Project Timeline

  • January 2011

    Alexandre Bayen, Associate Professor of Systems Engineering Wins the PECASE

    Alexandre Bayen, Associate Professor of Systems Engineering, has won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), it was announced late Friday, Nov. 5.

    Bayen is being honored for his mobile sensing work on both the Mobile Millennium project and the Floating Sensor Network. He won the National Science Foundation Career Award last year; the NSF then nominated him for the PECASE award. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. A total of 85 recipients were announced in a press release late Friday. The awards, established by President Clinton in 1996, are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. Ten federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious scientists and engineers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for assuring America’s preeminence in science and engineering and contributing to the awarding agencies' missions. Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach. Winning scientists and engineers have received research grants for up to five years to further their studies in support of critical government missions.

  • June 2009

    California Transportation Foundation's 2009 Tranny Award

    The Mobile Century / Mobile Millennium Project won the California Transportation Foundation's 2009 Tranny Award for Traffic Operations/ITS Project of the Year. The awards celebrate transportation achievements in 2008. Project partners Caltrans District 4, UC Berkeley College of Engineering, and Nokia were announced at a June 3 luncheon in Sacramento. More can be found at the following URL: http://www.calccit.org/?page=news&id=11

  • February 27, 2009

    CITRIS opening

    Mobile Millennium arterial visualizer goes live! For the grand opening of the CITRIS building (Sutardja Dai Hall), Mobile Millennium arterial traffic was officially released to the public. As part of the opening ceremony and in the presence of distinguished guests including California Governor Gray Davis, Mobile Millennium's live interactive visualizer was presented to guests of the ceremony. The visualizer is now operational and can be viewed by any visitor of the museum. More about the CITRIS opening can be found at: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/03/02_citris.shtml

  • January 2009

    CAREER Award

    Principal Investigator Alexandre Bayen won the CAREER Award based on a proposal centered around Mobile Millennium. The CAREER program offers NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution. The intent of the program is to provide stable support at a sufficient level and duration to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars.

  • January 2009

    Live Traffic Online

    Mobile Millennium shows small portion of live traffic online for the first time.

  • November 18, 2008

    Best Innovative Practices Award

    Mobile Century project was honored with the "Best Innovative Practices Award" by the Intelligent Transportation Society of America at the annual meeting of the national group in New York City in November, 2008. The winning paper, whose full title is "Mobile Century: A Novel Approach to Traffic Data Collection from GPS-Equipped Mobile Phones," was honored at an awards ceremony on November 20. Larry Orcutt, Chief of the Division of Research and Innovation, accepted on behalf of Caltrans. Additional awards were presented to CCIT Senior Development Engineer Ali Mortazavi and CCIT Associate Director JD Margulici on behalf of CCIT, and to Alexandre Bayen, the principal investigator on the project. More can be found at the following URL: http://www.calccit.org/?page=news&id=7

  • November 18, 2008

    Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) World Congress, New York City

    Mobile Millennium showcased a custom version of the system that modeled urban traffic in downtown Manhattan. Mobile Century won the "Best of ITS" award at the ITS World Congress, with citation "Best Innovative Practice".

  • November 10, 2008

    Launch of the Mobile Millennium

    At 8:30am PST, the Launch of the Mobile Millennium was announced from the UC Berkeley campus.

  • October 2008

    System integration and rollout of test vehicles

    Volunteer drivers were set up with GPS cell phones in their vehicles. Data was collected while they re driving along the San Francisco/Lake Tahoe corridor and passed to the traffic estimation system. Speeds and travel times were calculated and sent back to the drivers' phones in real-time.

  • August 2008

    Traffic estimation system in place

    The system is able to process incoming data along the I-80 corridor between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, providing speeds and travel times as output. The models and algorithms were refined while running small-scale tests along this study route. Other routes, including highway 50 to South Lake Tahoe and major urban arterial roads in the bay area and Sacramento, were also studied.

  • July 2008

    Field test

    In downtown Berkeley, CA, 20 cars drove along a fixed loop for several hours. The objective was to collect data to validate traffic models on urban roads as well as to test an initial prototype of the full traffic estimation system.

  • June 2008

    Preliminary data collection tests

    Vehicles with GPS-equipped cell phones were driven in loops on urban roads for a fixed period of time. The data collected from these phones was used to develop the traffic models to be implemented in later stages of the project.