About

Professor B. Brian Park is a faculty member at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, associated with the Link Lab. His research focuses on developing sensing and computing methodologies for the fast and reliable analysis of smart and interconnected infrastructure systems under uncertainty. His work is inherently multi-disciplinary, aiming to advance reliability and resilience in infrastructure systems.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Control engineering
• Computer network
• Real-time computing
• Transport engineering

Selected publications

• Mock Truss-Braced Wing Ground Vibration Test using FixedBase Correction Method

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Detection and identification of nonlinearity is a task of high importance for structural dynamics.On the one hand, identifying nonlinearity in a structure would allow one to build more accurate models of the structure.On the other hand, detecting nonlinearity in a structure, which has been designed to operate in its linear region, might indicate the existence of damage within the structure.Common damage cases which cause nonlinear behaviour are breathing cracks and points where some material may have reached its plastic region.Therefore, it is important, even for safety reasons, to detect when a structure exhibits nonlinear behaviour.In the current work, a method to detect nonlinearity is proposed, based on the distribution of the gradients of a data-driven model, which is fitted on data acquired from the structure of interest.The data-driven model selected for the current application is a neural network.The selection of such a type of model was done in order to not allow the user to decide how linear or nonlinear the model shall be, but to let the training algorithm of the neural network shape the level of nonlinearity according to the training data.The neural network is trained to predict the accelerations of the structure for a time-instant using as input accelerations of previous time-instants, i.e. one-step-ahead predictions.Afterwards, the gradients of the output of the neural network with respect to its inputs are calculated.Given that the structure is linear, the distribution of the aforementioned gradients should be unimodal and quite peaked, while in the case of a structure with nonlinearities, the distribution of the gradients shall be more spread and, potentially, multimodal.To test the above assumption, data from an experimental structure are considered.The structure is tested under different scenarios, some of which are linear and some of which are nonlinear.More specifically, the nonlinearity is introduced as a column-bumper nonlinearity, aimed at simulating the effects of a breathing crack and at different levels, i.e. different values of the initial gap between the bumper and the column.Following the proposed method, the statistics of the distributions of the gradients for the different scenarios can indeed be used to identify cases where nonlinearity is present.Moreover, via the proposed method one is able to quantify the nonlinearity by observing higher values of standard deviation of the distribution of the gradients for lower values of the initial column-bumper gap, i.e. for "more nonlinear" scenarios.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data-Driven Assessment of Traffic Calming: A Case Study of University Campus Using Vehicle Telematics Data

  2025-05-02

  articleSenior author

  This study presents a data-driven assessment of the effectiveness of a road diet, a traffic calming infrastructure, on McCormick Road at the University of Virginia using telematics data from the university’s facilities management fleet. With this data, we evaluated the impact of the road diet on driving behavior and overall traffic safety. Telematics data captured a variety of infraction metrics, including speeding, harsh braking, jackrabbit starts, and harsh cornering on thousands of trips before and after the implementation of the road diet. Our findings revealed a $\mathbf{7 5. 5 \%}$ reduction in total infractions, despite a $16.8 \%$ increase in trip volume within the study area. That, along with geospatial analysis of the McCormick Road zone and additional insights drawn from visualizations of hourly infraction patterns, demonstrated the success of the road diet and highlighted the power of vehicle telematics as a tool to monitor and evaluate traffic safety interventions in real-time. In addition, the study contributes to the growing body of evidence supporting data-informed urban planning, suggesting that even modest infrastructure changes, when designed with pedestrian safety in mind, can yield significant safety benefits. Future work is proposed to improve temporal resolution in data collection and develop personalized driver training programs for persistent outliers, further leveraging telematics for long-term traffic safety improvements.

  PublisherDOI

• Smart Rideshare Matching: Feasibility of Utilizing Personalized Preferences

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Assessment of Electric Vehicle Battery Fast Charging Characteristics

  2025-09-29

  articleSenior author

  Electrification via the rapid adoption of electric vehicles is a key to addressing climate challenges. While researchers investigated EV users' battery charging behaviors such as charging location choice based on charging events, little effort was made to explore the characteristics and significant variability of EV battery charging duration. This study analyzes high-resolution (1-minute interval) charging data from 108 Tesla electric vehicles in North America to quantify this variability. Our analysis of top-performing vehicles reveals that charging duration for a typical 10% to 80% battery state-of-charge session can vary by as much as 30 minutes, even at the same nominal charging power level. This statistically significant variance underscores the inadequacy of static charging time estimates and warrants the development of dynamic, individualized charging duration models for reliable EV route planning.

