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Each year, the D-STOP Symposium brings together top experts in the field of automated vehicles, connected infrastructure and new mobility services to share their emerging research that will impact the future of transportation planning and technology.

The Data-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning Center (D-STOP) from UT Austin met with representatives from local and state government, academia and industry in early April at a symposium designed to collaborate on the future of Smart Cities. The day-long event explored smart transportation systems, collaborative ecosystems, infrastructure-based technology, regional planning and analytics and connected vehicles through a series of panels featuring experts in the field.

In 2013, 32,719 fatalities resulted from traffic crashes, most of which were caused by driver error. Across the globe, people are facing longer commutes and five Texas communities are in the top 26 most congested cities in the United States. Traffic congestion creates about 4.8 billion hours of travel delay and affects the environment through increased carbon footprints and higher fuel consumption.

Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a milestone in modern wireless and cellular telecommunications, creating a radically smaller, more efficient radio wave circulator that could be used in cellphones and other wireless devices, as reported in the latest issue of Nature Physics. The new circulator has the potential to double the useful bandwidth in wireless communications by enabling full-duplex functionality, meaning devices can transmit and receive signals on the same frequency band at the same time.

A team of researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Unversity of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) led by Prof. Andrea Alù has built the first-ever circulator for sound. The team’s experiments successfully prove that the fundamental symmetry with which acoustic waves travel through air between two points in space (“if you can hear, you can also be heard”) can be broken by a compact and simple device.