Recognized for being at the top of his peers, 2014 University of California, Berkeley graduate Jack Reilly received the Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award in Science and Technology from the Council of Universities Transportation Center (CUTC) for his Ph.D. Graduate students from academic transportation centers across the U.S. were nominated for the award.
“I was honored to learn that others in my field found value and merit in the research I have been conducting for the last few years,” says Reilly. “I believe it’s also validation of the approach to research emphasized in the Mobile Millennium and Connected Corridors projects since I have been in the lab: theoretical contributions to the transportation field with accessible and real-world results in implementation.”
Reilly completed his doctoral degree in October 2014 in Civil Systems Engineering under adviser Alexandre Bayen at the Institute for Transportation Studies.
Working on his doctoral degree, Reilly took full advantage of the range of projects and disciplines in his department, including creating crowd-sensing platforms, measuring earthquakes with cell-phones, creating pollution maps from traffic, studying game-theory as applied to freeway route-choices, and developing novel traffic routing engines.
Reilly was able, and encouraged, to implement his theory on large, real-world systems as a part of his program. Reilly tested iPhones to measure earthquakes, and helped develop an iPhone app for the AppStore, which records accelerometer data from participants and broadcasts their measurements back to a central server for aggregation. His control algorithms were fully implemented within the Connected Corridors system at the Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology, which will be used during a field-test pilot on a real freeway in California.
“Knowing that your research has real-world impact gives much more weight and longevity to your work,” says Reilly.
Reilly was recognized at the CUTC awards banquet in January 2015 during the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. and awarded a $2,000 check. He currently works at Google in the Maps data group.
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