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Orosz selected as NSF CAREER awardee

06/11/2014

Orosz

Assistant Professor Gabor Orosz has been selected by the National Science Foundation as a CAREER Awardee, based on his research proposal entitled “CAREER: Heterogeneous Delayed Networks: Data-based Design and Optimization of Connected Vehicle Systems.” This is the fifth ME junior faculty member to receive an NSF CAREER award during this academic year (AY13-14): Eric Johnsen, Don Siegel, Chinedum Okwudire, Kira Barton, and Gabor Orosz.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which exists within the National Science Foundation, offers awards to junior faculty who have exemplified the ideal teacher-scholar dynamic. In other words, the program advocates research in unison with education as a means to further a specific mission. The grant differs from other NSF awards, in that the stakes are set higher. Projects are expected to be new and innovative, and there is greater focus placed on education as well as outreach.

Abstract: “Connected vehicle technologies allow vehicles to share information with each other through wireless communication interfaces. By enabling vehicles to share information about their location and motion, such technologies have the potential to revolutionize transportation on roadways, significantly reducing traffic congestion, and reducing the number and severity of accidents. However, currently there exist no design principles for connected vehicle systems that take into account the differences in human behavior, vehicle features, and wireless communication across the network. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award supports fundamental research to provide a systematic approach for designing and constructing connected vehicle systems of the future. The scientific tools created will enable auto manufacturers to exploit vehicle-to-vehicle communication to benefit customers while at the same time enhancing the performance of large-scale transportation systems. This aligns with the national interest in improving mobility and reducing energy consumption without large investments in road-side infrastructure. The educational contribution is to create a new generations of engineers who can apply system-level thinking to solve the large-scale engineering problems of the 21st century. This will be accomplished by integrating the research results into undergraduate and graduate courses and by providing opportunities to underrepresented high-school students to excel in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The penetration of vehicles equipped with wireless communication is expected to grow significantly in the near future, increasing the demand for data-based models for heterogeneous connected vehicle systems, where heterogeneity originates from the differences in human behavior, vehicle properties, and wireless communication across the network. This research is addressing a knowledge gap related to the decomposition of the dynamics of large, heterogeneous, infinite-dimensional networks and provides a systematic way to design and optimize such systems. Modal equations that map the spatio-temporal complexity into the time domain will be used to optimize the system-level performance by designing the network structure and tuning the gains and delays for the communication links while satisfying driver constraints. The educational activities include the development of a new course on network dynamics and control design and the initiation of a problem solving competition in high-school physics that will provide an opportunity for underrepresented minority students to increase their chances to enter and excel at the best universities in the nation.”

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automotive

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