Georgia Tech News | The Contracting Education Academy

August 28, 2019 By cs

5 challenges for government adoption of AI

From transportation solutions to video-streaming applications, artificial intelligence (AI) permeates almost every aspect of our lives. This includes government, where AI is increasingly making an impact.

Consider the two examples below:

Emma chatbot: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services receives a considerable amount of service requests daily. In response, a chatbot named Emma was deployed to address immigration questions. Emma, which can operate in both English and Spanish, handles more than a million immigration queries a month.
Firebird framework: Co-developed by Georgia Tech and the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department, Firebird helps the City of Atlanta prioritize buildings for inspection according to the building’s risk of fire.

Widespread adoption of AI has been slower in government than in the private sector. Given the magnitude of the impact that AI could have on public entities, it is important to understand the roadblocks that stand in the way of systemic government adoption of AI.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/artificial-intelligence-government-public-sector/

August 27, 2019 By cs

Research, sponsored activity awards top $1 billion at Georgia Tech

Research, economic development and other sponsored activities at Georgia Tech passed a significant milestone during the fiscal year that concluded on June 30, recording more than a billion dollars in new grants, contracts and other awards. The record amount comes from federal government agencies, companies, private organizations, the state of Georgia and other sources.

The growth in new awards for sponsored activity allows Georgia Tech to take on complex and significant challenges involving multiple disciplines and collaborating organizations that bring together teams of researchers with a broad range of specialized expertise, noted Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research.

“Tackling society’s most pressing challenges requires multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, business experts, policymakers and humanists, crosses multiple areas of specialization and often necessitates involvement from more than one research organization,” Abdallah said. “This level of funding allows us to participate in and lead more complex, more important and more impactful research projects. We are grateful to our research collaborators and to the state of Georgia for the confidence they have placed in us by providing these resources.”

The new funds also show Georgia Tech’s expanding role in national security, where defense agencies increasingly rely on the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) – Georgia Tech’s applied research arm – to tackle complex national defense, homeland security and related challenges. For some of this work, GTRI has contracts through its designation as a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) that delivers essential engineering capabilities to Department of Defense agencies.

Accounting for approximately $643 million of the $1,050,095,192 total, GTRI employs more than 2,300 engineers, scientists and support staff at facilities in Atlanta, Warner Robins and other locations around the United States. GTRI’s research spans a variety of disciplines, including autonomous systems, cybersecurity, electromagnetics, electronic warfare, modeling and simulation, sensors, systems engineering, test and evaluation, and threat systems.

Among the examples of large, collaborative projects funded at Georgia Tech during fiscal 2019 is a $21.9 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new techniques for battling a potential flu pandemic. The project will involve five universities, a company and the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention in developing new ways to help the body resist infection, fight the virus and boost the effects of vaccines.

In another example, Georgia Tech is leading a consortium of 12 universities and 10 national laboratories in a $25 million project with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to develop new technologies and educational programs to support the agency’s nuclear science, security and nonproliferation goals. The award will link basic research at universities with the capabilities of U.S. national laboratories.

Beyond defense and national security, Georgia Tech received a $13.5 million award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help bring together research teams working on a global grand challenge: reinventing the toilet. The project could improve sanitation for 2.5 billion people worldwide without requiring costly new sewer lines or wastewater treatment facilities.

In the humanities, Georgia Tech’s Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue and expand its innovative work in the digital humanities. The new award followed $1 million of initial funding from the Mellon Foundation that established the DILAC, which uses digital projects to engage undergraduate students in the liberal arts.

For its home state, Georgia Tech conducts research to benefit farmers and food companies with improved crop monitoring, food processing and inspection technology. And researchers recently helped the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services protect case managers with the development of ClickSafe, a small device that can quickly summon help if needed.

Solving critical challenges for research sponsors is just one part of Georgia Tech’s innovation pipeline. Research often leads to discoveries that can, in due course, become the basis for new products, new goods, new services and new industries. To create new jobs and new investment, Georgia Tech can license technology to existing companies and startups. During fiscal 2019, Georgia Tech filed 87 U.S. patent applications and executed 55 licenses for the use of intellectual property. At least seven startup companies were launched during the year based on research discoveries.

