Transportation ideas aim of UALR’s Italy trip

The destination: Bellagio, Italy.

Summer 2019. All expenses paid.

Thanks to anonymous donors, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and graduate student, along with three professors from other institutions, are in charge of planning the 2019 weeklong Rising Star workshop that, in part, promotes collaboration in research focused on the intersection of telecommunication and transportation.

Think of the possibilities: using Skype to talk to people versus flying out to see them, smart meters that read total usage of electricity a day instead of having an electric company employee come by, or even self-driving cars.

“Telecommunications technology is changing faster than transportation in general,” said Greg Erhardt, an assistant professor in the department of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who is part of the workshop’s steering committee. “Transportation, historically, has moved very slowly, but it’s something that affects our daily lives.

“The sort of directionality is twofold: Can we use new telecommunications technology to improve traffic? And in some cases, that may be cheaper or more cost-efficient than actually putting pavement down. And then there’s sort of how does it affect what we decide to build?”

The donors are covering costs for workshop expenses and each participant’s travel, along with a $27,000 annual contribution to UALR for a graduate assistant in the George W. Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology to help plan and promote the workshop. Recipients must write a thank you note to the donor annually, according to the gift agreement.

Mustafa Alassad, 34, a first-year doctoral student in the systems engineering program, is its inaugural recipient and will put in 20 hours a week for the gig. He said he is hoping to gain experience in working with some of the experts in the field — and earn his Ph.D., of course.

The workshop is only the second of its kind: the first, run by the Transportation Research Board, was held on a transatlantic cruise aboard

the Queen Mary 2 in July 2016, said Yupo Chan, the UALR professor and the founding chairman of its department of systems engineering. The “secluded” environment encourages interaction between the small group of fellows, he said.

“The first one is always challenging because, you know, you’ve never done it before,” Chan said. “And so my job this time, with the help of Mustafa, is to even sharpen the focus a little bit more, not only recruiting the best candidates to participate but also define the problem more precisely.”

The steering committee wants to have 12 junior fellows — newly minted post-doctoral graduates who are just starting in academia — and four senior fellows, those with at least 30 years of experience in the field, for the 2019 workshop, Chan said.

The junior fellows typically come with an idea — a real-world problem — and are supposed to move the needle in helping fix the problem, Alassad said. All fellows will draft a technical paper stemming from the workshop ideas which will be considered for publication in a journal.

Chan said self-driving cars is a good potential research topic. Sometimes, the vehicles

crash, and sometimes they aren’t on track with the route, he said.

“Self-driving cars is very, very brand new, so anything you can do to help out to understand it better would be a good deal from an engineering point of view,” he said. “The main driver behind it is communication because you need to tell basically a robot running around what to do.”

Erhardt, who was a junior fellow at last year’s workshop, studied whether people substituted or complemented long-distance travel as telecommunications technology improved. His paper offered two conceptual models to understand the relationship between the two.

The workshop also offers junior fellows career guidance to help them excel in their fledgling academic careers. Transitioning from a doctoral student — which has a faculty advisor — to a faculty member with complete independence is a daunting task, Erhardt said.

“Once you get into that position where you’re a professor, everyone kind of expects you have the answers. They don’t expect you to be looking for the answers,” he said. “[The workshop is] essentially an acknowledgement, in essence, of a chance to identify people who are doing really great things and help them launch their career, and it’s an investment in those people.”