Computer and Information Sciences Doctoral Defense Announcement

The Computer and Information Sciences department invites the university community to a doctoral defense for Reza Sarraf on 6/7/2019 at 10:00 am in YR 459.

Dissertation title: Safe Route Planner

Dissertation committee: Dr. Michael McGuire (chair), Dr. Chao Lu, Dr. Josh Dehlinger, and Dr. Robert Hammell, II

Abstract: Many factors including vehicle type, speed, distractions, roadway design, environmental and driver characteristics contribute to motor vehicle crashes. This research aims at reducing accidents using a data-driven approach. Navigation systems including Google Maps, Waze, and MapQuest consider the travel time in suggesting a path from a source to a given destination. The fastest path is not necessarily the best path in terms of safety. There are roads with design issues that increase the possibility of accidents. The literature reveals the willingness of professional drivers to take the safest routes. At this point, there are no existing tools to allow drivers to find the safest route to their destination.

Existing accident visualization methods can be confusing and must be manually interpreted by drivers to find the safest path. This manual interpretation is a time consuming and difficult task that results in ignoring the accident visualization tools by drivers, due to complexity. This research aims at developing a novel tool to automatically find the safest route between any two points by incorporating real crash records.

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This post was written by Walczak, Robin