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KU junior named as Newman Civic Fellow
LAWRENCE – Abeer Iqbal, a junior majoring in behavioral neuroscience with a minor in social justice in the U.S., is the University of Kansas’ Newman Civic Fellow for 2022-2023. The award recognizes student leaders who demonstrated an investment in their community through service, research and advocacy.
Exhibition highlights collaborative research across art, physics, math
LAWRENCE – An exhibition opening April 20 presents collaborative research across visual art, mathematics, physics, music and dance at the University of Kansas. “Collective Entanglements” is organized by the Spencer Museum of Art’s Integrated Arts Research Initiative. For the past year, a group has worked on a project that uses the time-based media of video and performance to explore questions in particle and nuclear physics through novel mathematical techniques.
Autonomous vehicles could prove to be future model for delivery services, study finds
LAWRENCE – A new study finds that self-driving vehicles reduce the completion time of delivery tours and provide the most cost-effective business model. The vehicle in the study drops off the delivery person at one location, where they deliver packages on foot. The vehicle then picks them up at an alternate location. “It removes the need to find parking where you leave a vehicle by itself, as well as it removes the delivery person’s walk back to the vehicle,” said Sara Reed, assistant professor of business analytics at the University of Kansas.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Andy Hyland, 785-864-7100, [email protected]
KU junior named as Newman Civic Fellow
LAWRENCE – A University of Kansas junior has been named as a Newman Civic Fellow, an award that recognizes student leaders who demonstrated an investment in their community through service, research and advocacy.
Abeer Iqbal, a junior majoring in behavioral neuroscience with a minor in social justice in the U.S., is KU’s Newman Civic Fellow for 2022-2023. She is from Des Moines, Iowa, and a graduate of Waukee High School. Iqbal plans to pursue a dual Doctor of Medicine and Master of Public Health degree. That degree would allow her to give back to her community by helping underrepresented communities of color have more satisfactory health outcomes and medical experiences.
She has provided leadership to multiple organizations that advance social justice and health education on campus and in the broader community.
Iqbal, a University Honors Scholar, is the current academic chair of Phi Delta Epsilon (PhiDE) Academic Pre-Medical Fraternity and previously held the service chair position. She is also the director of alumni relations for Mortar Board Society, a Family Relations Committee member for KU Dance Marathon and service chair for Sigma Kappa sorority. Iqbal has also volunteered within KU LEAD-UP, Jayhawk Health Initiative Medical Tele-Brigade, Sigma Kappa Campus Clean-Ups and Broadlawns Hospital. Since fall 2021, she has participated in a research recruitment internship at University of Kansas Medical Center, where she helps connect and teach minority communities to research opportunities and resources within the KU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
Iqbal joins a cohort of over 200 students from across the country in a yearlong program that includes training, virtual learning opportunities and an annual fellow convening. The opportunities available to the Newman Civic Fellows include attendance at the national Newman Civic Fellows conference, participation in regional and state gatherings of Newman Civic Fellows, engagement with a virtual event series focused on skill development and professional learning, and guidance from a local mentor.
Campus Compact advances the public purpose of over 1,000 colleges and universities by deepening their ability to improve community life and to educate students for civic and social responsibility. For more information, visit compact.org.
The Center for Service Learning will celebrate Abeer Iqbal, CSL Award recipients and graduates from the Certificate in Service Learning program at its annual Service Showcase and Celebration at 3:30 p.m. April 21.
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Contact: Elizabeth Kanost, 785-864-0142, [email protected]
Exhibition highlights collaborative research across art, physics, math
LAWRENCE — An exhibition opening April 20 presents collaborative research across visual art, mathematics, physics, music and dance at the University of Kansas. “Collective Entanglements,” organized by the Spencer Museum of Art’s Integrated Arts Research Initiative (IARI), explores work by IARI research fellows Agnieszka Międlar, associate professor of mathematics; Daniel Tapia Takaki, associate professor of physics; and New York-based artist Janet Biggs.
For the past year this group has worked on a project that uses the time-based media of video and performance to explore questions in particle and nuclear physics through novel mathematical techniques.
“We asked ourselves: What is art? Is mathematics an art? Can physics create art? Can our collaboration across disciplines be generative and substantive in our respective fields and still build new scientific knowledge?” Międlar said.
During April 20-22, the group will present its research through a series of events across the KU Lawrence campus, including an exhibition in Slawson Hall. To create the immersive installation, Biggs produced video and sound inspired by the phenomenon of time, including lunar and solar eclipses, scientific devices at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), dancers and Antarctic glaciers. Międlar and Takaki manipulated Biggs’s footage through algebraic computations often used in quantum mechanics.