  PublisherDOI

• Impact of Critical Situations on Autonomous Vehicles and Strategies for Improvement

  Future Transportation · 2025-04-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Recently, the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and intelligent driver assistance systems has drawn significant attention from the public. Despite these advancements, AVs may encounter critical situations in real-world scenarios that can lead to severe traffic accidents. This review paper investigated these critical scenarios, categorizing them under weather conditions, environmental factors, and infrastructure challenges. Factors such as attenuation and scattering severely influence the performance of sensors and AVs, which can be affected by rain, snow, fog, and sandstorms. GPS and sensor signals can be disturbed in urban canyons and forested regions, which pose vehicle localization and navigation problems. Both roadway infrastructure issues, like inadequate signage and poor road conditions, are major challenges to AV sensors and navigation systems. This paper presented a survey of existing technologies and methods that can be used to overcome these challenges, evaluating their effectiveness, and reviewing current research to improve AVs’ robustness and dependability under such critical situations. This systematic review compares the current state of sensor technologies, fusion techniques, and adaptive algorithms to highlight advances and identify continuing challenges for the field. The method involved categorizing sensor robustness, infrastructure adaptation, and algorithmic improvement progress. The results show promise for advancements in dynamic infrastructure and V2I systems but pose challenges to overcoming sensor failures in extreme weather and on non-maintained roads. Such results highlight the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and real-world validation. Moreover, the review presents future research lines to improve how AVs overcome environmental and infrastructural adversities. This review concludes with actionable recommendations for upgrading physical and digital infrastructures, adaptive sensors, and algorithmic upgrades. Such research is important for AV technology to remain in the zone of advancement and stability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Long Road to the “Long-Promised Day”

  Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Matthew Harris has provided the Mormon community with a gift: Second-Class Saints is a substantial work of scholarship based on enormous archival research and makes a compelling case concerning the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ racial policies since World War II. While the parameters of the story are well known, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Church's evolving relationship with Black members has never been so meticulously documented and bracingly told as in this volume. Second-Class Saints will be a standard work for quite some time.While the first chapter provides a general overview of the background, origins, and implementation of the LDS Church's racial restriction—in which those of African descent were barred from priesthood ordination and temple participation—the book is primarily focused on the policy's development in the mid-twentieth century, its demise in the 1970s, and the legacies that have remained to the present. There are some moments that will surprise even the most seasoned reader, like Harris's documentation of an apostolic committee formed in the early 1950s to assess whether they could rescind the policy (57–61). Other sections add further context to common stories, like when Harris provides additional detail to the federal government's investigation into Brigham Young University student practices or the Church's tax-exempt status (197–202). And some portions provide a first attempt to contextualize the most recent developments in the twenty-first century, like when Harris analyzes the context for the Church's 2012 statements that proclaimed, “All Are Alike Unto God” (293–306). Second-Class Saints, indeed, provides something for every reader, no matter their level of expertise.The strongest part of a very strong book is its sources. Harris was able to gain access to a treasure trove of personal papers located in archives, universities, and family ownership, which enabled him to unearth facts and ideas that have been overlooked by previous historians. These collections are so numerous that Second-Class Saints features a six-page abbreviations index for its 110 pages of endnotes. At the heart of many of these sources were internal disagreements among LDS authorities, an excavation that demonstrates how race was as contested among Church leaders as it was among the general American public. Indeed, because this book is primarily focused on telling the story rather than analyzing its meaning or context, it provides numerous starting points for future scholars to investigate, introducing them to key moments or figures as told through previously overlooked sources and begging for more investigation.Harris takes pains to document the ideology and theology at the heart of the racial policy and its aftermath. The book is at its best when unpacking the writings of, especially, Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie to demonstrate both the depth of their racial views as well as, in McConkie's case, how he evolved to eventually see a policy change as possible. While one might hope that Harris had spent more time placing their ideas within a wider context, this is arguably the most synthetic and comprehensive analysis of modern LDS leaders’ thinking on race that the historical field has yet produced.Every historian is forced to frame their work in such a way that it prioritizes some questions over others. Second-Class Saints is no different. Because Harris's archival source base primarily deals with the institutional Church and its elite critics, the story is primarily told through the lens of white voices. The Black experience is primarily implied rather than detailed, though more Black voices appear after the creation of the Genesis Group in the 1970s and the proliferation of Black activists in the twenty-first century. Excavating their lived realities and ideas would have required a different set of sources and methods beyond those framing this work. It will therefore be left to other historians to build on this institutional foundation and tell that story.One other notable point of framing and prioritization concerns audience. Second-Class Saints is primarily devoted to addressing Mormon narratives and answering Mormon questions. This can be seen, for example, both in how Harris frequently refers to “the brethren”—a term with a particular meaning within LDS culture—as well as in how he tells a tale of competition between orthodox conservatives, primarily Smith and McConkie, and liberal critics, primarily Sterling McMurrin. The stakes of these debates are often cast in a way that is only significant to the LDS community. At times the narrative even veers toward a good-guys-vs.-bad-guys framing more reflective of internal debates rather than engaging the external context. The benefits of such an approach are that the work will reach a much larger audience of Latter-day Saints who typically find academic works unapproachable; the downsides include limited use for the broader academy.Perhaps the chapter that best embodies this framing and its consequences is chapter 8, which explores the immediate fallout after Spencer W. Kimball's 1978 declaration that ended the racial restriction. On the one hand, the chapter is Harris at his archival best: he meticulously traces the origins of several folkloric stories concerning the declaration as they spread across LDS culture between 1978 and 1985, largely embellished accounts created by McConkie himself that eventually garnered chastisement from his superiors. However, scholars outside Mormon studies might find such exhaustive detailing tedious, if not antiquarian. They might also be left desiring more analysis on how McConkie's storytelling fit into a broader culture simultaneously struggling with a crisis of authority in the wake of Watergate and America's racial protests, like how LDS leaders’ anxiety over reaffirming their clout in the wake of a fundamental change reflects contemporary social discord.But one book cannot do everything. Second-Class Saints should be praised, and praised extensively, for what it did accomplish. Harris's monumental achievement is in the vein of D. Michael Quinn: an archival-rich reckoning that will both prompt discussions within the Mormon community and serve as a foundation for future scholarship. It is an immediate classic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimizing Routes for UVA’s Facilities Management Fleet: Enhancing Sustainability and Pedestrian Safety

