New Faculty Positions

The bad state of our economy is really showing up in the number of transportation faculty positions available in the current hiring cycle. I can only remembers 3 positions advertised this past months: UMN, S Calorina and FAMU/FSU. Those who graduated last summer and hired as a faculty must be blessed. Do you know who are they? They should not be too many compared to several years ago.

T-ITS

I just received the Dec 2009 issue of IEEE Transactions on ITS. It is now officially called T-ITS. Over the years, the number of paper published per issue has increased, so is the number of issues per year. The journal is certainly growing. However, I do notice a decline in the no. of papers among the civil engineering folks. This, perhaps is not in direct proportion to the number of CE-based associate editors. Is it because there are several new competing transportation journals (e.g., Transportmetrica, Jr of Sustainable Transportation, and even the Jr of ITS) that draw the CE authors away? On the other hand, T-ITS is the window for us in ITS research in EE and EU.

Jonathan Upchurch

I have mentioned ASU and UMass Amherst. I've forgotten to mention Jonathan Upchurch. He spent his early faculty career at ASU. I remember at one time he was the ITE President. To my knowledge, he is the only faculty-president of ITE. He then moved to UMass. He left UMass for Washington DC for a political appointment (I don't exactly remember what position was that, but it was either in DOT or house committee). I believe his position at UMass was replaced by EP. Anyway I've not seen or heard about him for many years (like Kanafani). Does anyone know where is he? Is he still active? Even Google doesn't know the answer. So, if anyone can provide some info, you should be smarter than Google.

Great Firewall of China

The Great Firewall of China was a subject of President Obama's speech when he visited China. This is a real problem to the academics and researchers! In my last visit to China, I had problem checking my emails (univ. a/c, even web-based) from the hotel's internet. It must have been blocked. After some attempts, I managed to use my VPN to access my univ. server. I also couldn't access airlines web site until I used VPN. What does this has to do with transportation? When there is a conference in China, people like us who cannot live a day w/o internet will bound to complain. I hope famous hotels like Sheraton, Marriott, Hilton etc will not have internet censorship problem (perhaps this is where value pricing can be applied). A few friends in PRC university prefer to use their sina.com or hotmail.com a/c to communicate with me, because their univ. a/c are being "watched" or sometimes unrealiable. When I review PRC journal papers, I often write or receive peer comments like "The literature review is insufficient....". I wonder if this is also because the authors' internet that has limited access to journal web sites to download articles. For sure, we can't expect libraries in PRC universities to have hard copies of TRR, JTE etc that date back to 1990. So, I am 100% for freedom of internet access. Until that happens, I hope ScienceDirect etc can set up a PRC version of server located in China, in collaboration with some PRC government unit or a famous university library.

UTCs

UTCs=University Transportation Centers, not Urban Traffic Control Systems.

These are research centers established with funds authorized by SAFETEA-LU (not me). The funds are administered by FHWA under its RITA office. There is a Council of UTC but its role is to coordinate the UTC's activities. I don't think CUTC has administrative, executive or decision power. I've not involved in UTC politics so I cannot say much other than the above.

There are several levels of UTC. Tier III and Tier II UTCs are mostly earmarked by congress. Tier I, Regional and National UTCs are thru open competitions. Of course, as you move up the categories, the annual budget increases and the pre-qualification become tougher. Many Tier III and II UTCs are in lesser known universities w/o transportation programs. I've heard many complaints that these schools didn't even know what to do with the money. So, they hire a transportation faculty as the UTC Director to start from scratch. But, UTC budget is not enough for him/her to hire 1 or 2 more faculty and give scholarships to attract research students. It is a tough job. And what happen to the faculty after the 3-5 year UTC fund has ended? I also don't know how genuine the competitions at Tier I, Regional and National UTCs are. Some schools seem to have permanent UTCs.

A UTC usually has a director (selected from senior faculty). If the fund is sufficient and activities warrant, there will be a full-time or part-time manager or admin assistant. The director, in consultation with the board members and faculty, develops a budget and work plan which usually includes proposal submission, review and award processes for research projects and fellowships, outreach to schools and industry, etc. The competitions are limited to faculty and students associated with the university (internal competition).

Projects from DOT and local agencies are more practical oriented (e.g., signal priority, incident management, asset management etc), but UTC is a good source of money to do more high risk, theoretical research. That's why I value UTC, despite some money are not well-used in some schools.

There is a map of UTCs in RITA's web site (http://utc.dot.gov/list_of_centers/utc_map/). I spotted several obvious patterns in the map: (1) TAMU has 2 UTCs; (2)there is no UTC in South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming; (3) the map is blank west of TAMU, all the way to New Mexico and Arizona (and even San Diego if you look at the Mexican border). There are also photographs of student awardees taken at every TRB (http://utc.dot.gov/student_awardees/). Do you notice any pattern in the photos?

Many UTCs funding cycles ended in FY2009. I've not seen any RFP or re-authorization. Can someone tell me what is happening now?

Retire as Associate Professor

When we go for job interviews, in our P&T packages, we always set (at least BS) high career goals. The modest goal is to become a full professor. But, these days, with the promotion criteria set higher and higher, and funding support gets lower and lower, many of us will not become a full professor when we retire. Have these colleagues failed? I don't think so. In my earlier posts, I've compared or measured career achievement using no. of publications, funded $, no. of PhD students etc. But, we also have to look at the constraints one is facing. If HM teaches in Louisiana or Mississippi state (two of the poorest states and with lowest literacy rates), can he achieve this much? If DL is in Montana instead of Minnesota, I'm sure he will not be as productive. On the other hand, if you teaches at Cal Poly, with 4 courses per semester, no PhD program and can still manage to write 2 journal papers a year, I consider this a great achievement. Therefore, when reviewing colleague's P&T package, we must always have this in mind. Professors who write 10 journal papers a year, graduate 5 PhD students a year, win $1 million funding a year all have to let go of some things. We all only have 24 hrs/day. I know HM only sleeps 4 hrs/day, TO at UBC only go shopping once a year (15 minutes on Christmas eve), someone else only eat dinner with his wife on Sunday, a friend of mine spend more time in business class cabin than at xIT's campus, my own advisor didn't even know who was Joe Montana..... Many professors are either single do not have kid so that they can work long hours and during weekends, and even so the standard of their (or their unsupervised student's???) publications suffers. It is hard for them to appear in scheduled class hours, meet with research students and know students at a personal level. So, some of us may deliberately "slow down" after becoming associate professors in order to have a life with love ones, go to happy hours, have a hobby at home, put more effort into teaching. It is hard to balance between the 2, so which path is more important to you? You decide your own life and enjoy your choice!

Massachusetts

It must be the Thanksgiving month that triggers my constant thought about this New England State. When we think of the universities in the Commonwealth of MA, Havard and MIT always come into our mind. When an international student says "I'm going to Massachusetts", people will think that he/she is going to MIT. However, the public research university in MA is University of Massachusetts or UMass. Several campuses: Lowell, Dartmouth and Amherst have transportation programs or faculty. Nathan Gartner at Lowell is probably the most well known among us who do traffic flow, operations, simulation, ITS. He has been the chair of TRB Traffic Flow Committee for many years. He has all the degrees from Isreal, and even won the first INFORMS Transportation Science Best Dissertation Award. I don’t know his colleague at Lowell. Dartmouth has a transportation faculty named Margarita Zarillo. She is in the physics department. The CE Dept in Dartmouth is very small and does not have a transportation program. Anna Nagurney status in OR and networks needs no mention. She is like the Barbara Streisand in the entertainment industry. She is not in CEE Dept but in Management Science. Nathan and Anna can rival the MIT faculty. UMass Amherst has a sizable transportation program. About 10 years ago, I came to know Paul Shuldinal, David Noyce (not to be confused with David Boyce), Katheleen Handcock. In 1999, Emily Parkany joined the group. But in several years, DN went back to Wisconsin Madison, EP left for Villanova and KH left for Virginia Tech at Falls Church. I don't know the reason so I do not want to speculate. For 2 years, PS was alone. Finally he decided to retire in 2003. He was still half active as an Emeritus Professor, holding the Center director position for a few more years. UMass Amherst then hired John Collura from Virginia Tech to lead and rebuilt the program. He hired Daiheng Ni, fresh from Georgia Tech, and later Song Gao (from MIT and then Caliper). Recently Mike Knodler is also promoted to the tenure-track faculty line. UMass Amherst has the faculty strength and number, and offer a program distinguished from MIT. My view is that the program is no match in the northeast states like VT, RI, CN, NH, ME and event NY, PA, DE. It meets the DOT's need and serves its constituents well. So, that’s my story about UMass. Not to forget there is still Gary Spring at Merrimeck College.

MIT

Finally I decided to talk about MIT. To go to MIT was my goal during high school days. But it didn't happened. My first encounter with MIT was Ben-Akiva's book and Sheffi's book when I was fresh from PhD. Then I met Moshe, Joe and Cindy at conferences. Joe was nice and fatherly. Moshe was a man of a few words. Cindy always reminds me of Hillary Clinton - smart career woman. I've not met Nigel. There was Harris, who didn't get tenure and was later replaced by Chabini. Chabini disappeared on the 5th or 6th year at MIT (I think around 2004). I met him several times from 1999 to 2004. He must be heart broken - a talent wasted. I think Chabini's position is still vacant. There was a joke among us that there was a position at MIT that nobody dare to apply, and when an assistant professor starts working at MIT, he has to start looking for another job immediately (using his start-up grant). I notice they (MIT professors) never work together. They make a lot of money with their private businesses, esp. Moshe and Yosef. They seldom publish. They seldom grant tenure or write good tenure reviews for colleagues in other universities. Perhaps they set the standard so high that they are becoming the victim of their own success. Few of their recent PhD students become faculty (I only know of Mark Hickman, Song Gao). Most of them work in the industry (e.g., Caliper, Cambridge Sys). The statistics cannot be compared with Daganzo or HM's students. Why? I suspect this is because of the lack of proper mentoring, or students become disilluted with the academic profession after the "MIT experience". There is another reason. Many colleagues in my college, when screening for young faculty applicants, often ignore MIT PhDs (except for US citizens). When I asked why, the answers were (1) they are very smart, but not (undergraduate) student oriented, or they are way ahead and therefore cannot put themselves in an average student's shoes; (2) they are not good communicators (no teaching experience, work as RA all the time). I think all the above reasons can be summed up in one issue: the program needs more down to earth human touch (there are MIT students who by nature of their characters do not fall into this). So, Beavers, am I wrong? But, MIT is still MIT after so many years, unlike GM.

P.S.: Mark Hichman and Song Gao are very nice persons. They are my good friends and colleagues in the field, and I have my highest respect for them. To me, they are the ambassadors of MIT. I hope Ismail can one day return to the academia, perhaps KAUST?