Startup companies in Georgia Tech’s VentureLab program – which helps faculty, staff and students create new enterprises – attracted $347 million in new investment during the fiscal year. During 2019, VentureLab assisted 111 Georgia Tech faculty members. The National Science Foundation I-Corps program, which helps faculty members prepare for commercializing technology, served 43 Georgia Tech faculty members during fiscal year 2019. Georgia Tech I-Corps teams attracted $14 million in investment.

In addition to its impact on the nation’s safety, quality of life and economic prosperity, Georgia Tech’s research program benefits its students by providing real-world experience. In fiscal 2019, approximately 4,000 students worked in the research program as graduate research assistants, while another 2,400 students participated in undergraduate research, supplementing classroom, laboratory and other educational activities.

Two measures are often used to assess the volume of university research programs. A number for total awards represents new funding provided during a specific fiscal year. These awards often support sponsored activities that take place across more than one year, so funding from a specific award may be included in multiple expenditure reports, which are the other metric commonly used for measuring research programs. An expenditures number includes the total amount actually spent during a specific year.

Georgia Tech conducts research through GTRI, its six academic colleges, 11 interdisciplinary research institutes and the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech’s economic development and business assistance unit.

Source: https://www.news.gatech.edu/2019/08/26/research-sponsored-activity-awards-top-1-billion-georgia-tech

August 23, 2019 By cs

Georgia Tech Research Institute develops and teaches tactics to defend transport aircraft

Air Force Capt. Courtney Vidt had already spent more than a week in a classroom studying the nuances of aircraft physics, radar theory, and the numerous dangers posed to military transport aircraft like hers.

**Master Sgt. Pedro McCabe (left), Lt. Col. Barrett Golden (middle), and Andrew Schoen (right), a GTRI senior research scientist, operate a C-130 flight simulator.**

Now, the C-17 pilot was presented with a new challenge: Craft a mission plan for a mock exercise that would achieve the mission objective and get herself and her crew back home safely.

“We fly in a lot of areas where threats can reach out and touch us, and this course helps us be aware of what tools and tactics we have to prevent them from doing that,” Vidt said, “whether it’s flying around it, flying over it, flying under it, or other methods — so they can’t touch us.”

Vidt was one of about a dozen pilots and aircrew from multiple branches of the U.S. military who in March 2019 descended on Rosecrans Air National Guard Base, located about 60 miles north of Kansas City. They came for an advanced training course designed for the mobility air force — service members who fly the large military aircraft that carry people and supplies.

The course was taught at the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center (AATTC), which provides the highest level of training in defensive maneuvers, countermeasures, and tactics for mobility forces with the ultimate goal of keeping them safe while flying through potentially hostile skies.

But it’s not just military instructors in uniforms teaching those courses. Working alongside them is a team of experts from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which for decades has partnered with mobility forces to develop technology to counter the threats that confront the military’s transport aircraft.

The GTRI team plays a pivotal role at the training center, helping students understand the science behind threats such as heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles as well as providing foundational knowledge of onboard aircraft systems and the measures used to defeat the threats.

“The goal of these courses is to save lives in the combat environment,” said Bobby Oates, a senior research scientist and GTRI’s site lead for the program at Rosecrans. “GTRI’s role here is to provide subject matter expertise. We’re all prior military aviators, and all of us have been on some sort of C-130 platform. That gives us a unique understanding of the needs of the mobility air force.”

GTRI’s expertise is a key part of the instruction in all of the seven courses provided at the training center, as well as in the development of new tactics and maneuvers.

The team helps craft coursework and serves as a direct link between the training center and GTRI’s research, quickly turning new technical findings about threats or aircraft systems into new course material. Each team member specializes in specific subjects, staying in contact with on-campus researchers involved in those areas of study.

