Jonathan Wood

Maroa Mumtarin, Md Samiullah Chowdhury, Jonathan Wood

In traffic safety research, extracting information from crash narratives using text analysis is a common practice. With recent advancements of large language models (LLM), it would be useful to know how the popular LLM interfaces perform in classifying or extracting information from crash narratives. To explore this, our study has used the three most popular publicly available LLM interfaces- ChatGPT, BARD and GPT4. This study investigated their usefulness and boundaries in extracting information and answering queries related to accidents from 100 crash narratives from Iowa and Kansas. During the investigation, their capabilities and limitations were assessed and their responses to the queries were compared. Five questions were asked related to the narratives: 1) Who is at-fault? 2) What is the manner of collision? 3) Has the crash occurred in a work-zone? 4) Did the crash involve pedestrians? and 5) What are the sequence of harmful events in the crash? For questions 1 through 4, the overall similarity among the LLMs were 70%, 35%, 96% and 89%, respectively. The similarities were higher while answering direct questions requiring binary responses and significantly lower for complex questions. To compare the responses to question 5, network diagram and centrality measures were analyzed. The network diagram from the three LLMs were not always similar although they sometimes have the same influencing events with high in-degree, out-degree and betweenness centrality. This study suggests using multiple models to extract viable information from narratives. Also, caution must be practiced while using these interfaces to obtain crucial safety related information.

Sudesh Bhagat, Ibne Farabi Shihab, Jonathan Wood

This research investigates the efficacy of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods in detecting misclassified intersection-related crashes in police-reported narratives. Using 2019 crash data from the Iowa Department of Transportation, we implemented and compared a comprehensive set of models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), XGBoost, BERT Sentence Embeddings, BERT Word Embeddings, and Albert Model. Model performance was systematically validated against expert reviews of potentially misclassified narratives, providing a rigorous assessment of classification accuracy. Results demonstrated that while traditional ML methods exhibited superior overall performance compared to some DL approaches, the Albert Model achieved the highest agreement with expert classifications (73% with Expert 1) and original tabular data (58%). Statistical analysis revealed that the Albert Model maintained performance levels similar to inter-expert consistency rates, significantly outperforming other approaches, particularly on ambiguous narratives. This work addresses a critical gap in transportation safety research through multi-modal integration analysis, which achieved a 54.2% reduction in error rates by combining narrative text with structured crash data. We conclude that hybrid approaches combining automated classification with targeted expert review offer a practical methodology for improving crash data quality, with substantial implications for transportation safety management and policy development.

Atousa Zarindast, Jonathan Wood, Anuj Sharma

Recommender systems attempts to identify and recommend the most preferable item (product-service) to an individual user. These systems predict user interest in items based on related items, users, and the interactions between items and users. We aim to build an auto-routine and color scheme recommender system that leverages a wealth of historical data and machine learning methods. We introduce an unsupervised method to recommend a routine for lighting. Moreover, by analyzing users' daily logs, geographical location, temporal and usage information we understand user preference and predict their preferred color for lights. To do so, we cluster users based on their geographical information and usage distribution. We then build and train a predictive model within each cluster and aggregate the results. Results indicate that models based on similar users increases the prediction accuracy, with and without prior knowledge about user preferences.