Authorship

For a paper with multiple authors, who gets to be the 1st author, 2nd author, 3rd author etc? The most frequently given answer by my peers is: the one who has the most contribution should come first. I agree with them. But the problem is how to measure contribution. Does a very busy professor who spent only 15 minutes at 1am to give the student a research idea has more contribution than the student who spent the subsequent 6 months to do modeling work? How about the 3rd guy who take the results and spent 3 weeks to write a nice story in publishable form? Without the 3rd guy, the work will never be published. I mean, all of them are essential, but who contributed the most? Some of us like to use "intellectual" contribution. Then, according to this definition, the professor must be #1, and the writer, the students who spend months counting cars or processing data will be out! Some like to add a big name as the last author to give the work more creditability. No wonder some ASCE Fellows or NAE members tend to have more papers as the 3rd, 4th or even 5th author towards the end of their careers. This has become the tradition of some research group (i.e. the boss name must appear in all the papers). Some of our colleagues like to play musical chair: a team of 3 researchers take turns to be 1st author. A different variation is, if A in CE Dept is collaborating with B in EE Dept, B will be the 1st author in IEEE transactions while A will be the 1st author in CE journals. This, I think, it necessary for our career survival. I have no problem with this as long as all the authors agree. Some professors like to put students before their names in order to motivate the students. These are noble acts but sometimes it can be back fired, because some reviewers may doubt the quality of the student's work. On the other hand, some of us believe that putting professor name's as the first author give the paper more weights. From another angle, there is this citation effect. If there are 2 authors, it doesn't matter whose name comes first, because we will cite the paper like Daganzo and Laval (2005)....you see both names in the text. However, if there are three authors, only the first one gets to be mentioned, e.g., Mahmassani et al. (2001). A famous professor friend does not care about this anymore. He is already a full professor. So he said 1st author is more important for young faculty's tenure, so he always put young colleague's name before his. So, there are so many factors that determine the order of the authors. Things get even more complicated when some universities use different weights to the order of the authors when counting publications. So, what arrangement do you practice? Does your advisor discuss the issue of authorship with you when writing paper?

Proposal Writing

Right after I graduated with my PhD and started working as a faculty, I realized that I need to write my own research proposal. Then, how to start? My advisor did not train or ask me to help in proposal writing. So I have to learn it on the job. I've learnt from that experience. Since then, when I prepare for a proposal, at the minimum I will ask a PhD student to do literature search/review, brainstorm with me and even do some software test. For a NSF proposal that involves a major effort, I'll try to make it an independent study course and give due credit to the student. This is especially when that student has been targeted as the RA for that project. However, I know of a few professors who make use of students in a class (not independent study, individual study or writing course) to help them with proposal writing. For example, a professor taught a class which had 10 PhD students. He/she gives each student a topic related to his/her research (not necessary of immediate interest to the student's research interest) to write a proposal. Will you do this? I won't.

Climate Change

The hot topics nowadays are climate change and energy. In recent years, we have seen a shift in transportation-ITS programs to transportation-logistics programs, to transportation-energy program (UC Davis). Note that I do not mention transportation-security program. Soon, there should be transportation-climate change programs. Basically the transportation-climate cycle is (1) transportation systems affects climate; (2) climate change affects transportation systems. Part (1) is pretty much covered by 2 Billion Cars. The most likely research to do that relates to (1) are
- Vehicle design or fuel that saves energy or emission
- Anything that can reduce trip counts or VMT, e.g. transit, rail.
(2) has more research for folks like us who do network modeling, GIS etc. The key is to link climate measures (rainfall, flood, temperature, wind, snow etc) that will affect the link capacity, node capacity and perform analysis. To think of it further, you can also say increase in temperature and UV will affect pavement durability, sign reflectivity or even pavement markings. These can be linked to safety, asset management and traffic safety. Our friends in hydraulics and bridge engineering will have many research topics too!

AIDS Research

Last Friday one of our PhD students in systems engineering invited me to serve as a faculty member in his PhD dissertation committee. He was about to take his proposal defense (some universities call it qualifying exam) and was proposing AIDS (automated incident detection system) as his dissertation topic. I scanned through his early draft and gave him some advice. Incident detection has been a research topic for the past 40 years. Many of our existing transportation faculty did their PhD research in AIDS. When I looked at his list of references, I saw familiar names like Han, Cheu, Lin, Abdulhai, Teng, Qi, Dia, Sheu etc. Some professors such as Stephanedes, McDonald, Van Zuylen, WWang, FWang, Adeli, HFan had students doing AIDS research. At the first glance, AIDS seems second in popularity compared to DTA. But, if you take a second look it is a simple but hopeless problem. Students who selected AIDS for research had a very well defined objective, scope, data set, performance measures. One can probably complete the work in 1-2 years. So, this is a relatively safe PhD topic. It is the same problem year in and year out but people just used different data processing techniques - hardly any breakthrough. Everyone is trying to outdo the predecessors by improving the DR and reducing the false alarms. But the improvement is only very marginal. I think the limitation is not with the data processing techniques. It has to do with the overlapping nature of traffic data with and w/o incidents and in addition, traffic flow propagation. No wonder most of the TMCs are still using manual AIDS (watching video cameras). So, AIDS dissertation has become like James Bond movies. Dr No was refreshing, but after several decades and episodes, I'm getting bored with the same plots: car chases, sexy women, guy fights, M, Q and at the end Bond saves the world like god saves the queen. So, in conclusion, AIDS was a good topic for PhD, but now it is only good enough for a MS thesis.

O-D Estimation (part 3)

PARAMICS O-D Estimator (PODE), because it is part of PARAMICS, is hard to comprehend and use. The reference manual does not explain the algorithm in detail. In fact it is harder to read than the Modeller’s Reference Manual. But, this also creates a lot of excitement. Imagine the thrill of exploring a new hard-to-get like-to-tease you Scottish girlfriend. I hardly find any publication by our peers that talk about the use of PODE. Perhaps this is because PODE was launched at the time where interest in PARAMICS has started to decline. May be it is simply not popular (then why am I writing about it?). I’ve tried it for a medium size network of about 50 zones, but the process of convergence was too slow (it took 24 hours) and even with that the results were not reasonable. The biggest influence factors were the initial pattern matrix and the weights. So, after fooling around with Miss PODE for 2 years I dumped her.

One the other hand, YCC did had an interesting twist on ODE. His version of ODE is to write an external loop that enclosed DynaSmart-P to adjust the Time-Dependent O-D Matrices. His process apparently is more transparent. I think he presented his work at INFORMS, TRB and ITSC not long after Quadstone launched PODE.

Anyway, the most accurate O-D estimation method is to do household survey. If you do this, it is pretty much like obtaining the O-D matrix, calibrate the trip distribution model to fit link traffic counts. Then we are back to the 1960’s, no real-time or next-day application. It's working in the reverse order from the ODE problem in ITS.

Chicago 2016

I would like to take a real-time incident detour to Demark today, because Omaba will be there to lobby for Chicago 2016. What does this has to do with transportation? Of course, olympic games is a special event that must have a transportation management plan in the bid documents. I know that IOC, FIFA and FIA require all the olympic games, world cup finals and F1 to have an ITS plan. I'm not sure if NBA, NFL, MLB has such ITS requirements. If not, I wish ITS America or ITE can help to lobby for one. This would certainly create more jobs for our transportation engineers, consultants and eventually spread to the universities.

Although big consultants will be the main contractors, I can't help but link LA 1984 to UC Irvine, Atlanta 1996 to Georgia Tech, Beijing 2008 to Tsinghua, London 2012 to Imperial College. Are our friends in Northwestern and UIC involved in this proposal? If Chicago gets to host the olympic, we may well have an ADVANCED II. This could be a perfect opportunity to apply DTA models, because the sport event's starting times are fixed. I won't want to disclose too much of my idea but I'm sure YN is smart enough to know. Atlanta 1996 made Autoscope famous. May be Chicago 2016 will revive Motorola?

Anyway, the politicians who question Obama's trip are talking about cost-benefit analysis. They argue that all the recent games, except LA 1984 are money losers. To me, if such analyses have included life cycle social benefits of urban redevelopment, congestion management, ITS etc, the B/C ratio must be very high. May be Chicago School of Business can think of a solution.

So, Beckham helped London, now where is Michael Jordan?

In terms of host cities, I wish in my life time I will get to see cities like Pyong Yang, Tehran, Riyah, Tel Aviv, Karachi, Yangoon, Tijuana or Taipei host this event (for various reasons). When this happens, at least you know some peace has happened on earth.

O-D Estimation (part 2)

Let's talk about estimating ODM from link traffic count.

I can't think of any simpler network than 1 link between 2 nodes. In this network, link volume = O-D.

Next, there is 1 intersection with 4 2-way approaches. Things are relatively simple if all the lanes have exclusive turning movements (not shared lane) and detectors are placed at stop lines (assuming that the detector counts are accurate). Then, let's move the detector 0.25 to 1 mile upstream such that vehicles can change lane between detectors and stop lines, or we don't know the lane discipline. Steve Ritchie and his group at UCI has tried this. They've expanded the network to several intersections in Irvine, and I-405. Their job is made easier by the help of vehicle signatures.

If we expand to 10-20 intersections, and w/o vehicle signature, just rely on loop detector counts, there is this program called QUEENS-OD which was marketed by Van Aerde many years ago. I still wonder why he didn't update the new version to call it VT-OD.

There are many algorithms. Basically you need to start with an initial assumed or old old ODM. The algorithm iteratively adjusts the ODM until the errors between assigned link volume and actual counted volume meet the termination criteria. Actually, estimating ODM from link traffic counts (smaller no. of counting locations c.f. link no.) is to backcalculate and guess the vehicle paths. That is, we make adjustment or guess the ODM in the new iteration, perform path-based traffic assignment, then get the link volumes to compared with the target traffic counts. If I say O-D Estimation == Path Estimation, would someone object? Actually link-based traffic assignment can still come out with traffic counts, but I just think that path-based approach is more logical.

I'll write more later about PARAMICS Estimator and DynaSmart. Meanwhile, I welcome your comments or information to share.

O-D Estimation (part 1)

When I was a PhD student, I thought that O-D Estimation (ODE) was a senseless research topic. Why? Because those days more traffic software used entry flow+intersection turning % to specify vehicle movements. These data are easy to collect. When ITS started, there was a need for O-D Matrix (ODM) because w/o it nobody know how to do route diversion. Because of this, simulation software like PARAMICS, VISSIM have an option to specify vehicle demand in the form of ODM. To take it further, DTA folks proposed the time-dependent ODMs (one matrix for 1 departure time interval). With the needs in ITS, incident management, microsimulation, I became appreciative of ODE. But it remains as an "estimation".

I'll write more later.

