University of Washington

PACTRANS-SUPPORTED OSU 2017 SUMMER UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM PacTrans has a steadfast devotion to the education and cultivation of the next generation of transportation professionals. We do this by offering fellowships and financial support, sending students to prominent conferences to listen to or present work, we sponsor student competitions and student chapters of professional organizations, we host seminars and workshops, and we recognize excellence with the annual Michael Kyte Outstanding Student of the Year Award. One unique way that our consortium partner Oregon State University supports students is through their Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program. This year, the program awarded upwards of twenty fellowships (up from eleven last year) to support hands-on research. This year's focus is on "Engineering Solutions for Resilience, Safety, and Infrastructure Renewal." During the eight-week program, students participate in a specific project related to one of those three focus areas, learned about the engineering that goes into such work, and develops research skills to increase graduate school opportunities. Each student is equipped with a $4,500 stipend, and a research project with a faculty mentor, and has the opportunity to participate in field trips for site-specific field work, weekly seminars from noted speakers, and informal lunch meetings to discuss graduate school. At the culmination of the program, this past August, the students presented at a final symposium to highlight their work. This year, PacTrans is directly supporting the program by matching support for Scott Logan-Deeter's appointment in the OSU Driving and Bicycling Simulator. We are very excited to be involved in such a great summer opportunity that both furthers students' education and challenges them to go on to higher education. PACTRANS STUDENT RESEARCHER PRESENTS PAPER AT IEEE CVPR CONFERENCE This past July, PacTrans Student Researcher, Ruimin Ke (UW), traveled to Honolulu, Hawaii, to participate in the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Traffic Surveillance and Challenge Workshop. The IEEE CVPR Conference is among the most prominent conference focused on computing. Mr. Ke attended to present research titled, A Cost-Effective Framework for Automated Vehicle-Pedestrian Near-Miss Detection through Onboard Monocular Vision. This presentation is part of an ongoing effort between the University of Washington, PacTrans, and the Washington State Transit Insurance Pool, funded partially through a TRB IDEA grant, to test collision detection technology on transit buses in the Pacific Northwest. Pedestrian safety has generated broader concerns as the number of pedestrian-related fatalities keeps increasing in terms of the percentage to total fatalities. This is partly due to the lack of pedestrian data for conducting solid studies. Thus, near-miss, as a surrogate safety measure, has become popular in pedestrian safety. But extracting near-miss data from the huge amount of different resources requires efficient and automated methods. Computer vision techniques are powerful and able to take the information-rich traffic images and videos as input data. The study I presented at CVPR 2017 was about extracting vehicle-pedestrian near-misses from onboard monocular video data. This is among the first efforts to extract vehicle-pedestrian conflicts using onboard monocular vision. The framework we proposed is cost-effective. The experimental results showed that the proposed system is comparable to a commercial system with multiple camera sensors in terms of accuracy. 29 2014-2015 Annual Report

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