2025 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition
Winners of the TSIG’s 2025 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition are:
1st place: Jiacheng Liu, University of Michigan, for “Bayesian Optimization for Simulation-Based Personalized System Design”
2nd place: Shixue Zhang, George Mason University, for “Interactive Fixed Effects for Longitudinal Instrumental Variables with an Application to Traffic Safety”
3rd place: Boyu Jiang, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, for “Learning Salient Representation of Crashes and Near-crashes Using Supervised Contrastive Variational Autoencoder”
Honorable mention: Eunhan Ka, Purdue University, for “Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Decomposition-Based Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework for Traffic State Estimation”
TSIG would like to congratulate Jiacheng, Shixue, Boyu, and Eunhan and wish them success in advancing transportation statistical science. I would also like to thank the following TSIG Paper Competition & Award Committee (PCAC) members and reviewers for their dedicated work in this effort:
- Eun Sug Park, Texas A&M Transportation Institute (PCAC, Chair)
- Pan Lu, Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute/North Dakota State University
- Marco Benedetti, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
- Brian Sloboda, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, US Department of Labor
- Woon Kim, Federal Highway Administration, US Department of Transportation
With best regards,
Linda Boyle, The ASA Transportation Statistics Interest Group Chair
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2024 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition
Winners of the TSIG’s 2024 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition are:
1st place: Mengying Lei, McGill University, for; Scalable Spatiotemporally Varying Coefficient Modeling with Bayesian Kernelized Tensor Regression
2nd place: Kehua Chen, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, for; Combining Time Dependency and Behavioral Game: A Deep Markov Cognitive Hierarchy Model for Human-Like Discretionary Lane Changing Modeling
3rd place: Liang Shi, Virginia Tech, for; DuST: Dual Swin Transformer for Video and Time-Series Multi-Modal Modeling
Honorable mention: Chengyuan Zhang, McGill University, for; Calibrating Car-Following Models via Bayesian Dynamic Regression
TSIG would like to congratulate Mengying, Kehua, Liang, and Chengyuan and wish them success in advancing transportation statistical science. I would like to express my appreciation to the following TSIG, Paper Competition & Award Committee (PCAC) members for their dedicated work in this effort.
- Eun Sug Park, Texas A&M Transportation Institute (PCAC, Chair)
- Seri Park, University of Nevada
- Pan Lu, Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute/North Dakota State University
- James Green, Westat
- Marco Benedetti, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
With best regards,
Patricia Hu, The ASA Transportation Statistics Interest Group Chair
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2023 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition
Winners of the TSIG’s 2023 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition are:
1st place: Meshack Mihayo, Cleveland State University, for; Leveraging Mixture Density Networks for Modeling Crash Clearance Duration: A Case of Ohio Freeways
2nd place: Md Istiak Jahan, University of Central Florida, for; An Enhanced Aggregate Framework to Model Crash Frequency by Crash Type: Accommodating Zero Crashes by Crash Type
3rd place: Dewan Ashraful Parvez, University of Central Florida, for; A Joint Econometric Model Framework for Transportation Network Companies (TNC) Users’ Trip Fare and Destination Choice Analysis
Honorable mention: Asif Mahmud, The Pennsylvania State University, for; Estimation of VMT using heteroskedastic log-linear regression models
2022 Clifford Spiegelman Student Paper Competition
TSIG would like to congratulate John, Meixin, Shahrior, and Xiaobo and wish them success in advancing transportation statistical science.
1st place (Spiegelman Award): John Kodi, Florida International University, for; Assessment of Mobility Impacts of Adaptive Traffic Control System (ATCS) Using Flexible Regression Models
TSIG president Pat Hu with the 1st place winner
2nd place: Meixin Zhu, University of Washington, for; TransFollower: Long-Sequence Car-Following Trajectory Prediction through Transformer
3rd place: Shahrior Pervaz, University of Central Florida, for; Integrating Macro and Micro Level Crash Frequency Models Considering Spatial Heterogeneity and Random Effects
Honorable mention: Xiaobo Ma, The University of Arizona, for; Eliminating the Impacts of Traffic Volume Variation on Before and After Studies: A Causal Inference Approach
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2021 TSIG Student Paper Competition
TSIG would like to congratulate Yiming, Chen, Soheil, and Jack and wish them success in advancing transportation statistical science. I would like to express my appreciation to following TSIG Paper Competition and Award Committee (PCAC) members for their dedicated work for this effort: Marco Benedetti (Nationwide Children’s Hospital), James Green (Westat), Pan Lu (Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute/North Dakota State University), Seri Park (Villanova University), and Eun Sug Park (Texas A&M Transportation Institute).
1st place (Spiegelman Award): Yiming Zhang, University of Connecticut, for; Bayesian Criterion-based Assessments of Recurrent Event Models with Applications to Commercial Truck Driver Behavior Studies. (Read article here)
2nd place: Chen Qian, Virginia Tech, for; C'est La VIE: Variational Inference of Extremal for Rare Event Modeling.
3rd place: Soheil Sohrabi, Texas A&M University, for; Is Automated Driving Safer? An Application of Survival Analysis in Automated Vehicle Safety Evaluation.
Honorable mention: Jack Kong, Texas A&M University, for; Discovering Reasons and Patterns for bridges with fast deteriorating deck conditions.
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Bio of Clifford Spiegelman
Clifford Henry Spiegelman graduated with a PhD in Statistics and Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1976.
From there he developed a varied career in applied statistics, spending a year at Florida State University, nine years at the National Bureau of Standards (present day NIST), and finally moving to Texas A&M University where he worked from 1987 until the time of his death on May 14, 2020.
Academically he moved up the ranks at Texas A&M, beginning as an Associate Professor, promoted to Full Professor in 1990, named a Distinguished Professor in 2009, and appointed a Regents Professor in 2018.
His major research interests were receptor modeling, calibration curves, nonparametric curve fitting, high dimensional methods, and applications of statistics particularly to forensics, chemistry, proteomics, the environment, transportation, and agriculture.
Dr. Spiegelman received accolades for his service to the scientific community. He was a co-founding editor of Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems and became Editor Emeritus in 2017 after 30+ years of service. He used his knowledge of statistics and forensic science to advocate for accuracy by investigators in the criminal justice system to prevent or overturn false convictions. His other contributions to his profession, and awards received, are too numerous to record here. For additional information please refer to his obituary in AMSTAT News, 1 July, 2020.
In 2004, Dr. Spiegelman was appointed a Senior Research Scientist at the Texas Transportation Institute. Prior to his appointment he provided statistical support to TTI research projects in the 1990s. He and his former PhD student Eun Sug Park established and staffed TTl's Stat Help Desk. Professor Spiegelman left a legacy of the strong statistical capabilities of the TTI group. While at TTI, he led a broad range of transportation research, including quality control of large transportation databases, robust estimation of origin-destination matrices, improving pavement performance prediction, and developing gap bootstrap methods for massive transportation data sets, as well as working with the Texas Department of Transportation in developing standards for road quality and regulations.
Dr. Spiegelman made a fundamental contribution to the field of transportation statistics. He played a pivotal role in establishing the Transportation Statistics Interest Group (TSIG) of the ASA, served on the Statistical Methods Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academics for many years (2002-2012), and provided crucial support throughout. Dr. Spiegelman and his colleagues Dr. Eun Sug Park and Dr. Larry Rilett coauthored a textbook entitled "Transportation Statistics and Microsimulation" (CRC Press, 2011) for transportation professionals and students to promote the proper use of statistics in transportation nationwide.