Web Sites

Ajay Rathi and NETSIM may be too old for young readers. So, I am going to post something of more interest to the young generation: web sites. Internet started when I was a young professor. Then, we only have HTML. Nowadays, we expect a descent department or transportation program has a good web site, with Flash, Active X, Java Applets etc. What is a good web site? I once attended a web design workshop organized by my university's center for teaching and learning. In that workshop we pulled out our parking department's web page and 20 faculties who participated in the workshop did a critique. It was an interesting session. I am always surfing transportation programs and CEE Dept web sites all over the world. I can hardy find a web site that is up to my standard (even I'm not quite happy with my own web site, but I have to conform to my university's design standard). When I see a below average web site, I wish I was surfing in Venice Beach in CA (remember Baywatch?). Let's do an exercise, say, pick the web site of the CE Dept closest to Cuba (by its name, not geographical location). Among the my criticisms are:
- Too much wasted (blank) space
- No professional quality photos (b/w, scanned, varied background, distorted aspect ratio)
- Inconsistent font size
- Hard to read bio in professor's web page (indentation, bullet points etc)
- Improper use of color contrast (e.g., black font on forest green background)
- Wrong job info: a young faculty who earned PhD in 2008 has the title of full professor!
I think I have said enough. I save my words on the ease of navigation.

A web site is a potential student's gateway to the dept or program. It is like the brochure or store front. I once discouraged my nephew to go to a computer science school in Cal State because it's web site was so out-dated. Can you imagine that a computer science dept does not make full use of IT to recruit students? It is like us using OHP to make presentation at TRB 2009, or a conference still asking for camera-ready hard copy of your paper. We as scientists must keep up with the technology. Otherwise I suspect you are not keeping up eith the latest research. When a dept files for ABET a year before the actual campus visit, ABET staff and evaluators will actually check your web site to make sure that all the degree program information is up there, and all the professor's publications are up to date. I'm sure funding agencies (NSF, EPA, NIH etc) will also check the potential PI and Co-PI's web sites. So, if you claim that you are an expert in traveler information systems, cyber-computing, AI in transportation, TRB committee in data and information system group etc make sure that you have a good web site. Nowadays, web site has all kinds of certifications, but they are more for data security (like your credit card number). May be we should start an ISO certification or star rating for web site's USABILITY (there is this term in computer science that refers to under friendiness). May be web site rating will eventually works its way into a school ranking criteria.

So, have you look at the website I mentioned above? Of course it is in Florida.

ORNL

Oak Ridge National Lab is under Dept of Energy. So, you would imagine that the prime interest of ORNL is transportation energy, engine design, fuel efficiency etc. But ORNL is also interested in transportation planning, security, supply chain, environment etc. I still cannot correlate these topics with energy. Can someone give me a lesson on this? I first came to know ORNL when I was a PhD student. Those days I played with NETSIM. Through NETSIM I came to know Ajay Rathi. He was a NETSIM expert user, but was in legal trouble in late 1990s and have not been heard or read (his papers) again! In 1990s, I also knew Edmond Chang and Chin Shih-Mao. I met them at TRB and some other conferences. They all do traffic operations, simulations, ITS stuff. Edmond has came out to set up his company. Chin is still there and active in many projects. As a national lab, I am disappointed with its transportation division. Note that the keyword is "national": a national lab should be the best lab in a country's public research facilities (including public universities, but not counting private industry/universities like Bell Lab, Watsons Lab, Media Lab, JPL). The web site and photographs of research staff also looks unprofessional. I don't know of other staff then these few I have mentioned, because I've not met new friends from ORNL in conferences or read about their work in journals. These days, ORNL seems to have close ties with UTK's transportation center in GIS and security. Can someone share something? It seems that ORNL and Knoxville are popular with researchers who originated from an island.

IRB

IRB=Institutional Review Board. The name is misleading. It sounds like the auditor for the whole university. No! No! IRB is actually a unit on campus set up as required by federal law. It's purpose is to protect human research subjects (i.e., human guinea pigs). The intention is good, but this is another layer of federal bureaucracy. If your proposal or project is funded by Federal $ and involves using human to participate in your experiment, then you are subjected to Uncle Sam's IRB review. In transportation, if we do travel diary survey or household travel survey, we need to protect the data collected from our samples, to avoid them falling into the wrong hand. But, even if you do public survey with only one question such as "what is your value of travel time?", you are still subject to IRB clearance. There are a series of forms to fill (as usual) plus courses to take to get pass the IRB. In some cases, even the entire research team needs to be certified by IRB before you are legally allow to conduct the survey. This has, in some occasions, delayed the research completion date. I have, in one occasion, suffered from this because my co-PI was on sabbatical leave in Alaska. To me, IRB is an necessary evil. And, according to IRB guideline, there is set procedure to follow in public survey. First, you must let the people know what this project is all about, how much time is needed for the survey, how much personal data will be collected, how will the data be protected, whether they want to receive a copy of the results of the study, etc etc, and finally, they must sign a statement to say that they have been informed on all the above and agree to take part in the survey voluntarily. When you have finished all the blah blah blah, the public will be so fed up that they say "No, thanks." This must be the rules set up by lawyers wearing suits and ties in air-conditioned offices, but never go out to the streets to do survey. I wonder how many of us actually follow the rules to tell grandmother story when we recruit our survey participants. The original idea of IRB is to protect patients who are the subject of medical research (e.g., taking new medication, eat 10 hamburgers a day, smell poison gas or subject to something that may cause injury etc). But, we have no choice but live with IRB if we want to do travel behavior research, ask them to sit inside a driving simulator etc. The only way to by pass IRB is not to ask personal information that will disclose his/her identity. So, if you need to do survey and to avoid IRB, the best way is not to ask for personal information (or ask the surveyor to observe and record the gender, age, etc quietly). Still, you must submit all the standard documents and request for IRB "exemption". If IRB grant you an exemption, then you don't have to tell grandmother story and ask for autograph. Otherwise, there will be periodic reports, audits etc.

Sun Devil vs Wild Cat

Check this out:
https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/1439066
Another successful coup by ASU!

Transportation Researcher Who Doesn't Know How to Drive

I don't know how to give this post a shorter title. Anyway...here is the problem: Most of our PhD students are from China, India and other developing countries. Have you realized that these students do not know how to drive or w/o a driver's license when they have just arrived in US? Then, how do we expect them to code traffic simulation models (with driving logic, traffic rules), TA transportation courses etc? My dept chair used to joke to me: "You want this guy to be your TA for traffic engineering? He doesn't even know how to drive!" Perhaps, when we have a project and needs to deliver, we have no other choice when our own US students do not want to do PhD. Yes, the don't-know-how-to-drive students can follow the user manual, examples but the model behavior will not be as "smooth". Do we expect them to know that the min headway is 1.5 seconds, and the mean reaction time is 1.25 sec? Without driving experience, they also don't know what to look for when making field observations, or make recommendations for design improvements. I've found that a very good basic question to ask them is "What is the length and width of a typical car like Toyota Camry or Honda Accord?" I bet none of them can give a near-correct answer. Some of them don't even know how to cross the road correctly in the first semester! Perhaps this is less of a problem if we ask them to do research in transportation network modeling, travel behavior etc. Topics related to public transportation, bicycles or walking will be closest to their hearts. Therefore, I always pass a copy of DMV's driver handbook to newly arrived master/PhD students, to encourage them to familiar with traffic rules and to get a driver's license ASAP. Not many people drive exactly like the handbook, but it is a good starting point. I encourage you to do like wise. Luckily, when I did my PhD I already had a car. For this reason, I have found it a lot easier to teach US students traffic courses, because they know what I was talking about when I discussed car-following, gap acceptance, passing sight distance, dilema zone, start-up delay, TWLTL etc. Have you thought about this problem? Do you have similar experience as a PhD student? On the other extreme, there are students like CP: all practice no theory. There is no perfect student or perfect solution. We have tested all the fundamental theories in PhD comprehensive written exams. Perhaps we should all make driver license a pre-requisite for PhD qualifying exams! I know that many of our poor students just have licenses but don't drive. But I think it will be too much to ask for proof of car ownership and insurance. What do you think?

New transportation blog!

I have a new competitor, and he is a big one!

http://fastlane.dot.gov

This is not the "fastlane" in NSF. But certainly we can smell the new research topics there.

PE

PE=Professional Engineer, means you can put PE after PhD in your name card. It also means that you are "licensed to practice", i.e., to provide engineering services in a particular state, esp. to state agencies. A PE can legally set up its own business (hear the cash register ringing?).
In US, each state has its own rules on how to become a PE (but national FE and PE exams are the same). I know California it the most difficult (esp. for structure engineers due to seismic hazards). The general steps are:
1. When in the senior year in a US program, or when doing master or PhD, or after getting a US engineering degree, one should take the national FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) Exam. This exam is a cup of tea. It basically test one's broad knowledge in the 1st 2 years of engineering courses (e.g., mechanics, maths, chemistry, physics, electrical circuits etc) + basic civil engineering stuff (e.g., soil mechanics, concrete, hydraulics). After you pass this exam, you are officially called EIT (Engineer in Training). This helps you to get a job.
2. Work for 4 years under the supervision of a PE (your boss). Full-time master or PhD study can count as 1-year of work experience maximum. Some states count experience as a faculty as equivalent of actual engineering work experience.
3. After accumulating enough work experience, apply to the state PE board. If the board thinks that you have enough experience, you'll be asked to take the 8-hr national PE (Principle & Practice) Exam. Again, this exam is academically no big deal. It basically test your general knowledge in civil engineering in the morning session, and chosen domain (transportation in our case) in the afternoon session. You'll become a PE after you pass this exam.
Top research universities (e.g., MIT, Berkeley, etc) do not care if the faculty is not a PE. The reasons are obvious. However, schools which emphasize (somewhat) on professional preparation of students do givecredit for faculty who become a PE. I've heard stories that faculty were given salary increments after becoming a PE, or given extra points in tenure evaluation. Quite often, PE is an issue when ABET evaluates a program. The issues are (i) not enough PE among the faculty; (ii) passing rate of students taking FE exam is too low. Some schools have resorted to coaching students to take the FE exam. Some schools even discourage poor students form taking the FE exam so that the passing rate of those exam takers can improve. I know for sure one world class university's CE dept in the south/southwest is doing this. I don't think this ethical. Perhaps NCEES or PE board should investigate this.
So, you want to become an EIT and eventually a PE? It is better to have one then none. It definitely helps if you are doing a BS or MS or PhD and plan to work in the industry after graduation. If you want to be a researchers or post-doc or faculty, PE adds to your resume. Who knows, you may get layoff or fail to get tenure and needs to use the PE license to make money.
I'll talk about FE and PE exams later.

