Our roads are arguably one of our most impressive pieces of infrastructure developed from American ingenuity. Like all infrastructure it needs to be ever changing to meet the needs of an expanding population with expanding needs. It is our nation’s civil engineers who design, construct and maintain our infrastructure that we seem to take for granted every day.
This past Friday my fellow STEMx classmates and I were able to sit in on a lecture from Dr. Joseph Hummer, professor and chair for civil and environmental engineering at Wayne State’s College of Engineering, who is world renowned for his work with traffic data. Dr. Hummer spoke about how civil engineers work with data collected in the field to calculate whether or not our roads are running as efficiently as they should. From that data they can make cost-effective proposals to various institutions to further improve our infrastructure.
Dr. Hummer has generously offered to simulate what these data experiences are like to STEMx students. In the near future myself, along with my STEMx classmates will be taken into the field to collect authentic traffic data as we learn how engineers check the efficiency of intersections. From there we will be analyzing this data and determining cost-effective solutions that can be proposed to various institutions.
I feel as though I can speak for my fellow classmates and instructor when I say that this upcoming data externship will prove to be very exciting and that we cannot wait to learn more about traffic data and engineering in general from Dr. Hummer.
-Steven Graczyk- Birmingham Public Schools 2014.
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