Georgia Institute of Technology School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

When you take a seat in the 2013 Ford Fusion sitting in Srinivas Peeta’s new lab, you enter a virtual world where researchers can throw anything at you: snow and ice, detours, traffic snarls. All you have to do is drive — and in the process, help shape the future of transportation.

For those attending the Jan. 23 launch event for Georgia Tech’s Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility, an efficient, safe, and speedy airborne alternative to ground gridlock is less than a decade away.

The world of fully autonomous vehicles is inevitable, according to one of the newest faculty members in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The question is, how do we get there with the right policies and investments — and without so many bumps in the road that public trust erodes along the way.

With another hurricane season beginning June 1 — and some forecasters predicting another busy one — researchers in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering are working on a tool to help first-responders use Twitter activity to identify developing crises after a storm while also helping civilians more effectively plug in to disaster response efforts.