The National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI), sponsored by the Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics (ISTL), provided the students with lectures, hands-on design competitions, field trips and laboratory tours to explore the varying aspects of transportation systems. Qian Wang, associate professor of teaching and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering has been program lead on NSTI for the last several years.

This year, NSTI’s focus topics included multi-modal transportation systems, transportation infrastructure, traffic operations and control, traffic simulations, bridge engineering and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Students visited the Transportation Research and Visualization Laboratory (TRAVL), where assistant professors Irina Benedyk and Austin Angulo, and ISTL program manager Kevin Hulme supported presentations on self-driving vehicles and explained “moral machine” decision making regarding the human factors that form the basis of machine intelligence. During the TRAVL visit, students learned about the science behind its many simulators — bicycle, walking and driving — and associated technologies like game engines, computer graphics, physics-based modeling, and virtual reality to support next-generation research and education in human mobility.