  2025-05-02

  articleSenior author

  To enhance pedestrian safety and sustainability, UVA’s Facilities Management (FM) fleet aims to reduce emissions and limit vehicle presence in high-foot-traffic areas. This supports UVA’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2030 while creating a safer environment for pedestrians around Grounds. This project identifies optimal routes for FM vehicles traveling to reduce overall fuel consumption and minimize interactions with students in busy areas. Using vehicular telematics data available from the Geotab Platform, current routes were analyzed based on travel time, fuel usage, safety hazards, and proximity to popular student pathways. By looking at the most popular to and from locations of the FM fleet, we identified all reasonable route options and selected the best ones based on the above metrics. Recommended routes enhance efficiency and safety while also avoiding pedestrian-heavy areas like McCormick Road. We analyzed three high-frequency origin-destination pairs and assessed route options at different times of day, focusing on trip duration and peak pedestrian times like class changes. The final recommendations avoid McCormick Road during peak times or altogether while maintaining low trip durations and minimal safety concerns. These findings offer FM practical adjustments to support UVA’s sustainability goals and pedestrian safety across grounds.

  PublisherDOI

• Eco-friendly natural mineral biotite as a cesium adsorbent: Utilizing low-concentration acid and hydrogen peroxide

  Chemosphere · 2024-02-23 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Biotite, a phyllosilicate mineral, possesses significant potential for cesium (Cs) adsorption owing to its negative surface charge, specific surface area (SSA), and frayed edge sites (FES). Notably, FES are known to play an important role in the adsorption of Cs. The objectives of this study were to investigate the Cs adsorption capacity and behavior of artificially weathered biotite and identify mineralogical characteristics for the development of an eco-friendly geologically-based Cs adsorbent. Through various analyses, it was confirmed that the FES of biotite was mainly formed by mineral structural distortion during artificial weathering. The Cs adsorption capacity is improved by approximately 39% (from 20.53 to 28.63 mg g−1) when FES are formed in biotite through artificial weathering using a low-concentration acidic solution mixed with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Especially, the Cs selectivity in Cs-containing seawater, including high concentrations of cations and organic matter, was significantly enhanced from 203.2 to 1707.6 mL g−1, an increase in removal efficiency from 49.5 to 89.2%. These results indicate that FES of artificially weathered biotite play an essential role in Cs adsorption. Therefore, this simple and economical weathering method, which uses a low-concentration acidic solution mixed with H2O2, can be applied to natural minerals for use as Cs adsorbents.

  PublisherDOI

• A Prototype Preceding Vehicle Identification System Development and Field Evaluation

  2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 374 AMPamide regulates the inflammatory response through toll-like receptor1/2

  Journal of Investigative Dermatology · 2024-07-19

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Cooperative Platooning in Mixed Traffic of Connected, Automated, and Human-Driven Vehicles

  NSF · $382k · 2020–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Nagui M. Rouphail

  63 shared

• Jerome Sacks

  59 shared

• Sallie Keller‐McNulty

  United States Census Bureau

  49 shared

• Katherine Campbell

  University of Miami

  49 shared

• Peter J. Bickel

  49 shared

• Robert G. Fovell

  Albany State University

  49 shared

• Frederic Paik Schoenberg

  University of California, Los Angeles

  49 shared

• Rodman Linn

  49 shared

Labs

• Link LabPI

Education

• PhD, Civil Engineering

  Texas A&M University

Awards & honors

• PTV America Best Paper Award
• Outstanding Reviewer Award from the American Society of Civi…
• Jack H. Dillard Outstanding Paper Award from the Virginia Tr…
• Charley V. Wootan Award (for best Ph.D. dissertation) from t…
• 2014 George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award for Out…