Karim El-Basyouny, PhD, PEng

Area of Study / Keywords

Engineering Faculty Executive Transportation Engineering Road Safety Remote Sensing Infrastructure Digitization

About

Dr. Karim El-Basyouny is a Professor and holds an endowed chair position in urban traffic safety at the University of Alberta. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in the province of Alberta and holds Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Transportation Engineering from the University of British Columbia. Karim is passionate about all things safety and has and continues to dedicate his research and professional career to furthering our understanding of increasing safety and improving mobility for all road users. For the past decade, Karim's research on safety management has been informing public policy and practice. To him, safety is a product just like any other good or service, and through his research, he advocates for the creation of a management framework which produces a safe system. His goal is to agitate the discussion on important and often neglected issues to achieve a system free of death and disability. Karim is an active member of multiple (inter)national safety committees and serves on the editorial boards of several prominent journals. Karim has won several notable awards for his research and leadership contributions throughout his academic career.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy, Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, 2011.
• Engineering Management Sub-specialization, Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, 2010.
• Master of Applied Science, Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, 2006.
• Bachelor's degree (ABET Equivalent), Civil & Environmental Engineering, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, UAE, 2003.

Professional Experience

• Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, July 2022 to present.
• City of Edmonton Urban Traffic Safety Research Chair, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, July 2011 to present.
• Associate Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, July 2017 to June 2022.
• Assistant Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, July 2011 to June 2017.
• Method Analyst II, City of Edmonton's Office of Traffic Safety, Edmonton, Alberta, August 2010 to June 2011.
• Research & Teaching Assistant, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, September 2004 to June 2010.
• Research Assistant, Bureau of Intelligent Transportation Systems & Freight Security, Vancouver, BC, July 2007 to December 2008.
• Research Assistant, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, UAE, December 2003 to July 2004.

Awards

• 2022 Young Professional Award, ITS Canada
• 2021 Essay Competition Award, ITS Canada
• 2021 Inaugural Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (EDI) Award, ITS Canada
• 2021 Paper Award Editor's Choice, Journal of Transportation Engineering Part A: Systems
• 2021 Committee Excellence Award, TAC
• 2021 Daniel B. Fambro Student Paper Award, ITE Annual Meeting & Exhibition
• 2021 Impacts on Practice Award from Maintenance and Preservation Section, TRB 
• 2020 Project of the Year, Northern Alberta's ITE Section
• 2020 Essay Competition Award, ITS Canada
• 2020 Canadian ITS R&D/Innovation Award, ITS Canada 
• 2020 Faculty of Engineering Mid-Career Research Award, UofA
• 2017 Early Career Researcher Award, Department of Civil Engineering, UofA
• 2017 Best Paper Award (2nd & 3rd Place), TAC Conference and Exhibit 
• 2017 James D. Cooper Best Paper Award, 34th International Bridge Conference 
• 2017 Young Researcher Paper Award, ANB20 Committee, TRB
• 2016 Best Paper Award (1st & 2nd Place), Capital Region Intersection Safety Partnership
• 2016 Best Paper Award, ABJ80 Committee, TRB 

Editorial Boards 

• Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Urbanization and Road Safety Management for Sustainability published by MDPI
• Handling Editor for the Transportation Research Record published by SAGE
• Editorial Advisory Board of the Analytic Methods in Accident Research published by Elsevier

Committee Membership

• Member of the Road Safety Committee at TAC
• Member of the Canadian Road Safety Engineering Handbook Subcommittee at TAC
• Member and Paper Review Coordinator for the Pedestrian Committee (ANF10) at the TRB

Research

Dr. El-Basyouny’s research focuses on developing models, techniques, and algorithms that can contribute to and improve the safety of human drivers and self-driving vehicles. Dr. El-Basyouny’s research on collision modelling and evaluation focused on applying econometric models to improve the predictive power and fit of safety models as well as to address several key data and methodological issues. His work on speed management focused on understanding the risk and factors that influence speeding in urban environments and developing programs to increase compliance with speed limits and improve safety. This included a comprehensive body of work on the impacts of speed limit reductions, the use of automated enforcement, and ITS technologies. Dr. El-Basyouny’s recent research has been directed at developing a framework combining advanced sensor technologies with data-processing tools to automatically detect and extract road and roadside features. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Dr. El-Basyouny combines statistical pattern recognition techniques and machine learning tools for the semantic segmentation of 3D point cloud data. His work in this area investigates the safety and mobility benefits of digitizing roadway infrastructure.

Publications

For a list of publications, please visit Dr. El-Basyouny’s Google Scholar or Scopus page. 

Teaching

• CIV E 616: Road Traffic Safety – This is a graduate-level course on road safety management, a field that focuses on using statistical analysis techniques for tasks like network screening, diagnosis, and evaluation of road safety improvements
• CIV E 617: Highway Geometric Design – This is a graduate-level course on highway geometric design, which focuses on the application of criteria and standards to the design of various alignment elements of a rural or urban highway facility
• CIV E 315: Transportation Engineering – This is an undergraduate-level course intended to introduce students to the fields of traffic engineering, planning, and highway design

Dr. Karim El-Basyouny's research group is excited to announce available positions for talented Ph.D. and Postdoctoral candidates to join the team at UAlberta. Several fully-funded Ph.D. positions and exciting postdoctoral opportunities are being offered for outstanding candidates who are interested in conducting research in Transportation Engineering, specifically focusing on remote sensing applications in road digitization. Emphasis is placed on candidates with a robust academic background in Machine Learning, Geomatics, and Programming/Coding.

CIV E 315 - Transportation Engineering

Transportation systems and their elements. Principles of transportation planning. Traffic volume, capacity, speed, density, and safety. Fundamentals of traffic control. Principles of highway planning. Highway and terrain. Vehicular motion. Horizontal and vertical geometric design. Cost/benefit analysis in highway design. Earthwork and mass diagram. Flexible and rigid pavement design. Prerequisite: CIV E 250.

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