Source
r/UIUC•
brain373

Paid Undergrad Research Opportunity (CS/CEE)

We are seeking undergraduates interested in transportation research involving big data and data analysis. This research is under Professor Dan Work, and will be supervised by CEE graduate students Brian Donovan and Raphael Stern.

We have data on ~700 million taxi trips in New York City (and potentially more from other cities!) and are analyzing the effects of systems like Uber. Specifically, we are analyzing the potential benefits that can be achieved by efficiently matching taxi drivers and customers. We will be running massive data-driven simulations on supercompters. Analysis on such a large dataset is innovative in transportation engineering, and a useful application of computer science techniques. We hope to learn something new and useful, and you can help us do it!

Requirements

  • Basic statistics knowledge (CEE202 or STAT100 or other)
  • Basic knowledge of computer programming (CS101 or other).
  • Basic knowledge of data structures (CS225 or other).
  • Interest in transportation research and big data
  • Approximately 10-20 hours/week during the semeser

Benefits

  • Gain research experience
  • Get your name on a publishable academic paper
  • Use a powerful supercomputer, provided by NCSA
  • Gain useful cutting-edge skills
  • Get paid while learning how to do research in big data.

If you are interested, please send an email Brian Donovan ([email protected]) containing your major, current year of study, relevant coursework, and an attached resume. Code samples are also welcome. Applications should be sent by September 1, 2014.

Posted Aug 25, 2014, 8:55 PM UTC · edited

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goodusernameComputers & Things•

That actually sounds like a lot of fun - sucks that I'm not an undergrad though. Best of luck with your search!

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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DJGingivitisCEE-Structural Grad•

Oh Rafi....

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zootam•

efficiently matching taxi drivers and customers.

so you mean some kind of app system like uber?

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brain373OP•

Correct. There are tons of apps like Uber that attempt to match drivers with customers in various ways. Problem is, nobody really knows what the effects of these systems are on society as a whole (in terms of traffic congestion, customer waiting time, environmental impacts, etc...). Our goal is to quantitatively answer these questions using hard data. In doing this, there are a lot of interesting computational issues that come up.

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