Information and Communication Technologies(ICT), Activity Decisions,and Travel Choices: 20 years into the Second Millennium and where do we go next?

CENTENNIAL PAPERSStanding Committee on Effects of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on Travel Choices (ADB20)Giovanni Circella, ChairInformation and Communication Technologies(ICT), Activity Decisions,and Travel Choices: 20 years into the Second Millennium and where do we go next?JACEKPAWLAK,Imperial College LondonGIOVANNICIRCELLA, University of California, Davis andGeorgia Institute of TechnologyHANIS.MAHMASSANI, Northwestern UniversityPATRICIAL.MOKHTARIAN, Georgia Institute of TechnologyABSTRACTInformation and Communication Technologies, or ICT,have rapidly emerged asan integral element of everyday life, interactingin an essential manner with mobility and the activity patterns that engender it. The current paper reflects uponthistrendandthe opportunities and challenges itrepresents.Givenmore than three decades of research in the domain of interactions between ICT, activity decisions and travel choices, we acknowledgethe elaborate, disruptiveand oftenunexpected waysalong which ICT interact with society.Tosupport the objective of theADB20 Committee, namely tosupportand promote theemerging research questions, we identifya number of technological, societal and behavioral trends related to ICT and mobility that are likelyto be major driving forces for activity-travel behavior considerations in the next 15 years. Those include democratization of technology; personalization; shared and commoditized mobility; automation;data as the new currency; next generation connectivity, including 5G; evolving social media and socialization; new forms of shopping; digital twins;activity fragmentation; andmultitasking.We also observe that inevitably, theincreasingly interlocking relationshipbetween ICT and mobility will bring challengesrelated to balancing efficiency vs. redundancy and resilience, ensuring transparency, susceptibility to malicious activitiesandtackling the digital divide. We argue that those should not be seen as barriers to realization of the ultimate benefits for society, providing that thetransportation research agenda maintains focus on the evolution of ICTand rigorously explores the related impacts on activity decisions, travel choices and, more broadly, on transportationsystems

Investigating the Effort of Using Business Process Management Technology: Results from a Controlled Experiment

Business Process Management (BPM) technology has become an important instrument for supporting complex coordination scenarios and for improving business process performance. When considering its use, however, enterprises typically have to rely on vendor promises or qualitative reports. What is still missing and what is demanded by IT decision makers are quantitative evaluations based on empirical and experimental research. This paper picks up this demand and illustrates how experimental research can be applied to technologies enabling enterprises to coordinate their business processes and to associate them with related artifacts and resources. The conducted experiment compares the effort for implementing and maintaining a sample business process either based on standard workflow technology or on a case handling system. We motivate and describe the experimental design, discuss threats for the validity of our experimental results (as well as risk mitigations), and present the results of our experiment. In general, more experimental research is needed in order to obtain valid data on the various aspects and effects of BPM technology and BPM tools

Bus Rapid Transit: A Handbook for Partners, MTI Report 06-02

In April 2005, the Caltrans Division of Research and Innovation (DRI) asked MTI to assist with the research for and publication of a guidebook for use by Caltrans employees who work with local transit agencies and jurisdictions in planning, designing, and operating Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems that involve state facilities. The guidebook was also to assist to transit operators, local governments, community residents, and other stakeholders dealing with the development of BRT systems. Several areas in the state have experienced such projects ( San Diego , Los Angeles , San Francisco , and Alameda County ) and DRI wished to use that experience to guide future efforts and identify needed changes in statutes, policies, and other state concerns. Caltrans convened a Task Team from the Divisions of Research and Innovation, Mass Transportation, and Operations, together with stakeholders representing many of those involved with the BRT activities around the state. Prior to MTI’s involvement, this group produced a white paper on the topic, a series of questions, and an outline of the guidebook that MTI was to write. The MTI team conducted case studies of the major efforts in California, along with less developed studies of some of the other BRT programs under development or in early implementation phases around the state. The purpose was to clarify those issues that need to be addressed in the guidebook, as well as to compile information that would identify items needing legislative or regulatory action and items that Caltrans will need to address through district directives or other internal measures. A literature scan was used to develop a bibliography for future reference. The MTI team also developed a draft Caltrans director’s policy document, which provides the basis for Caltrans’ actions. This ultimately developed to be a project within a project. MTI submitted a draft document to Caltrans as a final product from the Institute. Task team members and Caltrans staff and leadership provided extensive review of the draft Bus Rapid Transit: A Handbook for Partners. Caltrans adopted a new Director’s Policy and published the document, BRT Caltrans. The MTI “wraparound” report presented below discusses in more detail the process that was followed to produce the draft report. The process was in many ways as much a project as the report itself