“Two members of our team are focused intensely on the infrared spectrum,” Oates said. “They are fully engaged in the current and emerging infrared threats, such as heat-seeking missiles, and they’re involved with the development of tactics to defeat those threats, whether through maneuvers or implementation of defensive systems and expendables such as flares. We also have two team members very involved in the radar side of the house. They are experts on radar threat technology and the employment of measures to defeat those threats.”

The training center has its origins in the early 1980s, when a Missouri Air National Guard unit flying C-130s at Rosecrans began conducting training to improve pilots’ ability to respond to threats encountered in combat. The school was formally established in 1983, initially focused on teaching pilots and aircrews defensive maneuvers and how to respond to threats while flying.

Those skills come in handy for pilots of the quad-turboprop engine C-130, which, because of its versatility and ability to land and take off in a variety of terrain, is one of the primary airframes the military uses to perform air drops and move cargo within hostile territory. The larger quad-jet engine C-17 provides a similar capability over longer distances.

**Rob Walling, a GTRI senior research engineer, highlights the components of expendable defensive measures.**

The relationship between the training center and GTRI stretches back to the early years of the program, growing out of the research institute’s role in developing C-130 countermeasure systems such as flares. GTRI researchers would often travel to St. Joseph to provide guest instruction at the training center.

Over time, the partnership grew, with GTRI placing researchers fulltime, onsite at Rosecrans and eventually expanding to its current team of six experts now working side by side with the service members stationed there.

“The mission enhancement that comes with having that team of professionals here cannot be overstated,” said Col. Byron Newell, commandant of the training center. “It’s not inherent in being a pilot or a navigator or a combat systems operator to be subject matter experts on the science behind those systems.

“We are taught to flip switches, follow a checklist, and do things in a certain order and fly an airplane a certain way. But if you’re going to develop constantly evolving tactics and techniques to counter emerging enemy threats that are constantly changing, then you really need to understand the science behind those systems.”

Having the GTRI team on site at Rosecrans helps accelerate the transfer of technical developments and new scientific understandings of emerging threats from the broader GTRI research community into the classroom.

“We’re trying to think of it on our own in the Air Force, and often it is a young kid at college who has the right answer,” said Col. Deanna Franks, vice commandant of the training center. “Getting involved with people outside of our organization, and having the opportunity for them to field those answers to us, is the true importance and why we have such a great relationship with GTRI.”

**Rod Orr, a GTRI senior research scientist, discusses navigation concepts inside a C-130 flight simulator with C-130H Navigator Capt. Justin Bigham.**

In many ways, the GTRI staff there plays the role of translators between the mobility forces and the researchers in labs back on campus, both in front of the classroom and during the development of new tactics and systems.

“The folks on campus live and breathe this stuff, and it’s a great tool to be able to reach back and talk to them about what they’re doing,” said Rob Walling, a GTRI senior research engineer at Rosecrans and a former C-130 pilot. “We turn around and put it in terms aircrew can understand to go out and execute the mission and execute the tactic that was developed for them.”

The product of that relationship was on display in March for the course on tactics and mission planning, called Combat Aircrew Tactics Studies/Mobility Electronic Combat Officer Course, or CATS/MECOC, which is an intensive two-week course designed to train aircrew members to be tacticians who can help plan missions at their home units.

For the course, researchers from GTRI dive deep into the technical aspects of multiple aircraft defensive systems, such as radar warning receivers, which help alert aircrews of an approaching radar-guided missile. The researchers teach the science of how aircraft systems work, their strengths and weaknesses, how to best use them in a defensive situation, and how each aircraft’s capabilities come to bear from a mission planning standpoint.

“The level of instruction that we’re getting from this course is at a master’s — I would even dare to say Ph.D. level for some of it — just going in-depth with our airframe, in-depth with the threat picture out there, and understanding it,” said Vidt, the C-17 pilot who is stationed at Joint Base Lewis–McChord near Tacoma, Washington. “It’s a lot of information to process, and they know that. But they’re great in that they’re able to sit there, explain it to you if you have questions, and then help you put it into practical knowledge. That’s the most important part, not only learning it but being able to apply it.”