Joey Orr, Spencer Museum curator for research, said the exhibition represents an experiment that has relevance across the fields that each of the IARI fellows represents.
“Consisting of six videos and a musical score, the installation itself was created collectively by all three participants,” Orr said.
Events throughout the week include panels featuring Biggs, Międlar, Takaki and Orr, as well as current and past IARI graduate fellows. Two lectures by visiting scholars Roger Malina, University of Texas at Dallas, and Tim Davis, Texas A&M University, will further explore ways of using physics and math to deepen understanding of the arts, and vice versa.
All events are free and open to the public. A full schedule is available online.
Events are co-presented by The Commons, the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Spencer Museum of Art. The Integrated Arts Research Initiative is funded by support from the Mellon Foundation and Margaret H. Silva.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Autonomous vehicles could prove to be future model for delivery services, study finds
LAWRENCE — The notion of self-driving vehicles is currently met with equal parts wonder and alarm. But a new study reveals how the pros may outweigh the cons as a business strategy.
An article titled “Impact of Autonomous Vehicle Assisted Last-Mile Delivery in Urban to Rural Settings” determines that this technology reduces the completion time of delivery tours and provides the most cost-effective business model. It appears in Transportation Science.
“The starting point of this paper involved the United States Postal Service announcing its idea to start using autonomous vehicles in rural routes,” said Sara Reed, assistant professor of business analytics at the University of Kansas.
“What we find is autonomous vehicles are cost-effective across all customer geographies, but it’s actually in urban environments that will see the most gains, particularly because parking is a challenge and customers are closer together. Serving customers on foot in urban environments becomes more advantageous than in rural environments where one may need to walk long distances between customers after parking.”
FedEx and Volkswagen have already utilized autonomous vehicles in countries such as China and Germany. Domino’s Pizza and 7-Eleven are now experimenting with bringing food and products to American customers. The USPS is aiming to implement this service by 2025, projecting a deployment on 28,000 rural routes. What once sounded like “Jetsons”-era futurism is now right around the corner.
Reed, who co-wrote the paper with Ann Melissa Campbell and Barrett Thomas of the University of Iowa, said this tech should not be confused with flying drones.
“Our autonomous vehicle is a ground vehicle that can drive itself,” she said. “It can go from one place to another without the need for a driver.”
In this particular study, the autonomous vehicle assists the delivery person in making deliveries.
“The vehicle drops off the delivery person at one location. They serve customers by delivering packages on foot, and then the vehicle picks them up at an alternate location. So what does that do for the delivery driver? It removes the need to find parking where you leave a vehicle by itself, as well as it removes the delivery person’s walk back to the vehicle,” Reed said.
The United Parcel Service has used a similar approach during the holiday season in Baltimore, for instance, by putting an extra delivery person onboard its trucks. The model proposed by Reed considers upgrading the technology of the vehicle instead. But which approach ultimately saves more money? On one hand, there’s the extra cost of the additional driver; on the other hand, there’s the extra cost of autonomous technology.
“Given the wage cost and increased productivity, we show that the autonomous vehicle model is more cost-effective than putting an additional person on a traditional vehicle,” she said.
Currently, Reed explained, this technology is very expensive. Thus the “per hour” delivery model costs more.
“But these great reductions in the time of the delivery tour outweigh that increased expenditure,” she said. “You also have to think about other advantages introduced by placing autonomous vehicles on the road. They may be driving around more, but they’re also not parking, so they’re freeing up spots for other people to park and get to businesses downtown.”
Overall, her report reveals dramatic savings in both time and money. In urban environments, the prospective savings could eclipse 50%.
On the flip side of this equation is the potential toll on human employment.
“One fear is that autonomous vehicles are going to take away the role of the delivery person,” she said. “From the aspect of a fully autonomous vehicle — meaning we’ve eliminated that driver job — our paper shows it’s actually more advantageous to have a delivery driver on board in both productivity and cost-effectiveness.”
A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Reed is now completing her first year at KU. Her expertise is in transportation logistics. This autonomous vehicle study was part of her dissertation.
She said, “Most of my work concerns ‘last-mile delivery’ – which is the idea that if you order a package from Amazon, it might go a variety of places until it gets to you, and the last mile is the previous destination to your address. I’m focused on the challenges in that realm.”
The “future shock” aspect of her autonomous subject is not lost on Reed.
“At the beginning, I thought this might represent a ‘new society’ and that type of thing,” she said. “But since I first started working on this, some things have already been implemented — not necessarily full-scale on the autonomous vehicle side, but if you think more locally on college campuses, there are places where robots are delivering food to students. I imagine it’s weird to see a robot going by, but then you probably get acclimated to it.”
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