News

Xiao Qin, professor, civil & environmental engineering and director of UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT), was awarded $500,000 in October from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) to develop, among other things, a best-practices guide and a national data clearinghouse to help state departments of transportation, public safety agencies, and the motor carrier industry prevent and mitigate the risk of bridge and tunnel strikes.   

Qin’s team includes: Habib Tabatabai, professor, civil & environmental engineering and director of the UWM’s Structural Engineering Lab; Andrew Graettinger, associate dean for research; and representatives from Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc., Applied Research Associates, and Specialized Freight Solutions.  

Read Complete Article

UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT) welcomes Dr. Jamshid Abdunazarov, the new visiting scholar, to Milwaukee! Dr. Abdunazarov’s visit is funded by American Councils for International Education (FEP program). Dr. Abdunazarov received his PhD from Moscow State Automobile and Road Technical University (MADI), Russia in 2015, and currently serves as the head of the Scientific Department of the Jizzakh Polytechnic Institute in Uzbekistan. Dr. Abdunazarov’s research interest is in road safety, traffic and safety modelling, sustainable transportation planning, and intelligent transportation systems.

.

UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT) welcomes Dr. Michael H. Schrader, P.E., as a Researcher and the newest member of the team! Dr. Schrader graduated from Wayne State University in 2018 with a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, and has since been a member of the faculty of Minnesota State University-Mankato, teaching transportation, and Gateway Technical College teaching fresh water resources. Prior to his academic experience, Dr. Schrader spent over three decades as a practicing civil and traffic engineering for both the public and private sectors. Dr. Schrader has extensive experience in traffic operations, transportation modeling and planning, signalization, construction, design, and public works.

Xiao Qin, professor, civil & environmental engineering and director of UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation, was awarded $99,951 in April to develop a web-based application (called Crash Information Extraction, Analysis and Classification Tool, or CIEACT) to improve data analysis related to highway crashes. Qin will collaborate with Rohit Kate, associate professor, computer science. 

The award comes through a traffic safety information system improvement grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation, through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. NHTSA oversees highway safety issues, including human behavior that contributes to crashes (i.e. reckless driving, DUI, improper cellphone use) and data related to them. The project aims to improve Wisconsin’s highway safety analysis by using technology to capture and analyze valuable information from unstructured data, such as police officers’ narratives, that relate to human behavior. Researchers will use machine learning and text mining techniques for automatic text analysis and feature extraction.

Read Complete Article

Dr. Xiao Qin, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the Director of Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT), along with the team members from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and VHB, has been awarded $600,000 NCHRP project: NCHRP 22-47: Incorporating Driver Behavior and Characteristics into Safety Prediction Methods. Dr. Qin’s share is $135,000. The objective of this research is to develop a methodology to incorporate driver characteristics and behavior into safety prediction methods that can be used to estimate the expected crash frequency and severity related to infrastructure features for use in planning, design, and operational decisions. Established in 1962 and administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) is one of the most competitive national programs in highway research.

Read Complete Article

IPIT Graduate Student Md Abu Sayed has been selected as a Lifesavers Traffic Safety Scholar (TSS) for the 2021 Virtual Lifesavers National Conference on Highway Safety Priorities, April 26-28, 2021. This conference is the largest gathering of highway safety professionals in the United States. The competitive scholarship program selects TSS based on the interest, commitment and passion to enhancing roadway safety.

UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT) welcomes Dr. Yang Li, the new research associate, to Milwaukee! Dr. Li graduated from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte with a PhD in Transportation Engineering in December 2020. Dr. Li has extensive research experience in data mining, visualization, spatial-temporal analysis, and statistical/econometric modeling with specialization in transportation safety related data analysis and modelling. 

The new textbook Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling coauthored by Dr. Xiao Qin, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT), and his colleagues, Dr. Dominique Lord and Dr. Srinivas R. Geedipally, at the Texas A&M University, College Station is published on March 1^st, 2021 by Elsevier. This textbook covers the key elements needed for making effective transportation engineering and policy decisions based on highway crash data analysis. It covers all aspects of the decision-making process, from collecting and assembling data to making decisions based on the results of the analyses. The new textbook is available at https://www.elsevier.com/books/highway-safety-analytics-and-modeling/lord/978-0-12-816818-9  

UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation received an $88,168 award from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to create an implementation-ready WisDOT Data Inventory that documents the structure, quality, definitions, and usage of WisDOT data. Congratulations to project researchers Andrew Graettinger, Yue Liu, Xiao Qin, and Mark Gottlieb! 

UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT) received a $73,763 award from the Department of Transportation to evaluate the local bridge improvement assistance pilot program and make recommendations for possible modifications and expansion to other areas of the local assistance program. Researchers on this project include Habib Tabatabai (PI, Civil and Environmental Engineering), Xiao Qin (Co-PI, Civil and Environmental Engineering, IPIT Director), and Mark Gottlieb (IPIT).