Workshop/Collaborative Research: The Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Methods and Solutions to Urban Transportation Challenges

This grant provides funds for a workshop that will gather researchers from transportation, computer science, and other relevant disciplines to explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered methods and solutions and future research directions to address urban transportation challenges. With the quickly growing quantity and variety of transportation data, AI technologies combined with other analytical methods have demonstrated a great potential to improve scientific understandings, transformative informed decisions, and innovative, proactive management solutions for urban transportation infrastructure systems, although significant challenges are also recognized.

This workshop will attract distinguished experts from academia, industry, and government agencies to work together to identify the tremendous research and educational needs and challenges in developing AI-empowered methods and solutions to urban transportation challenges, and further stimulate transformative research and education activities in both transportation and AI communities.

This workshop includes two phases. Phase I has four podium sessions, one round-table discussion session, and one work session to investigate and document the potential and challenges of leveraging AI-empowered methods for fundamental urban transportation management research. Topics to discuss include traffic sensing and monitoring, congestion mitigation, shared mobility, user behavior, and associated equity and environmental issues.

Phase II dedicates three podium sessions and one round-table discussion session to explore new education and training needs and directions for developing future workforce and responding to this big technology revolution in transportation. Overall, this two-phase workshop will produce a highly desired strategic research and education agenda for transportation and AI research communities to jointly develop AI-empowered methods and solutions to address urban transportation challenges and their workforce development needs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.