USC ITE Students Excel at the 2025 SoCal ITE/OCTEC Student Presentation Night

On Thursday, May 1st, 2025, the Southern California section of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (SoCal ITE) and Orange County Traffic Engineering Council (OCTEC) hosted their annual Student Presentation Night at Knott's Berry Farm. Bringing six universities together - USC, UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, Cal Poly Pomona, and and UC Irvine - and over a dozen transportation professionals, it was an exceptional opportunity for students to grow their networks and show their enthusiasm for the transportation industry.

The centerpiece of the event was the opportunity for each ITE student chapter to present a technical project their students worked on throughout the academic year. Students, professionals, and judges sat down for a dinner while hearing about the chapters' class projects, original research, and technical insights. In addition to giving ITE students a valuable presentation and feedback opportunity in front of a large audience and professional judges, this event is also a significant chance for ITE student chapters to secure funding that maintains chapter operations, like attending conferences and hosting speakers on campus.

USC students Emerson Sonoda, Mila Mattson, and Blaise Moynihan presented on their work. Combining their varied perspectives grounded in their three different majors from the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and Viterbi School of Engineering, the team jointly developed an innovative web application to crowdsource and organize reports of street hazards. This concept is not only beneficial for ordinary citizens, who can now see where hazards exist around their neighborhoods, but also for municipalities, which now have an easy way to prioritize which hazards to respond to based on reporting frequency (enabling them to make better use of constrained resources for hazard response). Moreover, the focus on an excellent user experience while providing a "one stop shop" for hazard reporting irrespective of jurisdictional boundaries makes the team's proposed solution stand above existing reporting solutions like 311. The audience espeically enjoyed the video demo of the web application, showing how it makes reporting hazards easy, convenient, and fast!

The presentation diversity was wonderful! While our chapter's project focused on pitching an innovative digital solution to streamline transportation agency operations, other students had much different projects - from a freeway interchange redesign from Cal Poly Pomona to an original Amazing Race-esque game for Los Angeles from UCLA. The first place team, Cal State Fullerton, showed off their proposed Dodger Stadium station spur for the Metro A Line, complete with a 3D model. On the other hand, the second place team, UC Irvine, described how they used large language models like ChatGPT to perform traffic warrant analysis at intersections.

UC Irvine closed the night by sharing about the Student Leadership Summit they're hosting at the start of 2026. We're all incredibly excited to see what they have in store for us!

Ultimately, the USC ITE project was awarded third place overall, along with a $1,500 cash prize. We're grateful for the financial generosity from SoCal ITE and OCTEC, and incredibly proud of the hard work Emerson, Mila, and Blaise have put into their project.