pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Early last month, PacTrans Director and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW, Yinhai Wang, Ph.D., was interviewed by the National Academies for their article titled The Era of Smart Infrastructure Demands Strong Data, Technology Management. As the incoming chair of the Transportation Research Board’s Standing Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications, professor Wang exchanged his views on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be employed in transportation asset management as a way to address safety and system reliability. 

Emphasizing the potential of AI and sensor signal data management in designing, operating and managing highway systems, professor Wang said, “Data management skills are particularly needed in the transportation industry. Very often, traffic data are collected and stored by separate data management systems without sufficient quality control. To make existing datasets ready for AI-based applications, transportation professionals need to use data management tools and skills to ensure data quality, properly integrate available datasets, and label and mark them as needed.”

Professor Wang also touched upon the alarming issue of lack of AI engineers in transportation, explaining how these AI engineers play a valuable role in making useful and innovative inferences from the available transportation data. In order to address this shortage of AI engineers, professor Wang believes there is a need for state departments of transportation to start collaborating with universities and IT companies as we move towards the smart infrastructure age. 

To read more, see the article here.