From Data to Actions in Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Prescription of Functional Requirements for Model Actionability

Advances in Data Science permeate every field of Transportation Science and Engineering, resulting in developments in the transportation sector that are data-driven. Nowadays, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) could be arguably approached as a “story” intensively producing and consuming large amounts of data. A diversity of sensing devices densely spread over the infrastructure, vehicles or the travelers’ personal devices act as sources of data flows that are eventually fed into software running on automatic devices, actuators or control systems producing, in turn, complex information flows among users, traffic managers, data analysts, traffic modeling scientists, etc. These information flows provide enormous opportunities to improve model development and decision-making. This work aims to describe how data, coming from diverse ITS sources, can be used to learn and adapt data-driven models for efficiently operating ITS assets, systems and processes; in other words, for data-based models to fully become actionable. Grounded in this described data modeling pipeline for ITS, we define the characteristics, engineering requisites and challenges intrinsic to its three compounding stages, namely, data fusion, adaptive learning and model evaluation. We deliberately generalize model learning to be adaptive, since, in the core of our paper is the firm conviction that most learners will have to adapt to the ever-changing phenomenon scenario underlying the majority of ITS applications. Finally, we provide a prospect of current research lines within Data Science that can bring notable advances to data-based ITS modeling, which will eventually bridge the gap towards the practicality and actionability of such models.This work was supported in part by the Basque Government for its funding support through the EMAITEK program (3KIA, ref. KK-2020/00049). It has also received funding support from the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19) granted by the Department of Education of the Basque Government

Systemische Vernetzung urbaner und ländlicher Räume – Erkennen, Formulieren, Entwerfen

Im Rahmen von Planungsvorhaben beschränken sich Kontextanalysen oftmals nur auf räumliche Veränderungsprozesse von „Land“ oder „Stadt“. Damit hierbei alle gesamtgesellschaftlichen Aspekte zielführend mitgedacht werden können, sollten diese bewusst frühzeitig maßstabsübergreifend erfasst werden. Das Aufbrechen fokussierter Planungssichten stellt hierfür einen notwenigen ersten Schritt dar. Die Systemgrenze der Betrachtungsweise sollte dabei grundlegend erweitert werden. Somit können frühzeitig wichtige Akteursgruppen und sozial-räumliche Wechselwirkungen in das Sichtfeld treten, deren ansonstenvernachlässigte Belange nur schwer bzw. nicht mehr in die laufende Planung zu integrieren sind. Analysen von verschiedenen Personen-, Waren-, Informationsströme etc. dienen als Ansatz einer vernetzten Betrachtung von „Land“ und „Stadt“. Diesem Gedanken folgend wird ein ganzheitlicher analysebasierter Planungsansatz, der zu einem integrierten Lehrkonzept für Architekturstudenten forschungsnah aufbereitet wurde, vorgestellt. Als Basis und Alleinstellungsmerkmal gegenüber der klassischen Entwurfsausbildung wird eine breitgefächerte Potentialanalyse an den Anfang einer planerischen Entwurfsaufgabe gestellt. Praxisnahe Lehrveranstaltungen, basierend auf den frühen Phasen der Projektentwicklung, schulen mit verschiedenen planerischen Instrumentarien die Studierenden, um planerische Problemstellungen zu regionalen und überregionalen Verflechtungen (Stadt-Landbeziehungen) sowie Eingriffe auf verschiedenenMaßstabsebenen wie Nachbarschaft und Quartier zu identifizieren und problemgerecht zu qualifizieren. In der weiteren Bearbeitung entsteht hieraus ein integrales, bauliches und räumliches Entwurfskonzept