From left, Master Sgt. Amber Meyer, a flight engineer, Senior Airman Kevin Pajor, a loadmaster, Technical Sgt. Jesse Sunde, a loadmaster, and Maj. Charles Francis, a pilot, all from Minneapolis-St. Paul Joint Air Reserve Station, go over the details of a training mission.

The mock exercise was an opportunity for Vidt, who serves as a wing tactician at her home unit, to test whether she had absorbed the course material coming at her like a firehose for days as she sat alongside other pilots and aircrews of C-17s and C-130s.

“We had to figure out, how do I get my cargo from point A to point B when there are these threats out there, and what tools am I given to address those threats,” she said. “It’s thinking about the ‘ifs’ and the ‘whens’ and what could go wrong. And oh, by the way, there are also five teams working simultaneously on this mission, and how do we work together? How does the tanker provide fuel for all of us? How does my aircraft get to my mission when it has two other missions before it? It’s a puzzle.”

The AATTC trains students from the Air National Guard, Air Force Reserve Command, the active duty component of the United States Air Force, the United States Marine Corps, and international crews from across the globe.

Aircrew members have the option of completing multiple courses at the training center, and Vidt already has plans to return for the flying course.

“The more you’re exposed to something, the more you’re going to be able to understand it and apply it,” she said.

From its early years, the original flying course offered at Rosecrans evolved into the Advanced Tactics Aircrew Course, a two-week program designed to take aircrews not long out of flight school and prepare them to operate in a combat environment.

During the two weeks, the aircrews spend time in the classroom learning more about their aircraft, eventually taking that knowledge out to the planes to practice maneuvers while performing airdrops or flying low along mountain ridges during eight training missions split between Missouri and Arizona.

“As aviators, it’s very important to go out and actually practice these things that you’re doing,” said Capt. Will Jones, a C-130 pilot stationed at Dobbins Air Reserve Base near Marietta, Georgia. “The way the course starts, they give you the academics about mountain flying and how to use terrain to evade threats, but it really brings it together when you go out and fly the course and practice the techniques you learn in the classroom.”

**C-130H Navigator Capt. Justin Bigham (left), C-130H Loadmaster Technical Sgt. Levi Justic (middle), and Kevin Valasek (right), a GTRI research associate, operate mission planning software.**

The training center has designed the flying course to overlap with another offering at the school, a three-week course called the Advanced Airlift Mobility Intelligence Course, which provides intelligence officers advanced instruction on emerging threats. The course also teaches intelligence members and aircrews about gathering intelligence in a combat environment, enabling them to work together on mock exercises.

“When our aircrews fly, we brief them on the things that could potentially harm them and how they can mitigate those threats, stay safe, and return home,” said Lt. Col. Sue Vogel, an intelligence flight commander who helps instruct the intelligence course. “When they come back from that flight, we do a debriefing and gather all the information they got, and put it back out in the intelligence community and Georgia Tech so they have all that information and can update any threat tactics.”

GTRI experts are there to help explain the technology behind the threats and provide intelligence service members the tools they need to evaluate the threat level.

“One of the biggest things our students love about Georgia Tech is they take really hard subjects, like radar theory, and break them down so they’re very easy to understand,” Vogel said. “A lot of our students don’t deal with that on a daily basis, and they say, ‘Now I finally understand how that works, and now I can better support my crews.’”

For Col. Ed Black, the 139th Airlift Wing Commander and base leadership at Rosecrans, the relationship between GTRI personnel and the training center boils down to saving lives.

“You absolutely make a massive difference in our ability to survive as a country, and not only us but also our allied nations,” Black said. “There is no research project when we partner with GTRI that is insignificant. In our eyes, when we go for GTRI help on solving a problem, that is a massive problem for us, and your assistance in solving that problem — to put our forces in a better place to survive — has a direct impact on our national security.”

Josh Brown is a senior science writer at Georgia Tech. A journalist by training, he’s spent the past decade writing about economic development, medical research, and scientific innovation. This article originally appeared at: https://www.gtri.gatech.edu/newsroom/keeping-them-safe

April 25, 2019 By AMK

Smart communities address transportation, housing, flooding challenges

Four Georgia communities are exploring innovative technologies and collaborating with local partners and Georgia Institute of Technology research teams to help drive the state’s smart development.

