ISTRC 2026 WEBINAR SERIES - Smart Transportation in Transition
Smart Transportation in Transition is a webinar series by the Israel Smart Transportation Research Center (ISTRC) that presents emerging research, methods, and applications in smart mobility. The webinar series aims to create a forum for discussing how transportation systems are changing in response to emerging technologies, behavioral shifts, sustainability goals, policy needs, and evolving mobility patterns. The series seeks to connect academic research with real-world transportation challenges and to encourage dialogue across disciplines and sectors.
WEBINAR NO. 2:
Optimizing Investments in Transportation and Other Critical Infrastructure Systems Protection
DATE & TIME
Oct 19, 2026 | 15:30
TARGET AUDIENCE
Smart Transportation Researchers and Practitioners
SPEAKER
Dr. Elise Miller-Hooks
Professor and Chair, Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering
Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair in Infrastructure Engineering
George Mason University
FACILITATOR
Dr. Rui Yao
Tenure-track Assistant Professor
Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
DESCRIPTION
Secure and functioning transportation and other critical civil infrastructure systems are of paramount importance to society. To ensure that effective services can be provided under changing, disrupted or extreme conditions, agencies charged with managing and operating these systems must invest in measures that safeguard their performance. Decisions to invest needed capital and accept the opportunity costs of directing funds to protection in place of other community needs involve tradeoffs in effective use of limited resources and risk levels. This lecture will describe developed optimization, real options and machine learning approaches designed for supporting such protective investment decisions. These techniques address inherent uncertainties in future conditions arising from one-time to episodic events, the role of humans in infrastructure service capacity, operational conditions of extreme environments, and the effects of dependencies and interdependencies across multiple, interacting civil infrastructure lifeline systems.