CEAE Faculty Candidate Speaker - Fatemeh Nazari: Human-Centered Smart and Resilient Transportation Systems

Transformative mobility technologies, such as connected autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, hold a great promise to offer cost effective and rapidly developing transportation systems. A fundamental question, however, remains underexplored as to whether and how these constantly evolving smart technologies can be leveraged to address the societal needs for climate-resilient, safe, accessible, and equitable transportation systems. An advanced approach to answer this question is to explicitly incorporate the perspective of humans, as the system end users, into the process of planning and design of the next-generation transportation systems. In this talk, I will present novel modeling frameworks to forecast human users’ reactions to emerging mobility technologies and design an interactive user-technology system through the analysis of the human decision making and emotions. Moreover, I will outline how these frameworks can develop regulations for the safe and ethical integration of autonomous systems into our lives through measuring users’ expectations and perceptions. I will also discuss designing equitable climate-resilient transportation systems for all communities by decarbonizing transportation and bolstering an integrated community-infrastructure resilience framework to withstand, adapt to, and recover from climate stresses. Intriguing to stakeholders and policy decision-makers, the outcome aims at pushing the frontiers of knowledge in travel behavior analysis and travel demand forecast through developing interdisciplinary methods ranging from behavioral economics and mathematical psychology to (deep) machine learning and neurosciences.