Transportation Channel

If you switch on the TV, there are food, travel, golf, shopping, MTV, real estate, weather, animal, court, military channels. If transportation is so important in our daily life, why is there no transportation channel? The closest is car racing (Speed) channel, but that is available only in cable, not satellite. So, what should be covered in the transportation channel? Let's start with car first:
- Car shows
- Car reviews
- Car maintenance
- Safe driving
- Scenic drives
- Traffic report (from local TMC)
- Car and driver (FM and his Kawasaki, Karl Malone and his truck, SS and her Civic Hybrid, Klimsman and his VW Beetle)
- What people do to/with/inside their cars
- Transportation research (professors, students and their labs)
- Happenings in transportation industry: GM bail out, cash for clunkers, bridge collapse, conferences
- Any thing related to transportation policy and technology

If the above is not enough to fill up the air time, we can expand to other modes as well:
- Airline and airport reviews
- Shipping industry
- Logistics and trucking
- Bicycle
- Transportation history
- The list goes on.....

Now, how to keep the station going? Money can come from advertising revenue from car manufacturers, dealers, insurance, auto part suppliers, tire companies etc. It's a big industry out there. Still no taker?

We must have a big name to be the anchor/speaker, like Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking. Perhaps we can invite a senior or retired transportation professor to be the anchor or show host. How about John Collura? Ken Courage? Joe Sussman?

Dean

Our college has a new dean today. In most US universities, the dean is appointed by the president. The appointee is either from an internal search (among dept chairs or associate deans) or from an external search. Being appointed by the president, his/her job is off course to execute the president's plan for the college. The plan may not be written, but the dean's job performance indicators are usually written in the contract. Also, since the dean is appointed by the president, tenured faculty are always suspicious of this new boss. This is particular sensitive if the dean is from an external search, as he/she will have a tenure that "parks" in a department - he/she may or may not help the dept as a dean, but will be part of dept's headcount and budget, probably will not contributing much to research, teaching or service once he/she steps down. To sum it up, unlike the chairs, the dean is not the "people's choice". Junior faculty has no choice but to go with the flow. The dean is very powerful in the college because he/she controls dept's budget, salary raise, promotion, tenure, new hiring, lab space, your office space and even the photocopy machine and telephone bill. So he is like the CEO of the college. Once of my PhD committee advisors could not receive his tenure because the dean did not like him. I have seen deans functioned in four universities. It is a dirty job. Once their terms are over, they either leave the university or become a center director in a remote location on campus. No wonder the deans are well paid (in the order of $200K for a 12-month appointment). Being a dean also means one has to give up his/her research (no time for that). One senior faculty of my college sums up very well: "the dean will only be the dean for his term of a few years, but we tenured faculty are here for good until we retired." I don't remember if any of our transportation colleagues is/was a dean. Do you know?

Money Talks

The Cash for Clunkers program is work very well in the market. The only complaints I read/heard so far are the paper works dealers need to submit to get the rebates (we call this federal bureaucracy). Fuel efficient cars are selling fast! Congress is proposing another $2b from the stimulus money for the program! This amount is going to jack up the sales of another 500,000 vehicles. The person who propose this program is a genius. He/she certainly knows that MONEY TALKS! This is an excellent chapter for transportation economics and transportation policy course!

Oops! I forgot to use the politically correct term: FINANCIAL INCENTIVE.

Oops, oops! In discrete choice model, the most important term in the utility function is of course COST!

Missouri

The state of MO does have a good number of transportation faculty in 3 universities. University of Missouri - Columbia (UMC) in Missouri is the Berkeley equivalent in California. UMC's mascot is tiger (w/o woods). They call themselves Mizzou. Mark Virkler is the most senior faculty and CEE dept chair. He used to be very active in highway capacity, safety etc but has slowed down in recent years because of his age and because of admin appt. I still see him at TRB every year. He is a very nice, fatherly guy. I'm glad that Carlos Sun has him as a mentor. The 2nd faculty, Carlos Sun, joined UMC from Rowan University, NJ. Carlos is one of the very few guys with EE background but PhD in CE (from UCI). As a guy with EE background, he used to play with traffic signals, VMS, detectors but has also moved into work zone traffic management and safety. There is a rumour that Carlos is taking sabbatical leave to do a law degree in California. Has he finished? He will be the only one expert in transportation law! The youngest guy is Praveen Edara who recently graduated from VT. No prize for guessing his university from India: it's IIT-Madras again! He plays a lot with traffic simulation with Joe the FHWA-guy. The center director is Charles Nemmers. Charles teachers some courses and do some research but he is officially not a faculty - he does not have a PhD. A couple of years ago there was another faculty Cynthia Wilson (last name is an approximation). I guess she has been replaced by Praveen. The second university used to be called UM Rolla. Last year UMR changed its name to Missouri U of Sc and Tech or MST (why not Missouri Institute of Technology, or MIT?). About 5 years ago Gary Spring and Mohammad Qureshi was there. In about 2003 Gary Spring returned to New England to take up a chair position at Merrimack College, MA, to start a new CE program there. He looks like the movie star Nick Norte. MQ is a Pakistani who loves to eat. He is Han Lee's 1st PhD student at U Tennessee at Knoxville. I'm not sure if MQ's "Mo Space" still exists in the cyberspace (I'm not sure if the "Mo" here refers to Missori's zip code of his first name). He left to take up a center director position at Jackson State. He was too young for that position (he left when about or after just receiving tenure at UMR). He didn't do well there, left and is in private practice now. For a while, UMR was struggling w/o a transportation faculty, until 3 years ago they found Gulam Bham (Benekohal's PhD student from UIUC). So, UMR replaced a Pakistani with another Pakistani. Then, a year later a Korean guy name Hojong Biak joined him from VT. Both of them claim that they are doing ITS but I think what they are doing is actually traffic operations. Two other major universities, UM St Louis and UM Kansas City do not have a transportation program. But there is a lady faculty, P-W Lin, at UM Kansas City. If I tell you that her PhD is from Maryland in 2006 and her research topic is network modeling, who do yo think her advisor was? The answer is not HM. The correct answer is GLC. Now you see, Missouri is really diverse with American, Peruvian, Indian, Korean, Pakistani and Taiwanese! BTW: there is a Prof Emeritus Henry Liu at CEE Dept at UMC, but he is not the same Henry Liu at UMN or the Henry Lieu at FHWA.

To cite or not to cite?

Today I have a meeting with my student on a TRB paper he was writing. One problem he had was citing references. He was not sure if he must cite a reference that was not readily available in the public domain (sometimes we call this unpublished report). The purpose of citing this ref is to support our problem statement in the INTRODUCTION. If a reader is interested to follow up on the source, he/she would have a hard time getting this reference to read. This reference is actually a report written by Txy. My student actually got it from one of his konnecion working in that institute. He said that this buddy had to use his internal working email account (not student's email) to download from the institute's internal library. It is not even in his buddy's university library. We couldn't find any related work of it that is published in a place indexed by TRIS. So, the question remains: is this lone work worth citing? Is it credible enough, since it has not gone through a journal's review process? I personally do not have problem leaving it out. The problem could be worse if someone who is unaware of this report propose a similar study, this will lead to repeated work - a waste of research grant! On the other hand, the PI and Co-PI of this institute can always propose a continuation (phase 2, like CTM Part II) of this research and nobody else will have the "exclusive" background knowledge in the full proposal writing! Since we have the "insider" info, we can quickly do similar work (perhaps with our own local data) and published it ahead of those guys at Txy. Then, I'll get all the credit. Legally, the first one who files patent or copyright is the "inventor" (as told by my university's IP office). Has my imagination gone too far?

So, to my readers: is this kind of work worth citing? What do you think?

List of References

It's time to write TRB papers. Year after year, one thing remains the same: students don't know how to cite and list references. I don't know why they don't learn from the so many published papers in TRR or the TRB author's guide w/o me explicitly say so. I remember when I was a student, I was so excited that I checked every thing. The only exception is former PhD student A (which I shall talk about in one of the future posts). The problem is compounded by Microsoft. They like to use Word 2007's "reference link". There are several default formats in Word but they are not up to ASCE or TRB specifications. I only accept ASCE format (preferred) or TRB format (only for TRB/TRR papers). The ASCE format (authors and year) gives readers an idea on whose work you are citing and the year of publication. The TRB numeric format does not have this info. Worse still, if you insert a new reference while making a revision, all the subsequent numbers have to be shifted in the remaining text. I also don't know why publishers come out with so many formats. Can't we just stick to one as the international standard, like? I can image how difficult it is to compile a citation database from the various formats. A search in my ISI citation records has revealed that several of my papers are listed differently in ISI. Some even cited my name wrongly (I assume that my citation count is under-valued because of this). Perhaps the library of congress or Thomson Reuters should enforce a standard citation and reference list format. Thomson Reuters is in a good position to push for it, because if your journals, conference papers etc do not follow that format it will not be accepted into the ISI or EI. All publishers need to do it to digitally upload the files and the software can easily pick up the fields and entries.

9 Reviewers for a Journal Paper

Today I received the review comments from a paper I co-authored with a PhD student from a journal's editor-in-chief. I shall not mention the name of the journal (and you will know who this person is). But all I can tell is that this journal has a long name. Anyway I was shocked to see that my paper was reviewed by 9 referees. Based on my experience with this journal and the reputation of the editor-in-chief, I had expected 6. Getting 9 is crazy! Is the editor trying to give every author a hard time? I know he is trying to prove something. The comments I received are mixed, and some are contradicting (e.g., Reviewer A says something that is the opposite view of Reviewer B). Hence I cannot satisfy everyone in my revised version. I can only mix revisions with rebuttals. Nowadays, I receive about 1 new jr paper per month to review. Including re-reviews and conference papers, the average is 2-2.5 per month. This is the maximum I can handle in view of my teaching, research and service duties. I personally read all these submissions and only ask my PhD students for second opinions (and to give them some experience in reviewing papers). The journals I review papers for usually have 3 reviewers. Imagine, if every editor send each manuscript to 9 reviewers, all of us will get at least 3 times the work load! I have in hand a paper from this journal to review. On second thought, if I am 1 out of 9 referees, my comments may not be so important any more. May be I should give other journals a higher priority because my words have 1/3 share! So you know what is this journal? Young faculty: if you are keen to get your papers accepted/published ASAP for inclusion in your min-term (3rd-yr) review and tenure package, avoid this journal.

How to become a transportation faculty!

I met a PhD grad in a recent conference. I had actually gave her offer to do PhD with me, but she opted to go to a mid-western state university. I still don't know why but it is no point asking her now. She has been working in a consulting company for 2 years after PhD but now she wanted to be a faculty. She asked me for advice. It was obvious to me that she didn't do her homework on "how to become a transportation faculty". I honestly think that she would have a better chance with me as her PhD advisor if she had actually set up her mind to be a faculty several years ago. I can only advise her to look for a post-doc position, teach some courses, write papers and proposals like no tomorrow. After building some credentials, apply to some smaller schools or research assistant professor positions. But, the most difficult step for her is to get the post-doc position (the first step), because her publication record from her PhD work is minimal. These days, if a PhD student wants to be a faculty, he/she must work on it right from the 1st semester. Other than picking a famous advisor (who has a track record of producing faculty bound PhDs), selecting a hot research topic, be a TA, friends of TRB committees, 1st author of journal papers, make presentation at conferences, getting best student awards, help advisor to write proposals, supervise master and undergrad students, one must also go around and shake hands with as many professors in other universities as possible, to create an impression. From my observations, Indian students are way ahead of students from other countries in knowing how to play this game. But I must clarify that knowing how to play is different from knowing how to score!

