• April 26, 2023

    PacTrans Out in Force at 2023 TRB Annual Meeting

    As usual, PacTrans had a very strong showing this year at the 2023 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting. This annual conference typically consists of more than 13,000 transportation professionals from around the world hosting more than 5,000 presentations in nearly 800 sessions and workshops in what always amounts to a jam packed week in frigid Washington D.C. This year, with COVID-19 mostly behind us, the conference felt as close to status quo as it has since 2020. This year’s spotlight theme played to that fact, Rejuvenation out of Disruption: Envisioning a Transportation System for a Dynamic Future. 

    With policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers, and representatives of government, industry, and academic institutions in attendance, the TRB annual meeting continues to be an amazing platform for PacTrans to demonstrate our abilities, expertise, innovation, and research as one of the country’s leading regional University Transportation Centers (UTCs). PacTrans student and faculty researchers were in attendance from all seven of our consortium institutions: Boise State University, Gonzaga University, Oregon State University, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, University of Idaho, University of Washington, and Washington State University. In total, PacTrans universities participated in over 100 lectures, poster sessions, workshops, committees, and subcommittees, and presented over 75 papers in the meeting.

    Several activities returned to normal this year that had been missing or done remotely since 2020. Firstly, the 2023 CUTC Winter Award Ceremony returned to in-person. This event features a series of Outstanding Student of the Year Awards. From PacTrans, this year’s award winner was Lena Breuer from Oregon State University. Also recognized at this event, OSU’s Eileen Chai received The Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in Science and Technology. The second activity that returned this year was PacTrans’ hosting of the Region 10 Reception. At this event, PacTrans presents our Michael Kyte Region 10 Outstanding Student of the Year Award. This year’s Award went to Frank (Hao) Yang of the University of Washington.

    PacTrans students received several other accolades as part of this year’s conference. 

    • Meixin Zhu’s dissertation entitled “Behavior Modeling and Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving Using Artificial Intelligence” received the Best Dissertation Award from the TRB AI and Advanced Computing Applications Committee (AED50); 
    • Chenxi Liu and his co-authors’ paper (TRBAM-23-05178: Cooperative and Comprehensive Multi-task Surveillance Sensing and Interaction System Empowered by Edge Artificial Intelligence) won the 2023 Best Paper Award from TRB’s AED30 Information Systems and Technology Committee.
    • Both OSU and UW had finalist team for the 2023 TRB Traffic Control Device Student Challenge (TCDSC) where each finalist presented their proposal in a session.