Georgia Tech leads the pilot Georgia Smart Communities Challenge, which supports one-year projects to develop and implement smart design solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the state.

The four selected localities were chosen from a pool of applicants statewide.The cities of Albany and Chamblee and the counties of Chatham and Gwinnett are focusing on pilot projects to improve local housing investments, address traffic and transportation challenges, and develop more targeted flooding forecasts of storms and sea level rise along Georgia’s coast.

A local government coordinates each project. But community and neighborhood groups, industry, and others are crucial collaborators. A Georgia Tech researcher conducts studies and provides guidance in pursuit of each project’s goals, supported by graduate and undergraduate students.

Each community has received $50,000 in grants and $25,000 from Georgia Tech in research support. Communities also raised matched funds. Georgia Power is the lead sponsor, with additional financial support from the Atlanta Regional Commission. The work began in September 2018 and will continue through September 2019.

Students are engaged through the research projects but also through two additional summer programs. The Georgia Smart Community Corps is a full-time, paid summer fellowship for Georgia Tech students to become part of the project team. It is a joint collaboration with the Strategic Energy Institute, Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, Center for Career Discovery and Development, and the Student Government Association.

The Georgia Tech Civic Data Science Program, led by Ellen Zegura and Christopher Le Dantec, competitively recruits students nationally to come to the Atlanta campus for the summer and work in smaller teams with the Georgia Smart community on data analytics.

And the competition will soon begin for the next group of communities, to be announced in June.

“We define ‘smart development’ as the integration and application of technologies to improve the quality of life,” said Debra Lam, managing director of Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation at Georgia Tech. These advanced tools can be intelligent infrastructures, information, and communication technologies, Internet of Things devices, and other computational or digital systems, such as data centers and portals, web and smartphone applications, and automated digital services.

“There is a misconception that smart community innovations always must start in a major city and trickle down to smaller places,” said Lam. “But innovations can trickle up as well. They can be developed more quickly in smaller communities because you have all stakeholders in the room — the mayor and city manager, public agencies, community and neighborhood groups, industry and business. A next step will be to spread what’s learned from these smart development projects to other Georgia communities and beyond.”

Smart Sea Level Tools for Emergency Planning and Response

Climate change is driving sea levels higher, increasing flooding events during coastal storms and extreme high tides in Chatham County. But the county has only one official water level gauge, located at Fort Pulaski. The Georgia coast, however, is a complex environment where rising water impacts can vary dramatically from place to place.

“Some neighborhoods are flooding more frequently now, while in other neighborhoods not far away the flooding is more modest or erratic, depending on which way the wind is blowing, how much rain falls, and many other factors,” said Russell Clark, Georgia Tech senior research scientist in the College of Computing.

That’s why residents want more targeted flood warnings and forecasts.

Chatham County is using its Smart Communities support to partner with Georgia Tech researchers to develop a sensor network partnered with data analytics for more accurate, localized flooding forecasts for improved emergency planning and response.

“Coastal communities are desperate for solutions,” said Kim Cobb, the project’s faculty leader, Georgia Power Chair, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Through many partnerships, Georgia Tech can design strategies to help communities adapt to climate change and sea level rise. We see this pilot as only the first step of a multi-year effort to advance real solutions with different combinations of partners, expertise, and funding.”

Local high school students are helping to build and install a new batch of 30 sensors that will soon augment the 12 units already deployed. The sensor network will transmit data to computer models for analysis and prediction of storm strength and flooding.

The Smart Sea Level Sensor Project is a partnership among Chatham Emergency Management Agency officials, City of Savannah officials, and Georgia Tech scientists and engineers. The pilot project’s data could be used to plan more resilient bridge, road, and water treatment infrastructure. The sensors could be adapted later to collect other environmental monitoring data, including rainfall and water quality parameters.

“Residents are excited to see that localized sensor data will be visible for them,” said Clark. “We hear a lot of ‘thank you for doing this in my neighborhood.’”