TRANSIMS

Does anybody has any idea what is happening to TRANSIMS? I have not used TRANSIMS, but I know that it is still written in FORTRAN with text input (like MOBILE6). It seems that TRANSIMS is getting popular as the in-thing for activity-based modeling. RP and YC are trying to integrate TRANSIMS and DynaSmarter together in a NSF funded project. Can the expert comment? I would like to hear from Ramasamy.

Book Review

Some journals (e.g., JTE, Part C) have Book Review Editors. This position seems to be junior to the editorial board member. His/her job is to, of course, review books, or coordinate the review of books. Have you wonder why all the book reviews are positive? I can think of a few possible reasons:
1. The review is not single-blind (the book author knows who is the reviewer);
2. The publisher pays for the review (like car companies pay car magazines for test drives);
3. The ultimate punishment is, the publisher can ban the reviewer from receiving free examination copy of future books.

My PhD student told me that reading book reviews in transportation journals is like watching the reviewer "patting on the horse's axx". I don't really know what she meant. This must be what we Americans call "kiss axx". Having said that, I still wonder why I have not received my copy of DTA Premier for "review" or "pre-review". Perhaps their ESP tells that I am going to give my unreserved comments?

I wish book reviews are like movie reviews or restaurant reviews. You really get critics to put comments and give star ratings.

BTW: Amazon.com does have some interesting reviews by anonymous readers. I think they are more reflective and unbiased.

DTA Premier

I heard rumours that the DTA Premier produced by the Network Committee is out. How come I did not receive a production copy or even a draft copy? Have my friends forgotten about me? Now it seems that I am not in their premier distribution list. Let me check their web sites. May be I can find the draft for download.....

Kanafani

I had omitted Adib Kanafani as a member of NAE (he was elected in 2002). This is partly because I have not seen him for many years, and partly because his interest in air transportation is not closely related to mine. I wonder why my friends and readers from UC Berkeley did not remind me! He was the Director of ITS Berkeley for many years when I was a lowly student. He recently become the Dir of Executive Board of TRB - that triggers the reminder! His current chair is "Cahill and Cahill", unrelated to the Australian national soccer player (also Everton FC). I wish Boeing or Airbus will give him an endowed professorship, if not an airlines. I used his book in my travel demand class (as a student). I shall not comment on his book here.

Wow! This is Great! :-O

In US culture, we like to praise children to encourage/motivate them rather than criticize and scolding them. I pretty much subscribe to such philosophy. As I recall, my PhD advisor is a “carrot” but my MS advisor is the “stick”. So you can guess that I respect my PhD advisor with the upmost gratitude.

But I notice that, our parents and school teachers have gone too far in praising our children. “This is great” has become the norm. Even a normal or expected outcome is greeted with “Wow” as if something truely extraodrinaty has happened! Because of this, our students are becoming too soft: cannot take criticism, too sensitive to negative remarks, complain when we scolded etc. They think they can easily get good grades and satisfy us. This is part of the reasons that our school standard sucks!

So, we tend to say all the nice words and give compliments rather then criticisms. Even if we are not happy, we still try to be diplomatic. So, new comers always have to decipher the "secret codes". Below are some of the nice words from nice professors followed by what we really mean. N=Nice; NN=Not nice.

N: “You are not well prepared for the class.”
NN: “Why didn’t you study before coming?”

N:”You are not ready for this course.”
NN: “You don’t even know this simple thing? Stupid idiot!”

N: “It would be nice if you can put in more effort.”
NN: “You spent 10 hours only to come out with this? Go back and do more!”

N: “Your English needs improvement.”
NN: “Your English is so bad. You write trash. How did you pass your TOEFL?”

N: “Wow! You have gotten great inspiration for this original piece.”
NN: “I suspect you copied this from someone else.”

N: “I’m surprised and puzzled by this result.”
NN: “This result is impossible. You must have made a mistake.”

N: “The exam will be intellectually challenging.”
NN: “The exam is going to be hard. I’m going to fail you.”

N: “I think I need to spend more time to explain the concept.”
NN: “Since you still don’t understand, I’ve have to waste my time again!”

N: “Would you excuse me for a moment.”
NN: “Get the hell out of here. I'm busy.”

N: "I am concern."
NN: "I am very very worried."

N: "I have no confident."
NN: "You cannot make it. You are not good enough."

N: "You are not competitive."
NN: "Your grades are not good enough." or "You price is too high!"

N: "You are very senior in experience."
NN: "You are old and not productive."

N: "You are over confident."
NN: "You are arrogant!"

Crown Prince

As the end of the school year is near, our transportation group held a meeting today to discuss the progress of our PhD students. We have nothing much to talk about on most of our students; they are very independent and on the right tracks, except for the subject of this post. The student we spent most of our time is this person I shall codename him CP. CP has a BS and MS from a top university and has worked in our state DOT for several years. He is on DOT’s scholarship to do a part-time PhD here. Since he has a BS and MS from a branded university, with descent GPA, GRE and w/o needing our financial support, we couldn’t deny giving him a PhD offer. He has been in our PhD program for 2 years, taking 1 course per semester. seasoned faculty like me soon sensed that CP is a person that will take us some effort to be mold into an outstanding scholar. He is “very inquisitive” in our teaching: always like to discuss with instructors on homework and exam solutions; always request clarification on mark deduction (seek perfect answer); have more questions than open ended questions (for many design problems there can be more than 1 solution), have innovative interpretation of problems (we wonder how he scored so well in GRE's analytical test), late for classes, etc. We all notice that he became very happy after we added 1 mark to his homework or exam (a sign of insecurity). So we figured that he likes to negotiate and be happy with a compromised solution. It is a practice of our negotiation skills. How can we help him? Advice him to change major to economics or management? He is highly recommended (district engineer said that he was the #1 candidate for PhD scholarship in the entire state DOT). Our UTC wants to keep a good working relationship with DOT. Furthermore CP is a minority. Our program will have a big achievement if we graduate a minority PhD. He is an EIT, but we thought he made a mistake between EIT and PE; we actually went to our state PE Board to verify! Sigh…. I guess this is what my Chinese young faculty mean by saying “it takes 10 years of effort to grow a tree, but 100 years to groom a PhD”. So at the end of today's meeting, we still think that it is too early to ask him to select a dissertation topic. Our consensus was “he needs time to discover his topic of interest.” We'll wait for him to finish his 8th course and see how well he do in PhD comprehensive exam (written and oral). By then I would have retired and do not need to be involved. If I am still in town at that time I may come back and see his coronation!

Nevada

When I mention Nevada, most of the people will think of Las Vegas! In fact the main campus of University in Nevada is at Reno (UNR). UNR had a very famous pavement faculty Professor Jon Epps. He was one of the key researchers in the SHAP program and had a test track with driverless trucks. He has retired. The pavement group now consists of Raj and Peter. The only traffic faculty is Tian Zong, who is a geek in traffic signal hardware (like Darcy Bullock and Scott Washburn). Actually the location of Reno is pretty good - only 1 hr drive from Lake Tahoe and close to Sierra Nevada.

Then, there is UNLV. I first know about UNLV because of its basketball team (the Running Rebels) in the 1980s. At that time UNLV can even beat some of the MBA teams. Anyway, UNLV has a soft transportation program with faculties like Ed Neuman, Mohamad Kaseko, Harry Teng and Alex Paz. The focus "was" on GIS, automated people mover and traffic modeling. They used to host the automated people conference once every few years. Ed wa also the chief editor of Jr of Adv Transportation. Shashi used to be the "group leader" but he left to be the UTC Director of Iowa State. Actually he is well qualified and have much connections with the local agencies and casinos to to be the UNLV's UTC director. Recently UNLV has recruited Kachoo from Virginia Tech to lead the Tier II UTC. I don't know what is the new plan and direction but I know that Kachoo is an electrical engineer and his emphasis is in vehicle communication and VII. I thought every UTC has a specific focus (written in the proposal) and the direction cannot be changed easily. The program is certainly becoming very "dynamic" like Las Vegas, where everything is possible!

So between UNLV and UNR, where will you do PhD? In UNLV, if you cannot work as a RA, you can always find a job in those hotels or casino. Reno has fewer casinos, but I'll probably spend the summer in Lake Tahoe or Yosemite.

Arsene Wenger

I had a busy weekend watching WC2010 qualifying.

Who is Arsene Wenger (AW)? He is the manager of Arsenal Football Club (a.k.a. Gunners) in English Premier League (EPL). I believe he is the first foreign coach to manage an EPL team! Before joining Arsenal, AW coached Monaco, a relatively small club in the French 1st Division. At that time he recruited Glenn Hoddle as a player from Tottemham Hotspur. Hoddle later became England Coach for the 2002 World Cup. AW rated Hoddle as high as Michel Platini and he even said English manager didn't know how to build a team around a play maker like Hoddle. When AW was with Moncao, the team has world class players like Hoddle, Djokaeff, George Weah, and Klinsman for a short while. Back to AW. AW was the longest serving Arsenal manager (13 years already). Only Sir Alex has a longer record than him at MUFC. AW coached Arsenal to the 1st EPL unbeaten season for 49 games (42 in EPL + 7 games in FA Cup, etc). What impresses me is that AW has a civil engineering bachelor degree and a master in economics degree. No wonder his fans called him "professor". That's the connection to this post. Prof AW is well known for bringing international students and develop them into "PhDs". Examples of his PhD students are George Weah (Liberia), Victor Ikeba (Nigeria), Patrick Viera (France), to name a few. After a few terms, Arsenal owner actually wanted to give AW "tenure", but AW only wanted to sign 3-year contract one at a time. BTW: do you think AW looks like Asad Khattak?

On another note: there are not many football players who has a university degree. Another player I know of is Socrates, the Brazilian captain for Espana 1982 and Mexico 1986. Socrates is a registered professional dentist. He earned his degree and license while playing professionally in Brazil. Rai (Brazil no. 10 in USA 1994) is his brother.

More on Bora Milutinovic later.

