Donald Katz

These past two weeks I visited Lisbon, Portugal for the 12th World Conference on Transport Research. I attended the conference along with my advisor Dr. Michael Meyer and fellow Ph.D student J.P. O’Har. The conference, with over 1500 attendees, was held at the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa along the Tagus River. One of the highlights of this venue was its location just beside the 25 de Abril Bridge, a double decker suspension bridge with vehicle traffic above and commuter rail below (see photo).

During the conference I attended many sessions on airports and aviation, traveler behavior, and urban transport modes. I made a few contacts who were interested in my Bangladeshi bus project. The conference was elaborate, topped off with a gala dinner at the Pavilhão Atlântico within the park formerly used for the World Expo ‘98.

As part of the trip to Lisbon, the three of us traveled to Madrid and the Galicia region of Spain before the conference, before taking Portugal’s high-speed rail line (similar to the Acela) down to Lisbon.

Earlier this month I visited Helsinki, Finland for the annual Helsinki Summer School in Transportation. This summer workshop is held at Aalto University School of Science and Technology. It is organized by Dr. Antti Talvitie, a professor at Aalto University, and Dr. Shinya Kikuchi, a professor at Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region campus. This year’s theme was “Reason Building for Decision-Making in the Transport Sector”, and from June 7 to June 11 we heard a variety of lectures and had discussions on topics of uncertainty, risk analysis, transport policy, and transport administration.

During my stay, I slept at a hostel in downtown Helsinki and took a regional bus to the Otaniemi campus in the city of Espoo. The other workshop participants included two other Americans and students and professionals from the United Kingdom, Spain, Finland, Morocco, Japan, Denmark, Belgium, and Italy. One of highlights of the week was a visit to the Port of Helsinki, located at Vuosaari Harbor. The picture below is from the visit.

During my stay I had time to explore the city of Helsinki, Nuuksio National Park about one hour outside the city, and take a ferry to Tallinn, Estonia for a day. Perhaps what was very special about the trip was experiencing Helsinki’s multimodal transit system. In one week I was able to travel by regional bus, city bus, tram, metro transit, regional train, intercity ferry, and regional ferry; all but the intercity ferry required only one integrated transit card.

A fellow student in my department who recently earned a Fulbright Scholarship pointed out to me the back cover of his recently received orientation booklet. There were two color photographs on the back, and one was of me pedaling a rickshaw in Dhaka in 2008. It was taken during my parents’ visit while on the Fulbright. That picture which is being used on this year’s booklet is shown below.

The Georgia Tech Civil and Environmental Engineering Department’s newsletter included a writeup about the four NSF Graduate Research Fellowships recipients in the transportation group this year. The other three students besides myself are all in my graduate office: Brent Weigel, J.P. O’Har, and Brittany Luken. The article also congratulates the other two students in our transportation group who received an Honorable Mention: Tom Wall and Josie Kressner (my desk mate).

This past week was the Ph.D Written Comprehensive Exam for the transportation engineering group. The four day test was intended to measure our ability to think through transportation problems, evaluate our ability to develop a research idea, and assure we have the technical abilities to proceed with the Ph.D program. Overall, there was a significant amount of writing to do, over 75 pages in four days.

I will receive the results of the test sometime this summer. If passed, the next step in the process will be the Ph.D Oral Exam, which I plan to take this coming autumn.

Last week was the final meeting of the school year for the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Georgia Tech student chapter. Our chapter recently won Chapter of the Year for the Southern District (composed of 9 states) as well as the Traffic Bowl competition at the SDITE Annual Meeting. It was the first time in many years that Clemson had not garnered both honors. Our chapter advisor, Dr. Michael Hunter, congratulated the chapter on our accomplishments, and cut a cake in honor of our efforts.

At the meeting, fellow student Andrew Vischio and I presented a humorous yet important research effort that highlighted the travel efficiency between the building which holds our graduate offices and the building in which we have our classes. The presentation, although intended to make others laugh, was in fact an actual research endeavor with about 6 hours of data collection, and a structured conceptual framework.

Lastly, part of the meeting was an election for next year’s leadership. All positions were run for unopposed, but nevertheless, I will serve as the chapter’s Vice President of Outreach in 2010-2011.

I received notice this past week from the National Science Foundation that I earned a fellowship in this year’s Graduate Research Fellowship competition. This was the second year I applied; I received an Honorable Mention in 2009. I will be using the fellowship for my Ph.D work at Georgia Tech.

A new page for the website is now up. Over the past couple of months I slowly put together a sort of rowing resume, listing out the clubs I have been a part of, coaches I’ve rowed under, and leadership roles I have served. I may add in the results of each race at some point, but for now only the regatta names are listed. Finally the “rower” part of the title of my blog is represented on the site. There is a link to this section on the sidebar.

In December of last year, Robert Milton visited our research group at Georgia Tech. As the former CEO of Air Canada, he arranged for us to travel to Montreal and spend a day at Air Canada’s headquarters.

During our recent visit, we met with the Vice President of Network Planning and the Vice President of Revenue Management. In the early part of the day our advisor Dr. Garrow presented to Air Canada employees the research we are doing at Georgia Tech. We spent the rest of they day discussing with staff members how Air Canada is making decisions in the areas of route planning, pricing, and resource allocation, gaining an understanding of how the airline functions.

Update: An article I wrote on the trip was posted on the GTI/UTC website and through Georgia Tech’s CEE Newsletter.