CEE Seminar: Promises of Emerging Data and Technologies for Transportation Applications

Abstract: Chen will introduce some of the ongoing projects conducted at the THINK LAB at the University of Washington (https://sites.uw.edu/thinklab). The focus will be on how emerging data and technologies will allow us to answer new questions and explore new frontiers in transportation analysis. Promises and limitations of these datasets for transportation analysis will also be discussed.

Bio: Cynthia Chen is a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle (UW). At UW, she directs the THINK (Transportation-Human Interaction-and-Network Knowledge) lab (https://sites.uw.edu/thinklab), where she and her students study the sustainability and resilience of a city through the lens of human beings’ interacting with the physical infrastructures and the built environment. The work of THINK lab is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on the latest methods and ideas in disciplines from social and natural sciences to engineering. Chen graduated from University of California, Davis with a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering in 2001. She has served on a variety of TRB (Transportation Research Board) committees including for example, Travel Behavior and Values and Travel Survey committees. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dtaR0JYAAAAJ) and her work has been supported by many federal and local agencies. She is an associate director of the USDOT-supported TOMNET (Teaching Old Models New Tricks) center (http://www.tomnet-utc.org/) and an associate editor for Transportation (https://link.springer.com/journal/11116).

Between 2017 and 2019, Chen served as a program director of the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) program (https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13352&org=ENG&from=home) in the Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) at the National Science Foundation.