Meet our new CSCRS Road Safety Graduate Student Fellows!

October 12, 2018

As part of our education and professional development activities for the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety (CSCRS), we're excited to announce the recipients of our 2018 CSCRS Road Safety Graduate Student Fellowships for this fall semester! This year's five awardees were from four different academic departments and submitted excellent applications for a wide range of student-initiated research projects.

Meet our new CSCRS Road Safety Graduate Student Fellows:

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Pierre-Elie Belouard, Department of Civil Engineering
The Impact of Dynamic Speed Limits on Road Safety

Except in some rare experiments, speed limits have so far mostly been static. Dynamic or Adaptive speed limit is the art of making the speed limits varying, depending on the weather, traffic and visibility conditions. The goal of my research project is to select the most relevant parameters, to build a dynamic speed limit model and to predict the effect of the introduction of such a dynamic speed limit model on road safety.

Being selected as a CSCRS Fellow is a great honor. I am looking forward to working with Berkeley SafeTREC's team and to exploring the possibilities offered by combining the power of data and mathematical optimization to make roads a safer place!


Zhi Li HeadshotZhi Li, School of Information
Recognizing Unsafe Roads Using Online Open Data

This research aims to take advantage of the huge amounts of online open data and use the techniques of deep learning to map the safety scores of a specific urban area, recognize roads with a high risk of accidents, and make proper suggestions accordingly.

The CSCRS fellowship gives me a chance to apply machine learning into road safety, which is a very interesting area. I'm excited to do more research here.


Nandita Sampath HeadshotNandita Sampath, Goldman School of Public Policy
Investigate Regulation and Standardization of Continuous Data Collection in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) to Ameliorate the Incidence of AV Crashes

My research will take a policy-focused approach to regulating autonomous vehicle crashes. I will be looking at ways to better standardize regulation of Autonomous Vehicle (AV) crashes as well as what kinds of data should be continually monitored by the AV and available for review after an AV crash.

I am honored to be chosen as a CSCRS Fellow and look forward to my upcoming research this semester! I hope my research can help contribute to better autonomous vehicle policy in California and the U.S. 


Fangyu Wu HeadshotFangyu Wu, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Real-Time Prevention of Risky Vehicular Maneuvers Using Deep Reinforcement Learning, Microsimulation, and Cognitive Sciences

The transition to autonomous and connected transportation should be a safe and gradual process. One step toward this goal is to develop safe and efficient Artificial Intelligence to augment human real-time decision making of vehicle navigation. 

The CSCRS fellowship gives me the resources and support necessary for my research in this area. I feel deeply honored and grateful to be part of the community to advance the state-of-the-art in transportation research and to promote the public’s welfare.


Mengqiao Yu Headshot

Mengqiao Yu, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Evaluation of Autonomous Vehicle Safety Based on California DMV Crash Reports

This study aims to conduct a comprehensive analysis about the difference between Autonomous Vehicle (AV) collisions and common collisions (in which only human drivers are involved). Based on the comparison results, the study further extracts key factors associated with AV collisions and proposed challenging scenarios for AVs. 

CSCRS connects me with other researchers from different fields (public policy, computer science, etc.), and we can leverage our own expertise to brainstorming and solving critical safety-related problems. 

This fellowship provides graduate students with the opportunity to generate high quality research pertaining to road safety topics that align with the CSCRS mission to accelerate progress in reducing traffic injuries or fatalities by utilizing a systems approach to bring perspectives from planning, engineering, public health, data science, and robotics to the road safety field. Learn more about SafeTREC CSCRS.