Emanuele Di Lorenzo, professor of ocean and climate dynamics, will integrate sensor data into models for predictive flood-risk assessments specifically for the Chatham County coast. David Frost, Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor of civil engineering, will provide resilience planning tools for community leaders.

Residents can offer their input during a May 16 showcase for the project sponsored by the Georgia Smart Communities Program. On smartphones and iPads, Georgia Tech undergraduates will guide residents through web-based visualizations of flood-risk scenarios for different coastal locations with augmented reality tools.

“We continue to look for community feedback, which is so important,” said Cobb. “There will be many more opportunities for local community members, students, and educators to get involved.”

Albany Housing Data Initiative

Why do public investments in housing and infrastructure fail to revitalize some blighted neighborhoods? Albany, a city in the southwest corner of the state, is drawing on Georgia Smart support and guidance to develop and evaluate an automated housing registry that could help answer this question.

“As is the case in many communities, housing has fallen into disrepair in some Albany neighborhoods,” said Omar Isaac Asensio, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy and principal investigator for the Albany project. “Abandoned or uninhabitable properties have been purchased and cleaned up. But the community says, ‘We’re spending a lot of money on revitalization, but because data are siloed in different city departments and are not easily accessible, it’s hard for us to really quantify the benefits of these investments.’ In an effort to promote transparency, the city wants to integrate and analyze Albany’s housing data, which would help the community answer questions about the effectiveness of various policies or programs designed to help neighborhoods.”

For example, the Community Home Investment Program (CHIP) assists low- and moderate- income households with up to $25,000 in home repairs that affect the health or safety of those residing in the home. Eligible repairs include costly items such as roof replacement, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, and other energy efficiency measures. Today there is no way to link housing investment information with energy performance data in the city. As a result, the data needed to evaluate the effectiveness of housing programs are inaccessible, not just to the public.

Asensio’s team is collaborating with the city to bring together multiple databases to map housing address information as well as 10 years’ worth of utility records held by the city. Additional information from other city departments, including transit, code enforcement data, crime data, and other open data is part of the overall initiative, and will be added later.

“Under the leadership of Steven Carter, Albany’s chief information officer, we’ve already made strides on data collection, aggregation, and curation,” he said. “Now an open-data portal needs to be built, and data from more departments will be integrated into one place.” Using record linkage and statistical algorithms, the Georgia Tech team will create maps to visualize locations of blight and housing investments and tell the hidden stories behind the data, backed by rigorous analysis.

Albany is hosting participatory design workshops for the public and others to develop priorities about the initiatives that can be run through the portal and ArcGIS Hub in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Christopher Le Dantec and Debra Lam. Project partners include Dougherty County, the city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, and the nonprofit Fight Albany Blight.

“We need input from both the public and private sectors about what’s important to them because ultimately this process is meant to benefit communities,” Asensio said. The open-data portal will evolve with new data that the city adds over time, helping officials to do their jobs, improving fiscal efficiency and enhancing transparency throughout city government.

Urban policy scientists are often stymied by lack of access to data. “The Albany initiative allows researchers access to granular data about public investment and performance needed for rigorous policy and program evaluation,” he said. “This project could provide a blueprint to other cities to open up and visualize city data in collaboration with the academic research community, the public, government, and industry. Albany’s experience will be indispensable for other communities in our state, putting the city on the map for developing the latest analytical tools on open data.”

Connected Vehicle Technology Master Plan

Suburban Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, has experienced sprawling growth and increasingly heavy traffic in recent decades. County leaders, looking for solutions, took note of Atlanta’s North Avenue Smart Corridor and similar high-tech projects around the country. Smart technologies can improve traffic flow and driver safety when vehicles share real-time locations with each other and with traffic signals. High-tech sensors on vehicles and roadways tell connected vehicles when to maneuver to avoid collisions, reducing crashes and traffic snarls on suburban arteries.

Now Gwinnett County is partnering with Georgia Smart in a project to engage multiple stakeholders across the state to set the standard for application of connected vehicle technology that can improve mobility and traffic safety.

