Ruimin Ke

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Recently, the availability of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) opens up new opportunities for smart transportation applications, such as automatic traffic data collection. In such a trend, detecting vehicles and extracting traffic parameters from UAV video in a fast and accurate manner is becoming crucial in many prospective applications. However, fro...

Cloud computing has been a main-stream computing service for years. Recently, with the rapid development in urbanization, massive video surveillance data are produced at an unprecedented speed. A traditional solution to deal with the big data would require a large amount of computing and storage resources. With the advances in Internet of things (I...

The widespread use of mobile devices and sensors has motivated data-driven applications that can leverage the power of big data to benefit many aspects of our daily life, such as health, transportation, economy, and environment. Under the context of smart city, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), as a main building block of modern cities, and...

Edge computing, which is an emerging concept to complement cloud computing, processes data closer to where the data is generated at the network edge. Transportation system is a critical component of our cities and is generating more and more data. To leverage the power of the increasing amount of data from traffic sensors, researchers have started...

A major role of automated vehicles is that vehicles serve as mobile sensors for event detection and data collection, which support tactical automation in autonomous driving and post-analysis for traffic safety. However, most data collected during regular operations of vehicles are not of interest, while it costs a large amount of computation, commu...

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a crucial optimization challenge with significant economic and environmental implications, particularly in logistics and transportation planning. While classical algorithms struggle to efficiently solve large-scale instances of VRP due to its combinatorial complexity, quantum computing presents a promising alter...

Transit Origin-Destination (OD) data are essential for transit planning, particularly in route optimization and demand-responsive paratransit systems. Traditional methods, such as manual surveys, are costly and inefficient, while Bluetooth and WiFi-based approaches require passengers to carry specific devices, limiting data coverage. On the other h...

Edge sensing and computing is rapidly becoming part of intelligent infrastructure architecture leading to operational reliance on such systems in disaster or emergency situations. In such scenarios there is a high chance of power supply failure due to power grid issues, and communication system issues due to base stations losing power or being dama...

Efficient and socially equitable restoration of transportation networks post disasters is crucial for community resilience and access to essential services. The ability to rapidly recover critical infrastructure can significantly mitigate the impacts of disasters, particularly in underserved communities where prolonged isolation exacerbates vulnera...

Traffic simulations are commonly used to optimize traffic flow, with reinforcement learning (RL) showing promising potential for automated traffic signal control. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is particularly effective for learning control strategies for traffic lights in a network using iterative simulations. However, existing methods...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) face significant threats to their safe operation in complex traffic environments. Adversarial training has emerged as an effective method of enabling AVs to preemptively fortify their robustness against malicious attacks. Train an attacker using an adversarial policy, allowing the AV to learn robust driving through interac...

Large Language Models (LLMs), capable of handling multi-modal input and outputs such as text, voice, images, and video, are transforming the way we process information. Beyond just generating textual responses to prompts, they can integrate with different software platforms to offer comprehensive solutions across diverse applications. In this paper...

Quantum computing, a field utilizing the principles of quantum mechanics, promises great advancements across various industries. This survey paper is focused on the burgeoning intersection of quantum computing and intelligent transportation systems, exploring its potential to transform areas such as traffic optimization, logistics, routing, and aut...

Quantum computing, a field utilizing the principles of quantum mechanics, promises great advancements across various industries. This survey paper is focused on the burgeoning intersection of quantum computing and intelligent transportation systems, exploring its potential to transform areas such as traffic optimization, logistics, routing, and aut...

Computer vision applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous driving (AD) have gravitated towards deep neural network architectures in recent years. While performance seems to be improving on benchmark datasets, many real-world challenges are yet to be adequately considered in research. This paper conducted an extensive l...

Large Language Models (LLMs), capable of handling multi-modal input and outputs such as text, voice, images, and video, are transforming the way we process information. Beyond just generating textual responses to prompts, they can integrate with different software platforms to offer comprehensive solutions across diverse applications. In this paper...

This paper discusses the importance of near-crash events and associated metadata as valuable sources for smart transit applications, such as surrogate safety measures for transit safety research. The STAR Lab at the University of Washington, sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration, has developed an edge computing system that processes onboa...

Numerous sensors were introduced to intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in the past decade. Consequently, new sensing technologies and the generated data attracted more and more attention, which brought new challenges, such as redundant sensors, huge maintenance costs, and data explosion, to ITS. To satisfy the core demands of traffic agencies...

Traffic congestion is a long-lasting worldwide problem and even becoming more severe in well-developed regions. Reversible lanes have been used worldwide on various road types to mitigate the effects of congestion and optimize mobility since the 1930s. However, with the limitation of traditional control and management methods, existing solutions ca...

Computer vision applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous driving (AD) have gravitated towards deep neural network architectures in recent years. While performance seems to be improving on benchmark datasets, many real-world challenges are yet to be adequately considered in research. This paper conducted an extensive l...

