(upbeat classical music)
- [Michelle] Hello, and
thank you for tuning in
to Connections & Directions.
Our University of Michigan's
Civil and Environmental
Engineering podcast.
My name is Michelle Santillan,
and I am the CEE Marketing
Communications Specialist
and host of this series.
During our podcast, we
are featuring members
of our CEE community and
how their work reflects
our mission of engineers
in service to society.
We will be highlighting
our strategic directions
and our commitment to diversity,
equity, and inclusion.
CEE's five strategic directions
are human habitat experience,
shaping resource flows,
adaptation, automation, and
smart infrastructure finance.
We're here with Zhichen Liu,
a third year PhD student
in transportation studies.
Welcome and thank you for joining us.
- [Zhichen] Yeah, thank
you for having me here.
- [Michelle] How do you
see yourself participating
in CEE's strategic
directions with your research
and how do you see it
fitting in to one of those
or multiple of those five areas?
- [Zhichen] I think in general,
our next generation
transportation programs
is related but not limited
to the automation adaptation
and smart infrastructures.
And we
and my peers,
we are investigating
how to use emerging technologies
such as vehicle automation
and connectivities
to transform traffic
controls, network modeling
and other innovative
shared mobility services.
So personally speaking,
my research is about
how to leverage emerging connected
autonomous vehicle trajectories
and trust to transform the current network
equilibrium analysis framework
and to support better
data informed decisions
for policy makers.
- [Michelle] And specifically, how are you
engaging in this research?
What does the testing
consist of, if you will?
- [Zhichen] When transportation
planning agencies
make decisions about they need to predict
what is the travel, travel demand
in five or 10 years, and
then make decision about
what is the best way to deploy
our roadway infrastructures
and what are the tooling
and pricing strategies
we need to do to reduce
the overall congestions.
When these framework was
initiated like 70 years ago
there was little data availables
about how people travel every days.
So what planners at
that time can do is they
will manually collect some survey datas.
But that is expensive to collect it
and only covers a very sub
samples of the total populations.
But now things becomes different.
We got trajectory datas,
mobile phone datas
and loop detector datas, and
all these datas have abundant
of informations about how
people travel every days.
So my research questions is,
can we somehow leverages this
this kind of new emerging and
multi-source data trust to
better inform the transportation
planning strategies?
So, uh,
more specifically
what I do is I try to
integrate the game theory
perspectives is try to
model the interactions
among all travelers
in this real network.
And I also integrated
some recent development
in machine learning technologies
and try to use the neural
networks to capture better
capture the complicated
behaviors of travelers.
And after I got these kind of
neural network based models
I could try to learn
people's behavior directly
from the empirical trajectory datas.
And after I learning
about people's behaviors
I can go on to do some
policy optimizations to
design the optimal improvement schemes
for the policy makers.
- [Michelle] That's an excellent response.
And how do you envision
everything that you've just
described? How do you see that tying
into CEE's mission of engineers
in service to society?
- [Zhichen] It's, for me,
civil engineering is a field
that directly impact
everyone's everyday lives
and directly changes the
infrastructures around us.
And for me, being a engineer
in service to society is being
a concerned problem solvers.
We need to be concerned with what is going
on on the societies, what
are the emerging technologies
and what are the real needs of people?
And then we being, we
can be a problem solvers
who can use our knowledges
to give better and more
equitable solutions to make
the transportation system
better. Yeah.
- [Michelle] And you
just said more equitable.
How do you see DEI diversity
equity and inclusion
incorporated in our department?
- [Zhichen] I think the DEI
really offers a very welcoming
and inclusive environment
for the communities.
It helps to connect
and support students from a
highly diversified background.
So personally speakings,
I start my first semesters
remotely in China.
I did struggled at the beginnings
because I got the 12 hour time differences
and I got no classmates
around me to have any kind of small talks.
So I remember
at that time our department
have peer mentor programs
which pairs with a remote students
with a more senior master
student or PhD student.
I really appreciate it
because it helps to connect
me with our communities
even though I was doing
everything physical remotely.
And I appreciated my, my peer
mentors who gives me a lot
of suggestions about how
to help me to finally
smoothly transferred
into my graduate life.
Yeah, I really appreciate it.
So, these years I go back
to our peer mentor programs
but this time as a mentor
not mentee. And hopefully what I learned
through my experiences
could be something helpful
for this new coming student.
- [Michelle] Thank you for
giving back in that way.
And do you belong
to the Michigan Student
Transportation Organization?
- [Zhichen] Yes.
- [Michelle] And can
you tell us a little bit
about the work you do in that?
- [Zhichen] So the Michigan Transportation
Student Organizations.
We are a student interest
group that are open
to anyone who have an
interest in transportation.
We aims to connect student
with academic research
and industry opportunities
both on and off campus.
So we have really
three types of event.
The first is Lunch and Learn,
which is a bi-weekly seminars
which offers free food and
features prominent speakers.
We have invited professors
in our own department
our alumnis, as well
as research scientists
from the industry such as general model.
The second line of main activities
we do is technical tours.
We have our regular field
trip towards AM cities
and this month will be
organizing a field trip
towards the Detroit airport.
And additionally we do
support graduate student
and undergraduate student to
attend academic conferences.
So this years we coordinated
with C-CAT a to facilitate
student to participate
the transportation research annual meeting
which is a top tier
conference in our own field.
And I think undergraduate
student will especially benefited
from mentorship match.
We paired every undergraduate student
with an industry representative
at the receptions to
help them better kickstart
their first T R B experience.
- [Michelle] It sounds like you have a lot
of activities planned as an organization.
That's great.
And why did you choose to come
to Michigan's CCE department?
What would you say to
prospective students who
are considering the University
of Michigan in this area?
- [Zhichen] We really
have a strong reputation
and strong faculties.
The our engineering programs
is a top tier programs
in the United States and around the world.
And we got excellent professors.
Professor Ing, Professor Lu,
Professor Masoud and Professor Zhao.
They are all leaders in their own field
and their studies covers a very range
of interesting topics in transportation.
And the second thing that I really enjoyed
at Michigan is we have
a broad curriculums.
We have our professors offering classes
at covering a wide range
of interesting topics in transportation.
And also we are able to take classes
from other department as well.
Personally, I benefited a lot
from the optimization class
from the IOE department
and the machine learning
class from the Ix department.
These kind of broad
curriculums really helps me
to explore my interests
and develop a well-rounded skill
set for my own career goal.
And I do enjoy the
physical life in Ann Arbor
and we had a very engaging community.
- [Michelle] And you were saying that
you're serving as a peer mentor.
If you had one piece of advice
that you could offer to a
an incoming student or
a prospective student
at University of Michigan
CEE, what would that words of
what would that word of
wisdom be or that advice be?
- [Zhichen] For me, it's
just find your passion
and work hard.
You, you may take some
time to find your interest
to find what really fascinates you.
And as long as you find it,
all it takes is just diligence
and persistence to take you
towards a successful careers.
And hopefully what you do can
be beneficial to the societies
and make the general society
better in the same time.
- [Michelle] Thank you
for joining us today.
- [Zhichen] Yeah, thank
you for having me here.
I appreciate it.
(orchestral music)
- [Michelle] Thank you for listening
to our podcast conversation.
For more information about CEE at Michigan
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umich
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edu.
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