Ci (Jessie) Yang, Ph.D.

Photo taken at 2013 WTS-GNY Annual Gala, Grand Central Station, NYC

Research Program Coordinator in Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT), Rutgers Univerisity, New Jersey Ph.D. candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rutgers University You can find my CV here. Email: jessie_yang06 (at) yahoo.com Research adviser: Eric Gonzales

A Demonstration of Big Data

Visualization of New York City 10-month Taxi Pickup Trips Aggregated into 24 Hours

Change speed: Slow Medium Fast

Visualization of New York City 10-month Taxi Drop-off Trips Aggregated into 24 Hours

Change speed: Slow Medium Fast

Identifying the factors that influence taxi demand is very important for understanding where and when people use taxis. A large set of Global Positioning System (GPS) data from New York City (NYC) taxis is used along with demographic, socioeconomic, and employment data to identify the factors that drive taxi demand. The taxi data is categorized by pick-ups and drop-offs at different times of day to help understand how taxi demand changes by day of time. The visulazation of the taxi pick-ups and drop-offs are shown below. A multiple linear regression model is estimated for each hour of the day to model pick-ups and another to model drop-offs....

This paper has been accepted for publication by Transportation Research Record (TRR), Journal of Transportation Research Board.

For the full version of the paper, please visit HERE.

Research Interest

Transportation Modeling and Planning (Travel Demand and Supply Modeling, Public Transportation System, Operational Research); Transportation Safety Management (Safety Data Analysis/Mining, Safety Data Quality Management, Safety Data Modeling); Statistical Analysis (Decision-making Predictive Modeling, Time Series Modeling, Spatial Data Mining); Environmental Engineering; Big Data analytics.

Education

• Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
  M.S. in Statistics (Statistics), January 2014

  Graduate Certificate in Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy (Transportation Studies), January 2014
  Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Transportation Engineering), October 2015

  • Advisor: Professor Eric Gonzales

  • Thesis: Data-driven Modeling of Taxi Trip Demand and Productivity in New York City
    - spatial data visualization, manipulation, management, and data mining.
    - taxi demand and supply modeling.

• Texas A&M University, Kingsville, TX (TAMUK)
  M.S. in Environmental Engineering (Air Quality Modeling), December 2009

• People’s University of China, Beijing (RUC)
  B.S. in Environmental Science, July 2007

Publications

1. Yang, Ci and Gonzales, Eric (2015), “Modeling Taxi Demand and Supply in New York City Using Large-Scale Taxi GPS Data.” Seeing Cities Through Big Data - Research, Methods and Applications in Urban Informatics (In Press).

2. Gonzales, Eric, Ci Yang, Ender Morgul, and Kann Ozbay (2014), “Modeling Taxi Demand with GPS Data from Taxis and Transit”. Mineta National Transit Research Consortium (MNTRC) Report 12-16 (Released on July 21, 2014), also covered in media by WFSB-TV 3, TikerTech.com, and Securities Technology Monitor.

3. Yang, Ci and Eric Gonzales (2014), “Modeling Taxi Trip Demand by Time of Day in New York City”. Transportation Research Record, No. 2429, pp. 110-120

4. Yang, Ci, Ender Morgul, Eric Gonzales, and Kaan Ozbay (2014), “Comparison of Mode Cost by Time of Day for Non-driving Airport Trips to and from New York City's Pennsylvania Station”. Transportation Research Record, No. 2449, pp. 34-44

5. Yang, Ci and David Hill (2012) “Modeling Stream Flow Extremes Under Non-time-stationary Conditions”, International Conference on Computational Methods in Water Resources (CMWR), 17-21 June, Champaign, IL

Presentations

• BDUIC 2014, CHICAGO, IL
  - Modeling Taxi Demand and Supply in New York City Using Large-Scale Taxi GPS Data

• TRB 2014, WASHINGTON, DC
  - Modeling Taxi Trip Demand by Time of Day in New York City

• TRB 2014, WASHINGTON, DC
  - Comparison of Mode Cost by Time of Day for Non-driving Airport Trips to and from New York City Penn Station

• ITE Northeastern District Meeting 2013, NORTHAMPTON, MA
  - Analysis of Taxi Demand Versus Subway Accessibility in New York City

• CMWR 2012, CHAMPAIN, IL
  - Modeling Stream Flow Extremes Under Non-time-stationary Conditions

Experience

Rutgers University, Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT), New Brunswick, NJ
Research Program Coordinator, January 2015 - June 2015

Graduate Research Assistant, May 2014 - January 2015

• Identify system errors (Data quality control) from New Jersey motor vehicle crash database, Plan4Safety and manage the big crash data.
• Perform data quality analysis, safety/fatality risk modeling based on the New Jersey crash database.
• Leading to develop academic paper ideas and Journal publications.
• Coordinating in project: Models Detecting Horizontal Curves.

Rutgers University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, New Brunswick, NJ
Graduate Research Assistant, September 2012 - June 2014

• Assisted Dr. Eric Gonzales and group members on various transportation research projects in a fast-paced environment.
• Gathered literatures and conducted research using large GPS datasets from Taxis to Understand Public Transit Demand and Mode Choice in NYC as a major investigator.
• Designed systematic procedures to clean and map large-scale spatial taxi datasets using ArcGIS, SQL server and Excel.
• Developed a series of numerical and statistical methods to analyze and model taxi demand using SAS, R and Matlab.
• Accomplishments include two first-authored peer-reviewed Journal publications and four conference proceedings.

Texas Environmental Studies and Analysis (TX-ESA), Kingsville, TX
Environmental Data Analyst, February 2010 - August 2010

• Worked with a team of 10 on wind farm projects under the supervision of Dr. Margaret Land
• Performed environmental risk assessment of wind energy turbines on wildlife (birds and bates) count data and survival analysis on carcass removal time, and assessed on environmental impacts using SAS and Excel.

Texas A&M University, Department of Environmental Engineering, Kingsville, TX
Graduate Research Assistant, August 2007 - December 2009

• Assisted Dr. Kuruvilla John and students on air quality research project “Corpus Christi Ozone Near Non-attainment Area Air Quality Research and Planning Activities”.
• Collected and analyzed air quality monitoring data for the purpose of identifying the sources and corresponding contribution of each source of air pollutants particulate matter (PM) and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in Corpus Christi area.
• Utilized EPA’s Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) tool to perform multivariate factor analysis.

Memberships

American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

Awards and Honers

Awarded Outstanding Student in ITS-NJ Annual Meeting, 2014

Awarded WTS-GNY Leonard Braun Memorial Graduate Scholarship, 2013

Student Poster winner ITE Northeastern District Meeting, 2013
- [On the ITE newsletter]

Awarded School of Engineering (SOE) Fellowship at Rutgers University, 2010 & 2011