Customary Units vs SI Units

U.S. is probably the only country that still uses pounds, gallons, miles, etc as units of measurement. Most countries, esp. Britian, has converted to SI units (the only use pounds when they talk money, but it is going to change soon). The beauty of SI units are: there are only 4 principle units: m, l, s, kg, for length, volume, time and mass, respectively. Everything in SI units are scaled by one thousand, e.g., mm to m to km. The customary units, sometimes called imperial units, are inconvenient (and there is no unit for mass!). Let's use Q=CIA as an example. The coefficient C can be applied to any I and A with SI units, and the unit of Q will follow whatever units you use for I and A. But, when using customary units, C can only be used, say, when Q is in cubic ft/sec, I is in inches and A is in square mile. You cannot scale up or down the unit in your calculation. I particularly dislike those AASHTO empirical equations that have customary units. You don't get this problem with SI. About 10 years ago, there was a campaign by ASCE to change all the engineering units to SI. Caltrans tried to change it but gave up after 5 years or so, citing the high cost of upgrading software and keeping construction parts (2 sets of steel beams, bolts and nuts, for both units). I believe there is a hugh cost for training workers too! These days, you don't hear such talk by ASCE anymore. Some journal's author guide wants all units to be expressed in SI, but no editor is enforcing this. Only a handful of highways in U.S. are using SI units in road signs and mile posts. I guess we can do things different from the rest of the world because our economy is still #1. On one occasion (TRB meeting), a faculty in UK laughed that we in US were "conservative" when it comes to unit. What can I say? I can't change that so I've to go with the flow.

10 more miles per gallon

Hurray! Today President Obama announce his proposal for new vehicle fuel efficient standard. Starting 2012 the average vehicle fuel efficiency will start to increase, up to 35.5 mpg (15.35 km/litre) in 2016. This is 10 mpg more than the current average. The standard is higher for passenger cars (39 mpg or 17 km/l) but lower for SUV and pickup trucks (30 mpg or 13 km/l). I don't have the details on how these efficiency is calculated, e.g., city or highway driving. But looking at the existing vehicle models, it looks like only Pirus and Civic Hybrid can meet the new fuel efficiency standard. Not even the Camry and RX400 Hybrid can survive. I used to think that GM is the evil empire, but Toyota is following suit. Why did Toyota change the my beloved RX to hybrid engine, but increase the internal combustion to 4.0L? Any fuel efficiency gain by the hybrid engine (at higher vehicle cost) is offset by the higher engine combustion capacity. We have been spoiled by GM, Ford, Chrysler and now Toyota is guilty to some degree. 20 or even 30 years ago, there were plenty of smaller cars with smaller engines with lighter body. Corolla used to be 1.6L and Camry 2.0L. Even Honda Accord was 1.6L. But now, the Corolla is 1.8L and a Camry or Accord is 2.4L, and some owners have "upgraded" to vans and SUV. GM used to say "we make these models (van, truck, SUV) because customer demand for it". For many years, I have been arguing that the consumer market demand is created by the manufacturers. Now there is strong demand for hybrid, but where is GM and Ford? If you want to know the details, you can go and read Dan Sperling's new book "2 billion cars". It is less then $20 at Amazon.com. I am taking this opportunity to promote Dan here. I was hoping that he would one day be the Secretary of Transportation (the 1st with a PhD in transportation). I still do.....

Lastly, I hope the new standard has addressed 18-wheelers. If every private owner drives a saloon passenger car, then no body can be safer, except for the monster trucks carrying containers on freeways. But then we'll have to address the implications in our freight and economy.

Grade Inflation

It's time to enter student grades for the semester. Grade inflation is a term that refers to professors artificially give student high grades to make student feel good. There has been complaints about the grade inflation at Harvard's undergraduate programs. But in most of the graduate programs that I know of, A and B grades are the norm. What I'm saying is that most of the professors give majority of the graduate students A and B grades. B is for those who just manage to "pass", and C is can be taken as "fail". Why? Because to enter graduate schools, you need a undergraduate GPA of 3.0 (B grade) or better. Only the A and B students get to enter master and PhD programs. So, they should be getting A and B most of the time. As part of ABET requirement, senior undergrad can take master level courses as advance electives. So, if you mix the graduate and undergrad students in the same class, giving most graduate students A and B make sense. Is this grade inflation? I don't know. When I was a young faculty, I believed that the should be more than A and B grades to distinguish graduate students with different capabilities. Nowadays, some graduate students have an attitude that they should at least get an B grade by default. On this, I prefer universities that use A+, A, A-, B+, B, B- etc rather than just A and B. As time passes, I've become more mellow and accept the industry practice.

CIVIL ENGINEERING

Have you ever wonder why civil engineering is called civil engineering, just 1 character short of evil engineering? Well, I also cannot find any documented history. I was told by my retired dept chair that in the old days (200 years ago, not sure where, probably in UK) when engineering program first started, there were military engineering and civil engineering. Anything not of interest to the military was being "civilized". At that time CE included ME, EE etc. Some even called municipal engineering. We were stuck with the name Civil Engineering since, until the 1980s it was fashionable to add "& Environmental" to the department name. My opinion is that, this is just a marketing ploy to deceive kids, parents and donors. If you look at the profile of any CEE dept., does the environment engineering faculty constitute the largest fraction (by headcount) in the department, or the largest share of research expenditure? Most likely no. The environmental group is about the same size as structural or geotechnical engineering. The most they have is a BS or MS program in environmental engineering. The word environmental was added because the environmental faculty wants to have a claim in the BS, MS programs (obvious this is related to their staff position and salary), plus research field to fight off guys in physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, industrial engineering, health science etc. That is, they see the funding opportunity from NIH, EPA as their cash cows. I also think that a environmental BS and MS programs are crafted out from CE's BS and MS programs so as to cater for more chemistry courses and students from chemistry and bio background. Because of this, I have some sense of mistrust for those environmental engineering faculty (they are always up to no good). If the same logic applies, then some departments or schools in the nation should be called Civil & Transportation Engineering. Transportation students need OR, human factor, basic automotive engineering and economics and even some IT background. Anyway, the trend right now is "infrastructure", "sustainable", "energy" engineering. So let's see which department is the first to add these words in their brand.

At this time there are very few CE depts with unique names: Civil & Coastal Engineering (U Florida), CE & Engineering Mechanics (U of Arizona), Civil & Architectural Engineering (UT Austin), CE & OR (Princeton, now no longer exist). Can you name any more?

SWINE FLU

Swine Flu is here! Our economy is already bad. We don't need another excuse to keep everybody at home instead of going out to spend money. If the situation turns out of control and the schools (and universities) need to be closed, I hope it will be after the final exam week. What can transportation researcher relates to? The first thing that come into my mine is the one extra "flu" check at the security gates. For departure flights, we need to bar passengers with flu to get onto the plane (an extremely enclosed space). For arrival domestic and international arrivals, we need to check for flu at the departure gates. Then perhaps, when we cross from one state to the next, we may stop all vehicles to make a check (pretty much like truck weight stations). I have not heard any complain so far for such proposal. I think everyone understand the life-threatening seriousness of this. If you are sick, your social responsibility take priority over your freedom of movement. But, it you do the same to check for driver license, driving insurance, many people (especially those pro-illegal immigrants) will complaint out loud.

ARPA-E

President Obama today announced the formation of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ARPA-E and NSF will have $400 million budget (not sure how long) to conduct research in energy and give scholarships to graduate students! My friends at UC Davis will be partying all night with free-flow of Napa Valley wine! May be next TRB they'll bring a few bottles of Opus One for the reception.

BTW: I just realized that ARPA sounds like NAPA.

CLEAN TEA

Have you heard of CLEAN TEA? It stands for Clean Low Emission Affordable New Transportation Equity Act. It is the new bill for congress to pass (see http://blumenauer.house.gov/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1442). From the first 3 words, you can bet that environmental sustainability is the #1 focus. Let see....now let me go to sip my GREEN TEA.

BTW: I'm afraid of any TEA, because the with the new TEA, no body is going to talk about me.

Edward Sullivan

This post is a tribute to Ed Sullivan. He passed away on Feb 16, 2009, exactly 2 months ago. In a short span of time (less than 72 hours) we lost 2 gentleman-scholars and I lost 2 friends. Ed's passing has great impact on me, to the extent that I've decided to reopen this blog to say something about him. Ed has a PhD from Berkeley, master and bachelor from MIT. With this credential he can be a tenure-track faculty in any university (except Berkeley). He spent 18 years teaching at Berkeley (as a non-tenure track faculty and a researcher at ITS) before moving to Cal Poly in late 1980s. His long lasting term at Berkeley demonstrated his passion for research. At Cal Poly, his interested turned to more on teaching. He directed the master transportation program there (there is no PhD program) almost by himself most of the time. He is known for his contribution in the SR-91 value pricing study. Later he also did some work on Caltrans TMC training simulator (in collaboration with UCI). He is a nice, humble person who can have a long chat with student on any topic. Talking to him is like talking to FM. He would have made a greater impact on more student's live and career if he remained at Berkeley. But, that is another political story I "Bear" not talk about (may be you can ask his poor "brother" AS). From the various tributes in Cal Poly web sites, it seems that Ed made the right decision to leave Berkeley. He is well loved by his students and colleagues over at Can Luis Obispo who value his contribution. I regret that I have not been in touch with him this past year. May Ed rest in peace. My prayers go out to him.

My friends are starting to depart, may be I should hang up my orange traffic vest and retire for good............................................

DTA

DTA is a sensitive topic in transportation research, but my blog will not be a real transportation research blog w/o an article on DTA.

DTA = Dynamic Traffic Assignment.

It is so popular that so many PhD students are using it as dissertation topic. But what exactly is DTA? I assume you know what is Static Traffic Assignment (STA). Compare with STA, DTA generally have 2 characteristics: (1) the origin-destination matrix (O-D) is time dependent (i.e., there are multiple O-D matrices each for a time period of loading); (2) the shortest paths are time dependent. The complexity comes when one adds elastic demand (O-D changes when drivers change departure times due to congestion effect); multiclass (either by vehicle types, or route choice preference, sometime also called asymmetric traffic assignment); definition of dynamic equilibrium; toll links, travel time reliability etc. That's why newbees are always very confused, and even seasoned professors cannot agree on a common definition of DTA. There are too many versions, each claim that it is DTA. It's like stir fried chicken, different chefs will come out with kongpo chicken, seasame chicken, sweet and sour chicken, Teriyaki chicken, orange chicken etc...but they are all chicken cooked in different ways. The model formulations already have so many variations. Then, there are analytical DTA and simulation-based DTA, and then some people talk about point queue, FIFO etc.....now even I'm confused. Some software vendor also claim to have their own version of DTA.