Threshold concepts and transfer: A curriculum mapping tool for first-year writing

Writing scholars Adler-Kassner and Wardle, Beaufort, and Devet have placed pragmatic learning goals of transfer at the core of education’s purpose. This thesis shares the assumption of pragmatic learning goals for education and examines these goals for transfer through Meyer and Land’s theory of threshold concepts in the context of first-year composition courses. Covering Meyer and Land’s foundational work on threshold concepts and Thorndike and Woodworth’s groundbreaking research that later informed Perkins and Salomon’s work in transfer, this thesis aims to contextualize this literature within and operationalize it for first-year writing programs’ curriculum course design through the creation and testing of a curriculum mapping tool

Antibiotic Susceptibility of Probiotic Bacteria

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are a heterogeneous group of bacteria widely distributed in nature. These bacteria are found in gastrointestinal (GI) and urogenital tract of humans and animals; they are present on plant material, in milk and meat, and numerous fermented foods. Lactic acid bacteria have been associated with traditional dairy products, cereals, vegetable and meat fermented foods, due to their natural presence leading to spontaneous fermentation. They are also used as starter cultures in industrial food production, as well as in the production of probiotic products due to their potential health benefits to consumer. Milk and dairy products are the most examined food system for the delivery of probiotic bacteria to the human gut. The probiotic concept has progressed and is now in the focus of different research. Significant improvements have been made in selection and characterization of new cultures and their application in food production. The food products, which are produced by traditional methods, exhibit a rich biodiversity with the respect to bacterial contents. From these products, new probiotic strains with the potential functional properties can been isolated and selected. The selected strains have to be further characterized in order to be used in the food industry. Before the probiotics can benefit human health, they must fulfill several criteria including: a) scientifically validated health properties; b) good technological properties meaning that they can be manufactured and incorporated into food products without loosing viability, functionality and technological performance; c) high survival through the upper gastrointestinal tract and high viability at its site of action; d) antagonistic activity to pathogens; e) antibiotic susceptibility; and f) to be able to function in the gut environment. Bearing in mind importance of antibiotic resistance of LAB in food chain, antibiotic susceptibility of potential probiotic strains is a very important criteria for their selection. In the recent decade, releasing of antibiotics in biosphere seriously increased, leading to a strong selective pressure for the emergence and persistence of resistant LAB strains. Since LAB are naturally present in traditionally made fermented food and GI tract and are also added as starter culture or probiotic bacteria in industrial food production, concerns have been raised about the antibiotic resistance of these beneficial bacteria strains. Probiotic bacteria can help maintaining balance in gastrointestinal tract in cases of diarrhea caused by antibiotic treatment. However, there is high risk associated with the ability of these resistant strains to transmit the resistance gene to pathogenic bacteria in gut microbiota. This can complicate the treatment of a patient with an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection or disease. The circulation of genes coding for antibiotic resistance from beneficial LAB in the food chain via animals to humans is a complex problem. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate the safety of potential probitic strains regarding their ability to acquire and disseminate antibiotic resistance determinants in selection of LAB. In this study, importance of LAB in the food chain will be reviewed. Morphological and biochemical characteristics of lactobacilli, bifidobactera and enterococci, as well as criteria for probiotic selection and role of probiotics in health benefit will be discussed. Antibiotic susceptibility as criteria for potential probiotic bacteria selection and mechanisms of gene transfers will be considered