FACULTY PROFILE: JESSICA
GUO
 lthough Jessica
Guo is a transportation researcher, her focus is on people. “I
think that’s why I get really intrigued and motivated,”
says the department’s new assistant professor. “As an individual,
you can relate to all of the problems—and then when you talk to
other people, you tend to get them interested.”
Drawing on her background in computer science and
operations research, Guo applies mathematical models and micro-simulation
techniques to a field of research called activity-based travel demand
modeling. Transportation modeling researchers generally focus on travelers’
destinations, modes of transportation, and time of travel into their
travel models. But the new approach places more emphasis on why people
make the travel choices they do, says Guo.
Studying transportation
from the traveler's perspective
Using survey data about individuals’ travel
choices and information about the built environment, Guo can build models
that predict current and future travel demand. She can implement the
models in software packages that city or state transportation planners
can use to test policy scenarios. For example, she says, if Madison
were to introduce a new commuter rail from the West Side to Downtown,
planners would want to predict whether it would be cost-effective to
construct and operate compared with the number of people who might benefit
from using it, as well as its effect on the environment.
Not surprisingly, Guo, who was born in Taiwan and
immigrated with her family to Australia, enjoys traveling herself. She
met her husband, South Africa native Michael Wilson, on a group tour
in Spain; among several shorter trips abroad, the two return to their
respective countries every few years to visit family.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in computer
science from the University of Melbourne in Australia. Then Guo began
graduate work at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology via the
Transport Research Center—a program that fed her interest in mathematical
modeling and the applications of computing, particularly in operations
research.
A year into her degree, she took a full-time job
in the Division of Building Construction and Engineering of the Commonwealth
Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s
national science agency. Guo started as a scientific programmer, but
during her five- year tenure, she became involved as a researcher on
two infrastructure system planning projects.
Coupled with her master’s research in spatial
aspects of transportation modeling, the CSIRO opportunity exposed Guo
to a broader range of transportation problems. “That’s when
I decided I’d like to get a bit more education in transport engineering,”
she says.
She found the research program she was looking for
under Professor Chandra Bhat in the Department of Civil, Architectural
& Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin. For
her dissertation, she studied the interaction between land use and transportation.
“That includes looking at how land-use factors—for example,
the distribution of residential, commercial and industrial activities
in an urban area—have an effect on people’s travel-related
choices,” says Guo.
Conversely, she also examined how individuals’
travel choices shape land-use distribution in the long run. “And
so in that context, I was really interested in people’s decision-making,”
she says.
During her PhD work, Guo joined another project
to develop a software system that simulates the daily travel patterns
for an entire city—everything from when an individual leaves the
house to walk the dog, returns, leaves for work, goes to lunch, runs
errands, and so on. Funded mainly by the Texas Department of Transportation,
she and other researchers currently are studying the Dallas-Fort Worth
area—a region with a population of more than three million. “We’re
building behaviorally sound mathematical models behind all that simulation,
so the computer system will be a good representation of the ‘real-world’
and can be used to test impacts of various policies and planning scenarios,”
says Guo.
She is the project’s co-manager; she also
is helping develop a geographic information systems tool to evaluate
transit accessibility measures for any given city. “Eventually,
we would like to be able to look at the map of a city and be able to
see how certain areas are probably provided with better transit service
than the others,” she says.
Ultimately, transit planners could use the tool
to identify and fill service gaps to increase ridership and ensure that
adequate public transportation is available to people from a variety
of racial backgrounds and income levels. Guo’s group will demonstrate
the tool in seven study areas in Texas; after that, she hopes to expand
the project. “Once you know the system is not doing well, what
do you do next? I want to take that next step,” she says.
On campus, she hopes to build a research program
that connects with and complements not only existing transportation
research, but also other fields. In particular, she is talking with
medical and public health researchers about how to design an environment
that encourages more people to walk and bike.
“We are looking at it in terms of reducing
congestion, replacing driving by walking or bicycling,” says Guo,
who often walks, carpools or rides the bus around Madison. “And
they are looking at the problem from the health standpoint, which is
how to get people to go out and walk more. But when you really think
about it, our ultimate goal is the same.”
Guo also hopes to tap experts in areassuch as psychology,
sociology and other social sciences to apply new techniques and perspectives
to solving transportation problems from a user’s perspective.
“This kind of travel behavior analysis is really a multidisciplinary
research area,” she says.
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