The county aims to develop and implement a master plan for autonomous real-time data sharing among connected vehicle applications, signals, and other roadway sensors. The Peachtree Industrial Boulevard Corridor has been chosen as the pilot smart corridor for technology deployment, which is scheduled to begin later in 2019.

First, though, the county needs accurate baseline data about current traffic patterns.

“We’ve had access to high-fidelity traffic signal data, but data from vehicles on the road are very sparse,” said Angshuman Guin, the project’s faculty leader and senior research engineer in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“We were only getting a location point for emergency response vehicles every five minutes, but we need GPS points every second to understand the bottlenecks in traffic, as well as where and why the vehicles are losing time on the roadway during an emergency response.” He is collaborating with the county fire chief to outfit 15 fire department vehicles with Georgia Tech-designed sensor packages.

“We are using the fire department data to know exactly where and how long the delays are for emergency response vehicles — and compare those data to signal data. Was a delay associated with the signal being red? Or was it associated with traffic alone? This study is only possible because of our collaboration with the county, the fire department, and the other partners involved. We would not be able to gather the data we need without them.”

Guin will help the county assess the benefits of Connected Vehicle applications such as Emergency Vehicle Preemption, which help responders reach emergency scenes more quickly and safely. He will also simulate traffic operations and apply safety analyses across all systems.

“We are helping the county develop strategies, leveraging connected vehicle technology, for extending the benefits of preemption by implementing anticipatory queue flush operations at intersections to reduce the delays experienced by emergency vehicles, and to also improve safety at intersections,” he said.

Gwinnett County and Georgia Tech are collaborating on the project with the Georgia Department of Transportation and the cities of Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, and Suwanee.

Most connected-vehicle pilot efforts focus on interstates or high-density business districts. But many commuters and other drivers in the Atlanta metro spend more miles on suburban roadways than in the city.

Suburban arterials are typically more challenging for smart communications technologies. Heavily traveled suburban roads with higher operating speeds and irregularly spaced intersections make driving more complex and dangerous. That’s why the suburban Gwinnett County corridor could form the backbone of the Connected Vehicle Technology Master Plan to improve driving experience with connected vehicle technology across city and county lines throughout the state.

Chamblee Shared Autonomous Vehicle Study

The city of Chamblee is attracting young people and others who seek a walkable, lively urban experience without the steep rents of Atlanta’s popular, higher-density neighborhoods. The Chamblee MARTA rail station in suburban DeKalb County has been a crucial drawing card for commuters relocating to apartments in the city’s redeveloping core.

Chamblee has succeeded in redeveloping properties near MARTA with urban apartments and new restaurants. “Now the city wants to expand local transit opportunities to link the MARTA station to other nearby neighborhoods, some with redevelopment projects already underway,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the Georgia Tech urban design program.

Chamblee is using Georgia Smart funding to partner with a Georgia Tech team, led by Dunham-Jones, to study how improving urban design and passenger experiences can help build ridership for an experimental mode of transportation — the shared autonomous vehicle.

Chamblee anticipates operating an autonomous shuttle along a mile of Peachtree Road with five stops for 10 hours a day, seven days a week. A second phase could extend the shuttle east to Assembly Yards, a mixed-use development under construction in Doraville. At first, the shuttle would operate semi-autonomously with an onboard attendant in case of emergencies.

The Georgia Tech team is developing a set of recommendations for the city and a best practices manual to improve the user experience of getting to, waiting for, and riding on autonomous shuttle buses. How might they expand walkability throughout Chamblee and build social capital? Can bus stops serve as community infrastructure? The guide could be applied in other communities in Georgia and around the country.

Dunham-Jones and Ph.D. student Zachary Lancaster studied 18 autonomous shuttle projects in pilot stages worldwide, the great majority of which operate on private streets or in office parks. They interviewed industry experts, visited pilot projects, and surveyed potential passengers of Chamblee’s shuttle.

The autonomous shuttle experience must be appealing to compete with other transit options including private cars, electric scooters, and ride-share services.

