Category: News

Kelly J. Clifton was appointed to serve as the interim Associate Vice President for Research at Portland State University in October.

Kelly Clifton was recently recognized as one of the “Remarkable Women in Transport” by TUMI – the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative.

TUM-IAS General Assembly 2018 – June 5-6, 2018

There is much interest of late in the promise of technologies to provide safe, efficient, and comfortable mobility. Most of this discussion has focused on autonomous and connected vehicles and the benefits for urban travel for passengers in automobiles and various forms of shared mobility options, including transit. With the exception of the potential to improve safety and reduce injuries and deaths, less attention has been paid to how these technologies will impact the pedestrian and the urban environmental conditions that support walking. This presentation will discuss the implications of an automated and connected future on walking and how planning might intervene to preserve and enhance our most basic form of mobility.

Walkability and walking are being intensively researched today and the literature provides a wealth of references and examples on how to measure walkability of the built environment. IAAPE is one method that was developed at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon) to measure walkability at the micro-scale, bringing solutions that were disregarded in two aspects: it is a participatory process; and it provides different evaluations for different population segments (adults, children, seniors, impaired) or for different trip motivations.

We will present insights of the walkability and walking in Lisbon which is our case study that will be presented. Recently, a number of interventions have been made in the built environment to make it more walkable and we present our assessment results out coming from IAAPE, comparing the before and after.

We also provide evidence on validation of the method both with pedestrian counting (under the assumption that more walkability would imply more pedestrians walking) and with on-street surveying, in order to compare respondents’ judgement on how they perceive the walkability of their walking environment and the walkability scores we obtain from IAAPE. Finally, we present a brief comparison of our method with other approaches and present the challenges we are trying to resolve now and the near future.

THE SPEAKER

Filipe Moura is an Assistant Professor of Transportation Systems in the Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Georesources at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal. He was awarded the Fulbright grant in 2017/2018 and is a visiting researcher at the Portland State University, where he is currently doing research on “Urban mobility, actives modes and travel behaviour changes”. His other research interests also focus on “sustainable mobility” and “technology diffusion in transport systems”. He is an expert of the European Commission (INEA) for the Smart Cities and Communities projects. Filipe holds a PhD in Transportation Systems from the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon, having developed part of his research at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxemburg, Austria.

http://trec.pdx.edu/events/professional-development/friday-transportation-seminar-031618

I’m pleased to participate in this panel discussion to dissect the critical issues of identity, gender and diversity within the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Portland State University faculty and researchers from chemistry, engineering and psychology will share their experiences and offer perspectives that embrace the need for a culture change in STEM. Other topics to be discussed include the exceptional skills and qualifications of women in STEM; the dangers of using labels and stereotypes on women, especially at an early age; and why science and technology fields benefit from more women and minorities. All are welcome.

More information here: https://www.pdx.edu/events/true-story-women-stem-its-more-just-diversity-memo

Today I attended a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study at TUM by Professor Christoph Lütge on the new German Ethics Code for autonomous vehicles. This is the first ethical framework for dealing with the many new dilemma’s that arise with the introduction of these technologies. Who is liable? What is the basis for designing algorithms for decision-making? To what degree should society be automated? Download the report in English here: Ethics Commission Report on Automated and Connected Driving

I am excited to be spending time working with Professor Rolf Moeckel at TUM  as a part of the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship. Over the next three years, I’ll be collaborating with the Modeling Spatial Mobility Lab and working to introduce pedestrians and appropriate built environment measures to integrated land use and transport models. Stay tuned!

I am excited to be traveling to Portugal to work with faculty at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) at the University of Lisbon on sustainable transportation issues. The Fulbright will enable stay abroad during my sabbatical in Winter-Spring 2016. Stay tuned!