UMD’s Xiong wins Young Researcher Award for travel app

Photo Credit: Urban Transport Magazine

A UMD researcher who helped develop a smartphone app that incentivizes smart travel choices has won recognition from the International Association of Public Transportation (UITP).

Chenfeng Xiong, assistant research professor of civil and environmental engineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering, won the Young Researcher Award for his work on incenTrip, a smartphone app technology that uses personalized, real-time multimodal traveler information and incentives to influence daily commutes and reduce congestion in Washington D.C. and Baltimore.

His work, in collaboration with Lei Zhang, Herbert Rabin Distinguished Professor and Director of the Maryland Transportation Institute, leverages the latest big data, machine learning, and computing technologies to optimize travel behavior for reduced congestion, energy use, and emissions in a cost-effective way.

“Nudging people’s travel behavior is a difficult task, even with the advanced and amazing technology readily available,” Xiong said. “Nowadays, big data, A.I., and 5G connectivity are here already changing people’s daily life dramatically. But if we aim to persuade more people to travel public transportation and advocate for it, the technological aspect needs to be integrated organically with its psychological counterpart.”

“With incenTrip, we hope to engage more people with incentives, gamification, and more behavioral nudging. It is a start, and could lead to a very cost-effective solution to congestion plague in the United States,” Xiong said.

UITP meets just once every two years to celebrate and acknowledge the most ambitious and innovative public transportation projects from around the world.

At this year’s UITP Congress held in Stockholm, researchers had the opportunity to compete for the following awards:

• Design processes and products
• Diversity and inclusion
• Marketing campaign
• Multimodal integration
• Operational and technological excellence
• Public and urban transport strategy
• Smart funding, financing and business models
• Young researchers

The award competition received over 400 proposals. This pool was further narrowed to 31 finalists by an international jury of experts and then published prior to the UITP Congress. The winners were then announced during the closing ceremony of the summit.

Xiong earned his Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2015. His research interests include understanding the fundamentals of transport systems, including travelers' choices, transport economics, representative agents, and their roles in designing smart-city and smart mobility solutions.

Published June 27, 2019