrans, was held in Houston, Texas, and featured dozens of great sessions ranging from rail to public transportation to innovations in pavement to system management and operations to emerging technologies.

Dr. Wang had the privilege of moderating and presenting in one such session. He, along with Dr. Musharraf Zaman, professor at University of Oklahoma and director of the Southern Plains Transportation Center, hosted a session on Technology Transfer. They were joined by Waseem Fazal, of the Federal Highway Administration. Dr. Wang shared about recent successes with our Center’s development of Bluetooth and WiFi mobile sensing technology. He also presented the challenges and obstacles that still stand in the way of these technologies being fully implemented to collect more robust data sets on peoples’ movements in the real world. Among these obstacle included privacy issues, as well as public perceptions due to previous experiences with people’s sensitive information.