EXPLORATORY ADVANCED RESEARCH

Breakthroughs in Vision and Visibility for Highway Safety Workshop Summary Report - August 13-14, 2014

Appendix B—About the Presenters

Ron Gibbons

Dr. Ron Gibbons is the director of the Center for Infrastructure Based Safety Systems at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. He is also the Institute's lead lighting research scientist and is responsible for lighting- and visibility-associated research projects and projects that consider roadway safety as they relate to infrastructure. Dr. Gibbons is currently the principal investigator on multiple projects, including studies on the effect of lighting design on roadway safety, the effect of headlamp design on safety and wet night visibility, and the performance of alternative light sources in roadway lighting. Dr. Gibbons is the author of several published papers on roadway lighting, photometry, and target visibility. He is a past president of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America. Gibbons obtained his doctorate degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Paul Carlson

Dr. Paul Carlson is a research engineer at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) and Division Head of the Operations and Design Division. Dr. Carlson leads TTI's Visibility Research Laboratory, located in TTI's new State Headquarters and Research Building. Dr. Carlson's primary areas of interest are traffic engineering, highway safety, vision science, traffic control devices, geometric design, and human factors. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator for numerous research studies, dealing with topics such as traffic-sign and pavement-marking retroreflectivity, highway safety, nighttime driver visibility needs, centerline and edge-line rumble strips, traffic-signal warrants, and operational effects of geometric design. Dr. Carlson holds a doctorate of philosophy in civil engineering from Texas A&M University and a master of science and bachelor of science degree, both in civil engineering, from The Pennsylvania State University.

Michel Ferreira

Dr. Michel Ferreira is a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Porto, Portugal, and a researcher at the Porto Laboratory of the Instituto de Telecomunicações. He is a lead scientist in Intelligent Transportation Systems and principal investigator in several research projects. Dr. Ferreira currently leads the Geo-Networks group, and his main research interest is in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems, in which he is especially interested in cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems, where intervehicle communication plays an important role. Vehicular ad hoc networks, mobility simulation, and spatio-deductive databases are important topics in his current research. A major goal in his research is the efficient design of large-scale distributed systems that use infrastructureless communication to self-organize, based on spatial reasoning. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Porto in 1994, a master's degree in computer engineering from the University of Minho in 1996, and a doctorate degree in computer science from the University of Porto in 2002.

Nicolas Hautière 

Dr. Nicolas Hautière is a researcher and program manager for IFSTTAR, the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development, and Networks. He received a master's degree in civil engineering from the National School of State Public Works, and a master's and doctorate degree in computer vision from the University Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, France, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He received the habilitation to supervise research, HDR, in 2011 from the Université Paris-Est and the specialized master in political science and sustainable development in 2013 from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech. His research interests cover modelling of the meteorological phenomena reducing highway visibility, detection of adverse visibility conditions, and the estimation of visibility range. The applications range from road operation, including advanced driver assistance systems and video traffic sensors, to meteorological observation. Since September 2013, Dr. Hautière has been a Project Director at the Department Components and Systems, IFSTTAR, and leader of the French program "Route 5^ème Génération."

Eileen Kowler

Dr. Eileen Kowler is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and Associate Dean of the Graduate School. Her research includes the areas of perception, attention, and motor control. Dr. Kowler received her doctorate in psychology from the University of Maryland in 1978 and joined the psychology faculty at Rutgers in 1980 after postdoctoral work at New York University. She is a member of the graduate faculty of Biomedical Engineering and is on the Executive Committee of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. She edited the reference work "Eye Movements and Their Role in Visual and Cognitive Processes" and served as section editor for "Behavioral Physiology and Visuomotor Control" for the journal Vision Research from 1995-2004. Dr. Kowler has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Vision and Cognitive Brain Research.