Have you wonder, after more than 20 years of research, why MPOs are not using DTA in transportation planning? I can think of 2 reasons: (1) the maths are too complex for planners/modelers to understand (they are usually from urban planning/GIS background so the maths scare the hell out of them); (2) lack of O-D data. Some may argue that the solution algorithms are not fast enough. But, I think, for a planning situation (for a network with a few thousands nodes and links) we can wait for a few days for the solution to converge. It's no hurry compared to real-time application. In my opinion the real problem is with the O-D matrix. STA is still used today because our census data (and trip generation equations) produce an O-D matrix for daily trips (24-hr O-D). Till now we can't even have a set of hourly O-D matrices for a typical day in a mid-size city. For DTA to be useful in actual planning, we need to have O-D data of at least 15-30 minute resolution. I hope we can go and knock at US Census Bureau to ask it to collect such data in the next round of census. Then, HM, Peeta, Chiu, Waller, Gao etc will say Halleluja......

On reflection, DTA community has gone off tangent. How can so many of us overlooked the lack of necessary input data and keep assuming that data is there, formulate the problem and solve the mathematical problem? We as advisers are supposed to point this out to our PhD students. It's like all of us are so engross in searching for a grass but we forget to look at the forest.

I for many years have been wondering why nobody is writing a book on DTA. The closest book that comes to this is the book by Ran and Boyce. But that was published more than 10 years ago. A lot of things have seen moved forward. Finally, I heard that Peeta and Chiu are writing a book about DTA. I can't wait to read it.

CAREER Stimulus

I heard from my dean who just returned from Washington DC today that NSF is re-reviewing all the CAREER proposals to select additional ones to be awarded from the stimulus money! Perhaps it's time to pick up your phone to call the program manager.

March Madness

We had gone thru our own version of March Madness (MM). Silly isn't it! Now the real MM is about be begin. For those of you who are not in U.S., MM refers to the top 64 (actually 65) college basketball teams playing in the annual national tournament. The games are held in March over 3 weekends (Fri to Sun) almost non-stop and shown live on TV. The semi-finals and final (we called it Final-4) take place in the 1st weekend of April. Some professors even cancel classes so that everyone can watch their university playing. I think you can watch it on www.ncaa.com or www.espn.com

For those of you who are shopping for college with transportation PhD and are basketball fans, these are the teams that have both:
Arizona
USC
TAMU
Purdue
Washington
California (Berkeley)
Maryland
Winconsin
UCLA
Texas (Austin)
Minnesota
Illinois (UIUC)

Also in the tournament are Utah Stata, Ohio, UConn, Arizona State, BYU, Missouri, Cornell, Florida State, LSU. Missing in action this years are Georgia Tech, Florida, Kentucky....

My favorite teams are Duke, North Calorina and UCLA. They are like Brazil, Italy and Germany in football, always make it to the World Cup semi-finals. Unfortunately, none of them has a strong ITS or traffic oriented PhD transportation program.

I'll be watching Texas vs Minnesota, California vs Maryland in the 1st round. Washington may play Purdue in 2nd round. UCLA may play Texas in the regional (3rd round). That's how I'm going to spend the next few weekends. I wish I can ask my friend HW to watch with me and provide his expert commentary.

Disclaimer

Things have gotten out of control! I apologize for not asserting my editorial judgment this past few days (after the post "Honk Honk!"). Let me quote one phrase from Obama: "Perhaps I've made a mistake!".
For this reason, I've decided not to display reader comments for the time being.
I beg readers to send me emails (safetealu@gmail.com) to nominate good professors. I'll compile the list before posting them in my blog. We have many dedicated professors in our field who deserve the recognitions. I prefer to praise and encourage my students for their strengths rather than screaming at them for their mistakes. But I've no hesitation in pointing out their errors. Same here to our colleagues.

I have only 2 nominations so far: David Levinson (U Minnesota) and Michael Zhang (UC Davis). Please let me have more!

Afternote: I subsequently received a nomination for Ryuchi Kitamura.

Best Advisor Award

These few days, there have been a lot of comments on some of the famous (now become infamous) professors even I am embarrassed to read. But I did not delete these comments because I did not disagree with them (to the best of my knowledge). Many of you who posted the comments must be their frustrated students who wanted some justice. I can understand.

Instead of looking at negative examples, why don't we learn from and reward our positive role models? I myself have been motivated by my advisor. My style of writing papers, proposals, advising students is largely influenced by my advisor. It is ionic that organizations, conferences and journals give awards based on research outcome, but not the process.

Among our colleagues, who take care of students well? Who respect and are courteous to students? Who meet students regularly, and know student's work well? Who stay up late at night to correct theses/dissertation/papers to make sure student meet the deadline for submission? Who write recommendation letters immediately after you told him/her? Who make effort to encourage students? Who eats, drinks and share rooms with students while travel to conferences (with the same sex of coure)? Who are treated well in return by their students?

Can I have some nominations (and your reasons)?

Maryland

Mention Maryland, we will all think about UMD at College Park. There are 6 professors at UMD: GLC (Gang-Len Chang), AH (Ali Hagani), DL (David Lovell), EHM (Elise Miller-Hook), LZ (Lei Zhang) and CC (Cinzia Cirillo).

We all know who is GLC, but it is difficult for people (especially people from mainland China) to figure out how his Taiwanese first name is translated into Gang-Len. To PRC, it should have been something like Jin-Lin. Westerners can hardly tell the difference. He is the richest professor in UMD. Even his advisor HM cannot match his grant $ and no. of students while at UMD.

AH is the most successful Iranian transportation professor. He used to chair the TRB network committee until Peeta took over. My ROC students joked to me that AH ancestors came from the Guandong province in China. Can someone confirm? AH is quite good looking, like Omar Sharif.

DL: He is CD's student, but he is not as great. Although both DLs graduated from Berkeley, the DL of Maryland is different car model (we call different trim) compared to the DL of Minnesota. If you search his resume, you'll notice that he mostly has Korean students. I wonder why. What do you think?

EMH is another HM's student. I only have good things to say about her. She is very good in logistics and network modeling. She is a nice, humble, capable American lady but she is no push over. I'm glad the she finally earned her tenure after moving to UMD from PSU.

LZ is Minnesota's DL's 1st PhD student, also 1st one to become faculty. He is very happy at UMD. After I received the news that he was leaving Oregon State, I suspected that he was going to UMD. Finally readers of this blog gave me the confirmation earlier than UMD's web site update. Thank you.

CC is the new Italian import. Nothing much I can say about her.

Interestingly, there is another guy called Michael Pack. He doesn't have a PhD (may be he is working on it) and he is the director of a lab in CEE Dept. This guy likes to blow trumpet everywhere he goes. I initially was fooled into believing that he was a professor in computer science! GLC and MP have teamed up and received a big grant from NSF for ITS-Evacuation in Capital Beltway. GLC is the PI (MP cannot be a PI because he is not a faculty). MP's proposal must be music to NSF's ears! I wish I have this musical skills.

UMD has a faculty search going on. HM's position has been filled by LZ. The current search must be for a newly created position. Let's see who gets to work in Mary-had-a-little-Land.

Correction: I've omitted Paul Schonfeld. How can I forget him after reading his papers on waterway and railroad transportation! He is more senior than GLC.

VMT Tax

I'm very disappointed to know that Obama's administration is not going to consider implementing VMT Tax (i.e., instead of the current gas tax of $/gal, we pay by the distance and location we drive). The reason given is the high cost of implementation. I was looking forward to the vast research opportunity and have been thinking of contacting our friends in Oregon. Singapore and London to write a grand proposal. So what is happening to the "Yes, we can!"? Oh! I forgot that it can also mean "Yes, we can ... kill a project!". My point is, if we invest some $ and effort to do it, we sure can figure out a way that is convenient for everyone. But no doubt the gas tax structure is very convenient to collect. If my logic is correct, IRS only needs to collect gasoline tax from Exxon-Mobile, BP, Shell etc a few companies which are the souces of the supply chain. They will then pass the cost to the players down the chain. But, I still going to support him. I think he will be a great president.

TRR Paper Submission: Remember

Today is March 13. We have 2 more days to submit the final version of TRB paper to be printed in TRR. Don't be caught up in reading this blog and forget this important date! Also, authors have 2 more days to download as many electronic papers as you can from TRR.

Transportation Faculty Salary

There has been discussions about salary of transportation professors. It is a sensitive topic but we all need to know our market values to avoid being cheated by our Chairs or Deans. But, making salary comparison (even within US) is difficult. So, let me state my scope: we only talk about transportation professors (don't compare with law, medical or business schools); refer to US$ and 9-month salary; do not include other income from consulting, business etc; do not include benefits like medical, 403K etc.

From my knowledge, assistant professor get around 60K-90K, associate professor gets 70K to 110K, full professors get 80K to infinity. You see the ranges overlap to a great deal. There are too many factors involved: the city (cost of living), your prior experience before you become a faculty, your prior salary, your negotiation skills, how desperately your boss wants to keep you, when you started your career (years ago the starting salary was much lower, and annual merit increment is also low) etc.....

The professor salaries of state universities are public records. You can find them somewhere in university web sites or the state government web sites. I don't have the time to do my "literature search" now. I'm surprised to learn from one comment that an associate professor in Florida can earn $140K.

I also sense a lot of interest in comparing our US salary with HK, SG and KAUST. That is another interesting topic. But, no body seems to be interested in the salary of Japanese, European and Australian professors. How about Chinese (PRC) professors?

Honk honk!

My intention of this blog is to share information. So far, I've been focusing on research topics, ethics, career development, university environment. I tried to restrict to the research and researchers in U.S. and international researchers whom we admire; otherwise the scope may get too big. I tried not to touch on personal life (like who is gay, who earns $200K/yr, who is having affair with who). But I am aware that knowing such information will help us to beware of sensitive topics when we have conservations with the subjects involved. I welcome comments and audience participation. Please moderate the tone of your comments. That way the topic may change somewhat but the discussions will not be out of control, and we all can enjoy this blog longer.

Face Off

This is not about John Travota and Nicholas Cage. It is about seeing double at TRB. Do you realize that several Chinese transportation professors in U.S. look almost the same? And 3 out of 4 combinations they almost have the same English last name. I bet their Chinese family names must be written in the same form. If so the similarities must be due to the family root 5000 years ago. Take a look at their web sites:

• William Lam vs Yafeng Yin (Yin looks like the 10 year younger version of Lam).
• Feiyue Wang and Yinghai Wang (the one at Washington looks 15 years younger than the one in Arizona).
• Gang-Len Chang and Wei Bin Zhang (the Taiwanese Chang looks 10 year senior than the PRC Zhang).
• Kelvin Cheu and Yi-Chang Chiu (this pair is the closest in terms of look and age, incidently both are related to El Paso. Cheu replaces Chiu's position. I also find that Chiu looks a bit like Yinghai Wang).

Can you think of any other?

Peter Chen

Does anybody know where is Peter Chen now? He left UIUC a few years back. I've not met him at TRB for a few years.

