pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Last month, PacTrans Director, Yinhai Wang, along PacTrans Associate Director, Jeff Ban, and several PhD students from his STAR Lab met with Andrew Walenstein, Director of Security Research and Development at BlackBerry. We discussed a number of different avenues for partnership and collaboration. While the connected and autonomous vehicle has been, and will continue to be, at the center of much discussion and research, security concerns surrounding the emergence of these new technologies has been lacking. Dr. Walenstein’s primary concern is bringing these issues to the forefront and challenging researchers and the next generation of transportation professionals to be prepared and competent with these looming issues.

Of the ideas generated during our meeting, several were identified has high priority and are now initiative that we are moving forward on. The first of those is a security seminar that will be co-sponsored by BlackBerry and PacTrans and will be hosted at the University of Washington. The intent is that this will be a regular seminar that brings in security experts from both industry and academia to speak on emerging issues and research in security. Secondly, BlackBerry offers a large number of very interesting internship opportunities all over the country. They expect candidates to be mildly literate in computer science but seek individuals whose interests and primary focuses are only tangential to what BlackBerry is currently working on. This offers BlackBerry fresh ideas and takes on new directions for their company. The final collaboration that was discussed was in regard to research. Dr. Walenstein quickly identified a number of great entry points into ongoing projects that PacTrans and the STAR Lab are already engaged in.