Machine vision based vehicle re-identification (ReID) plays an important role in some Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Yet, most previous methods mainly focus on fixed surveillance cameras instead of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). With high flexibility, the UAV-based vehicle ReID problem has some special challenges including complicated sh...

Congestion, whether recurrent or non-recurrent, propagates through the road network. The process of congestion propagation from a particular road to its neighbors can be regarded as a kind of message passing with a directed relationship. Existing methods have created a solid foundation for characterizing congestion propagation; however, they are ei...

Realistic digital geographical models of real-world locations are a necessary starting point for digital twin applications, especially for simulation and visualization. However, the visual fidelity of this first step is often neglected, since the effort involved is counterproductive to the main research focus. In this paper, we explore different to...

Managing and estimating the availability information of parking lots is of great importance to travelers and managers. However, the task is very challenging since the occupancy rate is affected by various factors, including spatial‐temporal features, parking lot attributes features, and environmental changes. Previous studies mostly focus on the sh...

As mobile device location data become increasingly available, new analyses are revealing the significant changes of mobility pattern when an unplanned event happened. With different control policies from local and state government, the COVID-19 outbreak has dramatically changed mobility behavior in affected cities. This study has been investigating...

In 2017, the Federal Transit Administration awarded Pierce Transit of Lakewood, WA, a $1.66 m grant for a bus collision avoidance and mitigation safety research and demonstration project. The project scope includes installation of an advanced technology package, the Pedestrian Avoidance Safety System (PASS) that uses light detection and ranging (Li...

Vertical curve features on interstate highways greatly affect traffic operations and vehicle performance and, thus, could have an impact on the occurrence of traffic crashes. Most studies to date only considered linear relationships. Though some researchers did consider nonlinearity, the preassumed data distribution may not fit the true distributio...

Short-term traffic forecasting based on deep learning methods, especially recurrent neural networks (RNN), has received much attention in recent years. However, the potential of RNN-based models in traffic forecasting has not yet been fully exploited in terms of the predictive power of spatial–temporal data and the capability of handling missing da...

Traffic data collection is the fundamental step in most applications of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Recently, traffic data collection methods have become more robust and diversified, yet still have some limitations in their flexibility and coverage. Onboard monocular cameras have considerable potential to be turned into cost-effective...

Our world is moving towards the goal of fully autonomous driving at a fast pace. While the latest automated vehicles (AVs) can handle most real-world scenarios they encounter, a major bottleneck for turning fully autonomous driving into reality is the lack of sufficient corner case data for training and testing AVs. Near-crash data, as a widely use...

A model used for velocity control during car following is proposed based on reinforcement learning (RL). To optimize driving performance, a reward function is developed by referencing human driving data and combining driving features related to safety, efficiency, and comfort. With the developed reward function, the RL agent learns to control vehic...

Short-term traffic flow prediction plays a key role of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which supports traffic planning, traffic management and control, roadway safety evaluation, energy consumption estimation, etc. The widely deployed traffic sensors provide us numerous and continuous traffic flow data, which may contain outlier samples du...

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become an increasingly popular tool for traffic monitoring and data collection on highways due to its advantage of low cost, high resolution, good flexibility, and wide spatial coverage. Extracting high-resolution vehicle trajectory data from aerial videos taken by a UAV flying over target highway...

Network-wide traffic forecasting is a critical component of modern intelligent transportation systems for urban traffic management and control. With the rise of artificial intelligence, many recent studies attempted to use deep neural networks to extract comprehensive features from traffic networks to enhance prediction performance, given the volum...

Short-term traffic forecasting based on deep learning methods, especially recurrent neural networks (RNN), has received much attention in recent years. However, the potential of RNN-based models in traffic forecasting has not yet been fully exploited in terms of the predictive power of spatial-temporal data and the capability of handling missing da...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is at the heart of modern traffic sensing research due to its advantages of low cost, high flexibility, and wide view range over traditional traffic sensors. Recently, increasing efforts in UAV-based traffic sensing have been made, and great progress has been achieved on the estimation of aggregated macroscopic traffic...

In 2017 the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) awarded Pierce Transit of Lakewood, WA a $1.66 million grant for a bus collision avoidance and mitigation safety research and demonstration project. The project scope includes installation of an advanced technology package, the Pedestrian Avoidance Safety System (PASS) that uses lidar sensors to trig...

Traffic speed prediction is a critically important component of intelligent transportation systems. Recently, with the rapid development of deep learning and transportation data science, a growing body of new traffic speed prediction models have been designed that achieved high accuracy and large-scale prediction. However, existing studies have two...

The pollution-routing problem aims to route a number of vehicles and determines their speeds on each route segment to minimize total cost, including fuel, emission and driver costs. Recently, carbon pricing initiatives have been widely implemented worldwide. With consideration of the interactions between carbon pricing initiatives and freight sched...

