Alexandre Bayen, director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and a UC Berkeley professor, and Susan Handy, a CITRIS researcher and professor in the department of environmental science and policy at UC Davis, have been selected to receive honorary doctorates from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands for their contributions to smart and sustainable mobility.
Bayen’s research seeks to integrate machine learning with cloud computing to enable on-road vehicle communication and collaborative traffic control. In a recent experiment, one hundred automated vehicles used these algorithms to collectively reduce stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 24 in Nashville, Tennessee, improving overall energy consumption by up to 10 percent and curbing a significant source of energy waste and accidents.
Handy’s focus lies in the core set of ideas — freedom, speed and mobility, among others — that shape the United States’ dependency on driving. Approaching from the societal perspective, she examines the shifts in professional thinking required to embrace a more sustainable transportation system, and the role of research in supporting these shifts.