PhD Offers

By now, aspiring PhD applicants should have received offers (official or unofficial) from the universities or professors. Congratulations if you have at least one offer in hand. Irrespective of the number (>0), I urge you to quickly make a decision and reply to the professors ASAP, before 4/26. If you decline the offer early, you'll give the professor a chance to offer the place to another applicant. These days, getting funds to support PhD students as RA or TA is difficult. The worst that can happen to a professor is not able to fill the place, not having a student to work on a funded project and deliver the products. Image, if you have offers from universities A and B, and you decided to go to UA and decline UB. The position in UB is filled by student C. When you meet C at TRB later on, this story would have been a nice conversation piece. Or, the professor in UB may eventually offer you a post-doc.....

Before you decide, ask as many friends as you can about the city, university and professors..... do enough homework and make an informed decision.

Value Pricing, Paper Pricing and Karla Kockelman

In U.S., the terms value pricing, managed lanes, dedicated commuter lanes, express lanes etc, refer to anything other than the word "toll" but actually "toll". The idea is to give drivers a choice of paying for lanes or highways that have faster speeds and lower travel times. Theme parks have higher price for express lanes for rides, airport has express lanes for security clearance, USCIS has premium service for H1-B applications, FedEx and UPS have overnight shipping. So, why can't we have express review service for journals? Although most journals promise 3-month initial review response, responsible reviewers normally get more than their fair share of papers to review. So, whoever who is willing to pay a premium price should get to jump queue in the stack of papers on their desks (LIFO). To prevent reviewers to know who (the author) is "paying" for their service, the review process can be double-blind (blank out the name of the author). How to encourage fast review? For every paper review within the shorter time frame, the reviewer gets credit points (like frequent flyer miles). Such credit point can be used to pay for fast-track review in future submissions. Now, how does a reviewer qualify to be a "premium reviewer". Of course, he/she must be a regular reviewer, have good on-time records and recommended by editor or EAB. Some journal's submission/review websites are already tracking reviewers' response times. It is like a Gold Membership for an airline. Now, to go a step further, a few journals from a same publishers, e.g., Transportation Research Parts ABCDE and other Elsevier journals can get together to form a common system to exchange credit points. Authors/reviewer can create a credit/debit account but use it to pay for/receive payment for different journals. Sound similar to PayPal? But, not all the journals are of equal standing, so we need to come out with some kind of rating system (like 4-star airlines, 5-stat hotels). You want to publish in a high standard journal, you need to pay for higher review cost ( famous professors like CD or HM will always have high value of time, right?). We can use a composite index of citation, impact factor, rejection rate etc to determine this journal rating. This mechanism create a currency platform for the credit point transfer between different publishers. Now this is like Star Alliance, you get frequent flyer miles from United Airlines but can be used to redeem tickets in Lufthansa. Once the system is in place, authors can always use the research grant to pay for the express review fee. So, there is no out-of-pocket cost for these authors. I predict that in the future, you'll pay for every paper submitted for review ($100, for the 90-day or full refund deal). You pay a higher price for the express review process ($300 for 30-day review or if not, refund/get credit for the marginal cost of $200 if within 90-day, full refund if exceed 90-days). Friends who are near 3-year review or tenure won't mind paying $500 for gurantteed 30-day decision. Reviewers will take a cut, editor will take a cut. Everybody happy. Then, I believe only serious authors will pay to submit papers that have a good change of being accepted. Now, I can also offer a pre-screening service, like FM is doing for Part B. You pay $50 for a quick pre-review with 2-week turn around to see if you would like to proceed with the full review. You weed out those who just want to try their luck, or make repeated submissions for papers which are rejected by other journals. I'm sure Hojat Adeli will love this idea, but I better don't disclose my business plan too much. I am selling the detailed idea to IEEE and ASCE, and have a former student developing a prototype website. One proposal is for ASCE or IEEE members to receive certain $ of credit with their annual membership subscriptions.

The message behind this post is: (1) nothing is free nowadays, even airlines charge for peanuts and luggages; (2) travel time is a "cost", so is reviewer's time; (3) editors and reviewers of reputable journals have been providing free service while publishers make the money, it is time for us to make some money; (4) we have been paying to attend conferences and present papers, so why we publish journal paper for free? Journal papers are given higher weights in P&T process, so the cost of publishing a journal paper should be higher than the cost of a conference registration.

If Karla Kockelman's idea of credit-based congestion pricing can win her awards (not sure if her MIT Review award is based on this idea, but I am jealous of the many awards she receives - I'm sure her house is full of trophies more than Michael Phelps), my idea on "paper pricing" deserves a chance. I think my idea has intellectual merit and broader impact that revolutionizes the academic publishing industry, not just in transportation. If ASCE and IEEE does not accept my business proposal, I may write a NSF proposal and call it (as inspired by the Beckman et al.) "THE ECONOMICS OF JOURNAL PUBLISHING".

Gay, Lesbian and Minority

I've received a request to talk about gays & lesbians. I know a few professors in our field who have such sexual preferences. But I'm not going to tell you who they are. As far as I know, being a gay or lesbian has nothing to do with their job performance. In fact, the two lesbians I know are more assertive then their male colleagues, in terms of mentoring style, writing proposals. GLBT stands for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender. Being a GBLT will not give you any advantage in securing a faculty job. In fact, the Federal EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) Law says something like "... do not discriminate against any person because of his/her sexual orientation...". Employer cannot turn down a job offer once they find out you are a GLBT, but you will not gain any advantage. You're just being treated with equal opportunity. This fact is always misunderstood. If you do not believe, call up your university EEO office and ask.

Minority, according to my university EEO office, is U.S. citizens of African, Hispanic, Native American, Alaskan origins. Bring a minority will give you some advantages in getting a job. Ideally, if all things being equal, the candidate with the minority skin color (or with the correct name) will be given the preference. It is like in a soccer game, if a forward and a defender both tripped and fall down in the penalty box and the referee is not sure who is at fault, the attacking team will be awarded a penalty kick. Women in science and engineering are also treated the same as minority. Asians are not treated as such, because the proportion of Asian who are economically and academically well of far exceeds their ethic percentages in the entire U.S. porpulation. Say (not statistically accurate), Chinese-American or Indian-American occupies only 2% of the U.S. population. But there are 10% of the professors who are of Chinese or Indian origins. This is 5 times of the 2%. You see what I mean? Perhaps one should change the first name to Dominguez, Lopez, Diego, Ronaldo, Kobe or Barrack, or if you marry a minority, hyphenate the last name like Gracia-Park, Nguyen-Torres. I'm not sure if Alfredo Ang (the one who co-wrote the famous probability book) intentionally use this name for the said purpose. Alfredo is a Spanish version of Alfred. Having said that, I still feel strange that there is nothing that says about white American!

Stimulus Package

Want to be stimulated by Obama? You have a chance.

This morning my VP Research gave a briefing to all the faculty. It was a full house in our university auditorium. My colleagues and I must be desparate for research funds. There have been a lot of rumors, questions, confusion on the stimulus package. So WIIFU? The bill has research allocations for NIH, HSF, EPA, DOT, DOE (energy), NASA etc etc in the order from millions to billions. If you want to know the details, go to recovery.gov. But the catch is, in order to be funded, you must:
1. Spend all the $ in 2 years. That means your proposed project duration must be <= 2 years.
2. Projects will be award in May 2009.
3. Priority will be given to proposals that will lead to creation/prolonging of jobs, promote green environment and have long lasting effect.
No agency has announced its stimilus related RFP yet. But VP's spies in Washington DC have found out that agencies will most likely not make any new RFP (there is almost no time for writing proposal and review). If there is is any it will be this week, and with 1-2 week notice for submission. They are most likely select from the just-expired RFP submissions, and see who fits the criteria, or ask PI to modify the project time frame and deliverable. So, those of you who submitted NCHRP, TCRP, ACRP, NCFRP, or CAREER with <= 2-year duration, you should have a better chance this year. Who knows you will have a windfall this Spring.

Willing Teacher, Willing Student

I had a PhD student whom I shall call her S in this post. S came from a non-traditional student source in the east side of a continent. As a mentor, I always try to build up some kind of long lasting relationships with students. I mean other than a teacher and an advisor, I want to be their friends, senior colleague in the field etc. Some were scolded by me but after graduation or close to it we became good friends and shared many ideas and thoughts freely. Other than teaching S the usual traffic theory, simulation, traffic assignment, planning, ITS etc in the courses and in thesis research, I also tried to pass her information on the happenings in our field. Occasionally I expressed my concerns about her student life, financial conditions, etc, those usual things I ask my students. But I sensed that S was not very forthcoming with my mentoring style, and the communication tended to be 1-way. I could say a few sentences and received only a 1-word answer. She was a very good programmer, very sweet looking but soft spoken and reserved. On the other hand she was stubborn (e.g. when it comes to correcting her thesis work). I noticed that boys in the lab always invited her for lunches, dinners and parties. On those parties I showed up, she was often not there, or just sat quietly in the sofa drinking water. Till today I don't think there was any incident of harassment or similar nature. It's just that she didn't feel comfortable with the culture of the research group (she was the only student from her country in our group, but there are many folks from the same region). She was not anti-social as she was very active (VP) of her country's student association. I ran out of idea to open her out and to make her relax, or to breakdown her barrier. I knew that if she was able to let herself free of the reservation, she could be an excellent faculty or business woman like LJ. After 2 years, she applied and transferred to another university. She did finished her MS before the transfer. I did not invite her to my house for dinner before she left, nor asked her out for lunch as a farewell gesture. I figured that she would not accept my invitation, so I spared the embarrassment for myself and for her. I didn't want to meet only for formality sake. My point is: no matter how eager you want to teach a person and how good a teacher you are, the student must be ready, willing and have a heart to receive at the other end. S is close to finishing her PhD now (her current advisor is my good friend). She remains as my "mysterious" and "unwilling" .

Afternote: I realized that the term "unwilling" at the end is not 100% appropriate. S has followed through my academic advice for her MS degree. What I lament is that our conversations remained formal and official, and somewhat superficial.

Phone Interview

My latest PhD student is preparing for her phone interview. I told him to say "yes" to as many questions as possible: "Can you teach freshmen Intro to Engineering?", say "Yes"; Can you help to set up our dept's general computer education lab?", say "No problem!"; "Can you teach PhD level maths course?"; say "I haven't done it before, but I am willing to try!".....The key is to be enthusiastic, don't say "no" directly. By the time they called you up for phone interview, they have determined that your education and research meet what they are lookin for. Now they want to assess your communication skills and see if your personality is a good fit. Your objective is to project an image of a nice person to work with. The target is a campus interview, and if the prospect is good, negotiate all the terms later before you sign the contract. Don't be afraid to promise too much at this time, as you can use it to leverage for other items in the start-up package (some interviewer will forget what you say a month ago). For example. "Since I have to teach sophomore statistics, can the Dept support one of my PhD student to be my TA (not from my start-up budget)?", if not, back out of the deal or get a course release in the next semester. When you have to set up computer lab for the department, take the opportunity to use the Dept teaching budget to load up all the traffic simulation software! You get what I mean?