Cloud computing has been a main-stream computing service for years. Recently, with the rapid development in urbanization, massive video surveillance data are produced at an unprecedented speed. A traditional solution to deal with the big data would require a large amount of computing and storage resources. With the advances in Internet of things (I...

Traffic forecasting is a particularly challenging application of spatiotemporal forecasting, due to the time-varying traffic patterns and the complicated spatial dependencies on road networks. To address this challenge, we learn the traffic network as a graph and propose a novel deep learning framework, Traffic Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term M...

Traffic speed prediction is a critically important component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Recently, with the rapid development of deep learning and transportation data science, a growing body of new traffic speed prediction models have been designed, which achieved high accuracy and large-scale prediction. However, existing studies...

A model used for velocity control during car following was proposed based on deep reinforcement learning (RL). To fulfil the multi-objectives of car following, a reward function reflecting driving safety, efficiency, and comfort was constructed. With the reward function, the RL agent learns to control vehicle speed in a fashion that maximizes cumul...

The quality of traffic data is crucial for modern transportation planning and operations. However, data could be missing for various reasons. Hence, the data imputation approaches which aim at predicting/replacing the missing data or bad data have been considered very important. The traditional traffic data imputation approaches mainly focus on usi...

Recently, the emergence of deep learning has facilitated many research fields including transportation, especially traffic pattern recognition and traffic forecasting. While many efforts have been made in the exploration of new models for higher accuracy and larger scale, few existing studies focus on learning higher-resolution traffic patterns. Th...

As the amount of traffic congestion continues to grow, pinpointing freeway bottleneck locations and quantifying their impacts are crucial activities for traffic management and control. Among the previous bottleneck identification methods, limitations still exist. The first key limitation is that they cannot determine precise breakdown durations at...

Traffic forecasting is a particularly challenging application of spatiotemporal forecasting, due to the time-varying traffic patterns and the complicated spatial dependencies on road networks. To address this challenge, we learn the traffic network as a graph and propose a novel deep learning framework, Traffic Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term M...

Short-term traffic forecasting based on deep learning methods, especially long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, has received much attention in recent years. However, the potential of deep learning methods in traffic forecasting has not yet fully been exploited in terms of the depth of the model architecture, the spatial scale of the predic...

Understanding correlation between influential factors and insurance losses is beneficial for insurers to accurately price and modify the bonus-malus system. Although there have been a certain number of achievements in insurance losses and claims modeling, limited efforts focus on exploring the relative role of accidents characteristics in insurance...

Lane changing maneuver is one of the most important driving behaviors. Unreasonable lane changes can cause serious collisions and consequent traffic delays. High precision prediction of lane changing intent is helpful for improving driving safety. In this study, by fusing information from vehicle sensors, a lane changing predictor based on Adaptive...

Surveillance video cameras have been increasingly deployed on roadway networks providing important support for roadway management. While the information-rich video images are a valuable source of traffic data, these surveillance video cameras are typically designed for manual observation of roadway conditions and are not for automatic traffic data...

Many recent applications of intelligent transportation systems require both real-Time and network-wide traffic flow data as input. However, as the detection time and network size increase, the data volume may become very large in terms of both dimension and scale. To address this concern, various traffic flow data compression methods have been prop...

The mixed multinomial logit (MNL) approach, which can account for unobserved heterogeneity, is a promising unordered model that has been employed in analyzing the effect of factors contributing to crash severity. However, its basic assumption of using a linear function to explore the relationship between the probability of crash severity and its co...

Grouping is a common phenomenon in pedestrian crowds and group modeling is still an open challenging problem. When grouping pedestrians avoid each other, different patterns can be observed. Pedestrians can keep close with group members and avoid other groups in cluster. Also, they can avoid other groups separately. Considering this randomness in av...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity in traffic monitoring due to their low cost, high flexibility, and wide view range. Traffic flow parameters such as speed, density, and volume extracted from UAV-based traffic videos are critical for traffic state estimation and traffic control and have recently received much attention from res...

Existing studies have extensively used temporal-spatial data to mine the mobility patterns of different kinds of travelers. Smart Card Data (SCD) collected by the Automated Fare Collection (AFC) systems can reflect a general view of the mobility pattern of the whole bus and metro riders in urban area. Most existing work focusing on mobility pattern...

Identifying the urban transportation corridor is very crucial in transportation planning, since planning with insufficient data verification often leads to wrong estimation of actual demand. In the era of big data, the pervasive penetration of mobile phones enables us to collect large-scale trajectory data of urban residents every day. These big da...

A novel method for detecting the average speed of traffic from non-stationary aerial video is presented. The method first extracts interest points from a pair of frames and performs interest point tracking with an optical flow algorithm. The output of the optical flow is a set of motion vectors which are k-means clustered in velocity space. The cen...