Six UCTC Dissertation Grants were awarded so far this year, and UCSB Geography graduate students Kriste Henson and Tom Pingel took home two of them: “I am very proud that our students received 2 out of the 6 fellowships granted during this cycle. There were 12 submissions total, and the judges are former recipients of these awards” (Professor Kostas Goulias).
According to its web site, the “University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) is a multi-campus research unit of whose theme is Transportation Policy and Systems Analysis… UCTC’s mission is to significantly advance the state of the art in transportation research and practice and to expand the workforce of transportation professionals. To accomplish this, we 1) carry out basic and applied research, 2) support top-flight, multidisciplinary education programs, 3) provide an ongoing technology transfer programs that make research results available to a wide range of users in forms that can be readily implemented or applied. and 4) co-sponsor new transportation research, education, and tech transfer activities and entrerprises during their critical start-up phases…UCTC’s program of research is conducted by University of California faculty and graduate student assistants. Research grants are awarded through a competitive process that relies on outside peer review, with reviewers drawn from other universities, the private sector, nonprofit organizations, and federal, state, regional and local agencies” ).
Kriste’s submission was titled “Travel Determinants and Multi-scale Transferability of National Activity Patterns to Create Activity Schedules for Synthetic Populations.” According to her abstract, “In order to model cities or large regions in a timely manner, a new methodology is proposed that will allow a person’s activity patterns to be ‘transferred’ to another person living in a different geographic location.
Tom’s submission, “Strategic Elements of Route Choice for Next Generation Digital Navigation Systems,” addresses the inadequacies of digital navigation assistants: “Better routes could be produced by intelligently gathering information about users’ preferences and travel strategies from objective information and expressed criteria. This dissertation provides a model for how such information could be integrated into personal navigation software…the dissertation provides a detailed analysis of the strategic thinking of individuals during route planning and provides a basis for the future analysis of route planning in other contexts.”
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