When: Wednesday, March 12, 2025 @ 12:00pm / Noon CT

Where: Metra Board Room, Metra Headquarters - 13th Floor
547 W. Jackson Blvd. Chicago, IL 60661 (SW corner of Clinton & Jackson)

The presentation will be held in the Metra Board of Director’s Room, 13th Floor, 547 W. Jackson Boulevard in Chicago. Doors open at 11:30 a.m. Presentations begin at Noon. A question-and-answer session will follow the presentation. Wrap-up is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Please bring your own lunch. Water and soft drinks will be provided.

FOR SECURITY AND ADMITTANCE PURPOSES PLEASE REGISTER IN ADVANCE. THERE IS NO CHARGE FOR THIS EVENT
Advance Registration Required - A government issued ID required to gain access to Metra Headquarters

Remote attendance also available (please register at the link)

Speaker Bios:

Kevin McCann became Metra’s Chief Operating Officer in July 2021. As COO, he leads all aspects of commuter railroad operations: Transportation, Mechanical, Engineering, Positive Train Control, Safety, Rules, Regulatory Compliance, Environmental Compliance, Operations Training, T&E Training and Certification.

Mr. McCann had previously served as Metra’s Chief Mechanical Officer, starting in January 2018. As Chief Mechanical Officer, Mr. McCann oversaw all activities of Metra's Mechanical Department, including field operations, shop operations, engineering and planning, asset management, reliability-centered maintenance, and state of good repair. He ensured that inspections, maintenance, repairs, and overhaul of Metra’s rolling stock was completed in a safe, efficient manner and in accordance with federal regulations, APTA guidelines and industry standards.

He was responsible for the development and integration of Mechanical Capital Projects and assisted with the development of long-range plans and projections for rolling stock composition, maintenance facilities and coach yards.

Mike Noland was appointed President of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, d/b/a the South Shore Line, by its Board of Trustees in October 2014. Noland came to the South Shore Line with over three decades in the railroad industry. Prior to joining the South Shore Line, he worked for 28 years at Metra in Chicago, Illinois. While at Metra, he moved to positions of increased responsibility and served as Chief Human Resources Officer, General Counsel, and Deputy Executive Director. Immediately prior to joining the South Shore Line, Noland worked as an executive with a private sector railroad holding company located in Chicago, Illinois with rail operations in 9 states and the United Kingdom.

In his role as President, Noland serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the railroad responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the South Shore Line, which runs on a 90-mile route from South Bend, Indiana to Millennium Station in Chicago, Illinois. The South Shore Line is an example of a true Public/Private partnership, hosting a private sector freight rail carrier serving business and industry in Northwest Indiana.

Noland leads a team of dedicated railroaders who are committed to providing safe, reliable, comfortable and convenient commuter rail service. Noland is leading the railroad through two federal Capital Investment Grant projects, the $944 million West Lake Corridor project which is expanding rail service into western Lake County, Indiana along the former Monon Railroad Line and the $650 million Double Track Northwest Indiana project, which adds 18 miles of second track, improves 5 stations, constructs 4 new bridges and enhances service on a 26-mile segment of the existing South Shore Line Corridor from Gary to Michigan City. Once completed, these projects are designed to unlock the true potential of Northwest Indiana by taking full advantage of the region’s proximity to Chicago.

Noland currently resides in Long Beach, Indiana with his wife Carrie, and holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a Juris Doctor from University of Illinois, Chicago Law School.

Scott Schiemann was appointed Metra’s Chief Engineering Officer in March 2024. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing the work of Metra’s Engineering Department. The department oversees maintenance and construction of Metra track, signal, bridges, electrical, telecommunications, stations, and facilities infrastructure.

Mr. Schiemann brings 15 years of railroad experience to Metra and most recently served as the Chief Engineer at the Belt Railway Company of Chicago.

He has a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Master of Science degree in Infrastructure Management from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was recognized by Progressive Railroading magazine in 2019 as one of the rail industry’s rising stars.

Mr. Schiemann also served in the U.S. Air Force. He currently resides in Riverside with his wife and two children.

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Xuesong (Simon) Zhou is a Professor of Transportation Systems at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, Arizona. Dr. Zhou's research focuses on developing methodological advancements in multimodal transportation planning applications, including dynamic traffic assignment, traffic estimation and prediction, large-scale routing, and rail scheduling. Dr. Zhou has served as an Associate Editor of Transportation Research Part C, is currently the Executive Editor-in-Chief of Urban Rail Transit, and an Editorial Board Member of Transportation Research Part B. He has also chaired the INFORMS Rail Application Section (2016 and 2025) and currently serves as a subcommittee chair of the TRB Committee on Transportation Network Modeling (AEP40).

