Thomas Oommen (GMES/MTTI/ICC-DataS) is the principal investigator (PI) on a project that has received a $188,433 research and development contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Administration.
The project is titled “An Integrated Automated Decision Support System for Ground Hazard Risk Mitigation for Railway using Remote Sensing and Traditional Condition Monitoring Data.”
Pasi Lautala and Melanie Kueber Watkins (CEE/MTTI) and Colin Brooks (MTRI/MTTI) are co-PIs on this potential three-year project.
Ryan Williams (GLRC) is the PI on a project that has received a $398,843 research and development grant from the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory.
The project is titled “Robotic Platform Soil and Terrain Characterization for Close to Real Time GO/NOGO Maps.”
Thomas Oommen (GMES/GLRC/ICC-DataS) and Jeremy Bos (ECE/GLRC/ICC-DataS) are co-PIs on this potential two-year project.
by Pasi Lautala
Thomas Oommen (GMES, ICC), Ricardo Eiris, (CEGE, ICC), and Beth Veinott (CLS, ICC) are among eight Michigan Tech researchers who have submitted a a record number of eight concept papers for proposed research projects with the Federal Railroad Administration.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) requested that Michigan Tech submit a record number of eight concept papers for proposed research projects as part of their 2021 Broad Agency Announcement.
In addition, Tech is a subcontractor for two more concept paper proposals. The paper submittal was coordinated by the Rail Transportation Program and the range of topics speaks to the diversity of Michigan Tech’s expertise applicable to the rail transportation. The PIs are looking forward to FRA decisions on how many of these papers advance to full proposals.
Each of the 10 projects had a different principal investigator (PI), representing six university departments/institutes and several more co-PIs.
The project titles and their PIs include:
- Hyper- and Multi-spectral Sensing and Deep Learning for Automated Identification of Roadbed Condition, (PI, Thomas Oommen, GMES).
- Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) for Weld Enhanced Cast Steel Coupler Knuckles (PI, Paul Sanders, MSE).
- IoT Assisted Data-analytics Framework Enables Assessment of Location Based Ride Quality (LBRQ) (PI, Sriram Malladi, MEEM).
- RailStory: Using Web-based Immersive Storytelling to Attract the Next Generation of Young Women in Rail (PI, Ricardo Eiris, CEGE).
- A Risk Informed Decision-Making Framework for Coastal Railroad System Subjected to Storm Hazards and Sea Level Rise (PI, Yousef Darestani, CEGE).
- Rail Corridor Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) Framework, Factors and Models to Support Project Evaluation and Multi-Modal Comparisons (PI, Pasi Lautala, CEGE).
- Development of Infrared Thermography for Effective Rail Weld Inspection (PI, Qingli Dai, CEGE).
- Enabling Longer-distance, AI-enabled Drone-based Grade Crossing Assessment in Potentially GPS Denied Environments (PI, Colin Brooks).
- Multi-Site Simulation to Examine Driver Behavior Impact of Integrated Rail Crossing Violation Warning (RCVW) and In-Vehicle Auditory/Visual Alert (IVAA) System (PI, Elizabeth Veinott, subcontract with Virginia Tech).
- Evaluation of Non-traditional Methods of Reducing Emissions in Short Line Railroad Operations (PI, Jeremy Worm, subcontract with ASLRRA).
Assistant Professor Sidike Paheding, Applied Computing, has been awarded a one-year MSGC Research Seed Grant for his project, “Monitoring Martian landslides using deep learning and data fusion.”
Professor Thomas Oommen, Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences, is Co-PI of the project. The grant will support part-time employment of two students during the award period.
This grant is supported in part by funding provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), under award number 80NSSC20M0124, Michigan Space Grant Consortium (MSGC).
The MSGC Research Seed Grant Program supports junior faculty and research scientists at MSGC affiliate institutions. The program also helps mid-career and senior faculty develop new research programs. The objective of this program is to allow award recipients to develop the research expertise necessary to propose research activities in new areas to other federal or nonfederal sources.
Sidike Paheding is an assistant professor in the Applied Computing department of the Michigan Tech College of Computing.
His research interests cover a variety of topics in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and remote sensing. He has authored/coauthored close to 100 research articles, including several top peer-review journal papers. He is an invited member of Tau Beta Pi (Engineering Honor Society).
Thomas Oommen, Timothy C. Havens, Guy Meadows (GLRC), and Himanshu Grover (U. Washington) have been awarded funding in the NSF Civic Innovation Challenge for their project, “Helping Rural Counties to Enhance Flooding and Coastal Disaster Resilience and Adaptation.”
The six-month project award is $49,999.
Vision. The vision of the new project is to develop methods that use remote sensing data resources and citizen engagement (crowdsourcing) to address current data gaps for improved flood hazard modeling and visualization that is transferable to rural communities.
Objective. The objective of the Phase-1 project is to bring together community-university partners to understand the data gaps in addressing flooding and coastal disaster in three Northern Michigan counties.
The Researchers
Thomas Oommen is a professor in the Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences department. His research efforts focus on developing improved susceptibility characterization and documentation of geo-hazards (e.g. earthquakes, landslides) and spatial modeling of georesource (e.g. mineral deposits) over a range of spatial scales and data types. Oommen is a member of the ICC’s Center for Data Sciences.
Tim Havens is associate dean for research, College of Computing, the
William and Gloria Jackson Associate Professor of Computer Systems, and director of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems. His research interests include mobile robotics, explosive hazard detection, heterogeneous and big data, fuzzy sets, sensor networks, and data fusion. Havens is a member of the ICC’s Center for Data Sciences.
Guy Meadows is director of the Marine Engineering Laboratory (Great Lakes Research Center), the Robbins Professor of Sustainable Marine Engineering, and a research professor in the Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics department. His research interests include large scale field experimentation in the Inland Seas of the Great Lakes and coastal oceans; nearshore hydrodynamics and prediction; autonomous and semi-autonomous environmental monitoring platforms (surface and sub-surface); underwater acoustic remote sensing; and marine engineering.
Himanshu Grover is an asssistant professor at University of Washington. His research focus is at the intersection of land use planning, community resilience, and climate change.
About the Civic Innovation Challenge
The NSF Civic Innovation Challenge is a research and action competition that aims to fund ready-to-implement, research-based pilot projects that have the potential for scalable, sustainable, and transferable impact on community-identified priorities.