Dept: Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering
Keywords: Transportation decision making, big data analytics, connected and automated vehicles, urban analytics, smart communities, deep learning
Dr. Sharma is an associate professor in the Civil Construction and Environmental Engineering Department at Iowa State University. He also holds a joint appointment as a Research Scientist with the Institute of Transportation. In these positions, he teaches transportation engineering courses to undergraduate and graduate civil engineering students, conducts research in the transportation operations area, and participates in numerous professional organizations.
His research uses big data driven discoveries to help make better short term (usually automated control) and long term (policy) decisions. Dr. Sharma is currently leading the REACTOR (REaltime AnalytiCs of TranspORtation data) laboratory. The High Performance Cluster assembled for the lab is able to ingest multiple streams of real-time data from multiple sources. After successful installation of the REACTOR-HPC, efforts are focused on ingestion, real-time analytics, batch processing, visualization/front end development, and archiving of data streams. Some of the tools developed under this effort can be found at http://reactor.ctre.iastate.edu/. These tools are being used for managing traffic workzones, traffic incident management, transportation infrastructure investment. REACTOR-HPC and a memorandum of understanding with Iowa DOT, has placed Iowa State University among one of the very few facilities in the US transportation arena using big data analytics in the field of transportation. Currently, efforts are being made to increase the ingestion of more data streams, improve visualization and visual querying functionality of archived data, develop batch processing for automatic reporting of performance measures, and conduct real-time analytics on data coming from multiple/heterogeneous sources.
Email: anujs at iastate.edu, Phone: 4-2140