Dr. Zhou is the Director of the ASU Transportation+AI Lab, where he is the principal architect and programmer for several open-source packages, including DTALite, NEXTA, and OSM2GMNS, which have collectively received over 100,000 downloads and many system deployments at various metropolitan planning agencies and state DOTs. He has published over 100 papers in Transportation Research Part B, Transportation Research Part C, and other leading transportation journals, with an H-index of 60 and a total of 11,000 citations in Google Scholar.

In addition to his academic achievements, Dr. Zhou is passionate about connecting practitioners, researchers, academics, students, and others involved in transportation planning and travel modeling. He serves as the conference chair for the TRB Innovations in Travel Analysis and Planning Conference in 2023, and a board member of Zephyr Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing transportation research and education.

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Saif Jabari is a Global Network Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University. His research interests center on theoretical aspects of traffic flow, specifically topics related to modeling uncertainty and emergent phenomena. The applications focus on traffic operations problems, including traffic state estimation and prediction, distributed traffic control, and cybersecurity.

Prior to joining NYUAD, Jabari was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Mathematical Sciences and Analytics Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Jabari received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2012 and his B.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering from in the University of Jordan in 2001.

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Nazanin Morshedlou (Tajik), Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Mississippi State University. She received her B.S. from the Sharif University of Technology, her M.S. from the University of Tehran, and her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma (OU). At OU, she was a graduate research assistant in the Risk-Based Systems Analytics Laboratory.

At MSU, she has established a cross-disciplinary, inter-university research center that integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, Machine Learning (ML), and Social Science (SS) concepts. Her goal is to form a problem-solving framework applicable to a wide variety of research thrusts, from cyber-physical-social infrastructure resilience to search and rescue planning, and from smart transportation to game-theoretic robotic designs.

Her publications have appeared in journals as Transportation Research Part B, IEEE Systems, International Journal of Production Economics, and Journal of Infrastructure Systems. She is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE), Production and Operations Management Society (POMS).

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Five leading AI-driven companies — Augment, Fleetworks, HappyRobot, Qued and Vooma —are coming together with the Northwestern University Transportation Center at the Spring 2025 Industry Technical Workshop to showcase how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing logistics and freight operations.

The Workshop will explore the increasing role of AI in automating communication, streamlining workflows, and improving overall efficiency in logistics management. Attendees will learn firsthand how AI-powered automation is reshaping the industry, improving task efficiency, reducing operational costs, and enhancing service reliability.

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2025

2:00 PM Welcome / Opening Remarks

Hani Mahmassani | Director | NUTC

Bret Johnson | Sr. Associate Director | NUTC

2:10 PM Presentations

Harish Abbott, Founder, Augment LLC

Jesse Buckingham, Co-Founder, Vooma

Kris Forrest, Head of Sales, GenLogs

Prasad Gollapalli, CEO and Chairman, Qued

Pablo Palafox, Co-founder & CEO, HappyRobot Inc.

Paul Singer, Co-founder & CEO, FleetWorks

3:15 PM Networking Break

3:45 PM Panel Discussion

Moderator - John Larkin, Strategic Advisor & Chair of Advisory Board, Clarendo Capital LLC

4:45 PM End of Program

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Ricaurte Vásquez Morales was appointed Administrator of the Panama Canal Authority for a seven-year period starting September 2019.

Dr. Vásquez is a Panamanian economist with an extensive and successful professional career of 50 years in the government sector and in private companies in financial, economic and administrative management.

Within the public administration he has held prominent positions such as: Minister of Finance and Treasury, Minister of Planning and Economic Policy as well as of Economy and Finance in 2004. He was the first non-US Chief Financial Officer for the Panama Canal and later Deputy Administrator and President of the Board of Directors. In the private sector, his experience covers banking at Chase Manhattan Bank, mining development with Rio Tinto Zinc in the development of the Cerro Colorado copper project. More recently at General Electric with regional responsibilities and covering Gas-to-Power initiatives in Latin America, retiring in 2015 to carry out his professional practice with SIGMA Management Advisors Corp.

Ricaurte Vásquez holds a Ph. D. and M.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic, a M.E. from North Carolina State University and a B.S. from Villanova University. He has been a professor of Economics and Finance in Panama and abroad. His professional experience is complemented as a university professor of Economics at Florida State University, at its headquarters in Panama

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The Annual William A. Patterson Distinguished Transportation Lecture is named for William A. "Pat" Patterson. In 1980, the NUTC established the Lecture as an integral part of the Patterson Endowment. It has since become an annual highlight at Northwestern University, drawing influential speakers from all facets of the transportation industry.

William A. "Pat" Patterson was a central figure in the United States air transport industry for more than four decades. He served as president and chairman of United Airlines from 1934 until his retirement in 1966. He was a life trustee of Northwestern University and was instrumental in the establishment and strategic leadership of the Transportation Center.

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