Congratulations OTC Student Paper Competition Winners
Andre’ Morton and Qingyi Ai

Mr. Andre’ Morton, a senior student in the Department of Water Resources Management at Central State University, was chosen as the Undergraduate Student Paper Competition Winner for his paper titled, Classification of Urban Districts based on Mobile Carbon Monoxide Exposure Using Self Organizing Maps. His paper elaborates on the concepts of exploring Self Organizing Maps (SOM) as a tool for studying a few urban “air districts” in the USA with respect to the demography using a single mobile source air pollutant.

Before attending Central State University, Mr. Morton received his B.A. in Speech Communications from Miami University of Ohio in 2001 and M.A. in Communication Studies from Bowling Green State University in 2003. Since then, he has participated in the National Nuclear Security Administration Hyperspectral Workshop (2008) and Evaportranspiration in Southwestern USA Project of the United States Bureau of Reclamation (2008-2009) as an undergraduate research assistant. In 2009 he completed a summer co-op internship with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD). The co-op experience consisted of analysis of bid contracts and requests for proposals for improvements to be made to NEORSD facilities as well as development of excel spreadsheets of cost saving measures implemented at three NEORSD facilities from 2003-2009. He is currently working with Dr. Ramani Kandiah on the OTC sponsored project “On-Road Mobile Source Pollutant Emissions: Identifying Hotspots and Ranking Roads” in ranking of roads based on on-line mobile pollutant emissions using neural network. A link to Mr. Morton’s complete paper can be found on the OTC’s “Publications” page.

Mr. Qingyi Ai, a Ph.D. candidate in the Transportation Engineering program in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati, was awarded Graduate Student Paper Competition winner for his paper titled, Dual-Loop Length-Based Vehicle Classification Models against Synchronized and Stop-and-Go Traffic Flows. His paper presents an innovative approach to evaluate dual-loop length-based vehicle classification models against concurrent ground-truth video vehicle trajectory data at the selected dual-loop traffic monitoring stations.

Mr. Ai joined the Graduate School at UC in September of 2007 under the advisement of Dr. Heng Wei. His research interests include traffic congestion modeling and vehicle classification modeling using high resolution dual-loop data, emergency evacuation, traffic operational impact on emission, and GIS application in transportation system. He received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) in 1998 and M.S. in Transportation
Engineering from Beijing University of Technology (China) in 2006. Before joining UC, he worked as a civil engineer in China for five years and worked on project management of transportation infrastructure and transit network planning of the city of Tianjin. Having completed his course work and passed his Ph.D. qualifying and proposal exams in May 2009 and June 2010, he is now under the supervision of Dr. Heng Wei. He is also a student member of ITE and NACOTA. A link to Mr. Ai’s complete paper can be found on the OTC’s “Publications” page.