PI spotlight: Daniel Work

Daniel Work, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has had the opportunity to work on two recent ICT/IDOT projects.

TrafficTurk Evaluation (R27-SP24) was a special, quick-turnaround project commissioned by IDOT to test the feasibility of using TrafficTurk, an app that Work and his students developed for smartphones that uses an array of sensors to estimate traffic states and detect possible incidents.

In another project (R27-155), which is now under way, Work and his team have begun exploring the effectiveness of smart technologies to improve safety and mobility in work zones. The overall goal is to test a variety of different technologies in two different work zones, and then model the results to estimate the cost savings of each technology.

Work’s research interests in transportation include traffic monitoring, control, and management; data analytics; and applications to problems in safety and operations.

He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. from The Ohio State University, all in civil engineering. He teaches courses in transportation engineering and systems engineering.

Dan has won a number of research awards including the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2014, the Faculty Fellow award from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the IEEE ITSS Best Dissertation Award in 2011. He was also the recipient of the 2015 Outstanding Instructor Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers UIUC student chapter, and he has appeared eight times on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students by the Center for Teaching Excellence at UIUC.

Please visit http://publish.illinois.edu/dbwork/ for more information on his research.