“Once the shuttle is operating, it’s important to have a data management plan that allows for feedback from users,” she said. “That will help the city improve the shuttle system by learning more about how people respond to it.”

The pilot project will also develop an operations plan for the shuttle and conduct preliminary engineering while engaging the community through public meetings, city strolls, and other events. Other city partners include the City of Doraville, Stantec, MARTA, and the Assembly Community Improvement District.

Introducing small autonomous transit vehicles to city streets could eventually transform how people get around.

“With autonomous shared vehicles, you could replace the typical big bus that comes once an hour with four or five small shuttles along the same route arriving every 10 minutes, and that would be a game changer for encouraging more people to use transit,” she said.

Concluding the Projects and Next Steps

As the inaugural Georgia Smart projects draw to a close in September, the team with support from the Strategic Energy Institute will produce a Georgia Smart Community Playbook. Distilling best practices and findings for all communities, the playbook is being developed by Christopher Le Dantec, associate professor in the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.

The playbook will include a data guide.

“The guide prompts communities to answer a number of questions about data they found useful in their projects,” says Le Dantec. “Where did these data come from? What are the data standards? What are the data’s limitations? What might another community do with similar data and where can it go for help?”

Each project concludes in September with a local public event to explain how the community pursued its goals, gained results, and made plans for the future. Each cohort, then, provides a road map for the next one.

But projects supported by Georgia Smart won’t necessarily come to an end after one year. They may evolve with new sources of funding.

“Georgia Tech scientists and engineers have become part of the local team,” said Lam. “Many of the researchers want to continue engaging in this work, expanding the pilot projects with new grants and other opportunities.”

Georgia Smart is supported by the Georgia Power Company and the Atlanta Regional Commission, the lead sponsors, as well as the Association County Commissioners of Georgia, Georgia Chamber, Georgia Department of Community Affairs, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Municipal Association, Georgia Planning Association, Global City Teams Challenge, Metro Atlanta Chamber, and Technology Association of Georgia.

For more information about Georgia Smart, visit www.smartcities.gatech.edu/georgia-smart.

The links below have additional information (in PDF format) on each project:

Source: https://www.news.gatech.edu/2019/04/15/smart-communities-address-transportation-housing-flooding-challenges?utm_campaign=daily-digest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=dd-article:11028|2019-04-17

March 13, 2019 By AMK

U.S. News ranks Georgia Tech graduate programs among the best

The Georgia Institute of Technology’s graduate programs were once again among the highest ranked in the nation by U.S. News and World Report.

The publication released its annual graduate school rankings for 2020 on March 12, 2019, and Georgia Tech continues to be ranked in the top 10 for the College of Engineering and each of its specialties.

The College of Engineering ranked No. 7 (No. 3 among public universities), and all 11 of the programs within the college are ranked in the top 10 for the seventh year in a row, including:

Industrial Engineering (No. 1)
Biomedical and Bioengineering (No. 3)
Civil Engineering (No. 3)
Aerospace Engineering (No. 4)
Environmental Engineering (No. 4)
Computer Engineering (No. 5)
Mechanical Engineering (No. 5)
Electrical Engineering (No. 6)
Chemical Engineering (No. 7)
Materials Engineering (No. 7)
Nuclear Engineering (No. 9)

The Scheller College of Business was ranked No. 29 overall, and its part-time MBA moved up eight positions to No. 17. Scheller was also ranked in the following specialties: Production/Operations (No. 7), Supply Chain/Logistics (No. 11, up six positions), and Information Systems (No. 8, up four positions).

In the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, the Public Policy program moved up four to No. 39 overall with the Information and Technology Management specialty at No. 2, the Environmental Policy and Management specialty up one to No. 11, and Public Policy Analysis at No. 20.

Not all disciplines are ranked annually. Computer science (No. 8), chemistry (No. 20), mathematics (No. 26), physics (No. 28), earth sciences (No. 38), and biology (No. 54) were ranked in 2018.

Source: https://www.news.gatech.edu/2019/03/12/us-news-ranks-georgia-tech-graduate-programs-among-best