Purpose: To spark new ideas, innovations, and approaches to solving a relevant railroad industry issue.
Award Amount: $500. The competition winner will also be announced after the conference and recognized by ASME.
Open to: All Registered Participants
Registration Form
How to Attend: Register using the link above by March 27, 2022. You will receive an email to submit your 10-minute pre-recorded video and presentation to the JRC website.
Registration Deadline: March 27, 2022
Submission Deadline: April 3, 2021
Presentations: April 20, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Awards: April 21, 12:20 - 1:30 PM
Questions: For technical questions, please contact the JRC Organizing Committee: Greg Placencia or Milad Hosseinipour. For all other event questions, please get in touch with Mary Jakubowski.
This year the JRC will host the 4th Annual JRC Grand Challenge Competition open to all conference attendees. The Joint Rail Conference wants you to take rail data to tell innovative and unique stories this year. Data is so much more than numbers; it often hides a rich narrative for someone to find and tell. Our Grand Challenge focuses on using data to suggest that narrative. We’re looking for all JRC participants to help us write the next generation of rail history through data. We're looking to examine data analysis, storage, data gathering, and visualization. The JRC 2021 Grand Challenge asks all researchers and attendees to submit their idea around the topic below.
We invite registered participants to propose an idea to the below Grand Challenge Question and present that idea to a panel of industry experts using a 10-minute pre-recorded video and presentation.
We have witnessed increasingly rapid advances in the rail industry during the past 100 years. What would you expect railroading to look like to remain competitive and economically, socially, and environmentally relevant in light of the rapid technological evolutions, social and economic changes, and even pandemics such as COVID-19?
The forum is open to ideas that the presenter is working on or believes have enough relevance to railroads’ current and future state. However, attendees should be mindful of the limitations of these technologies within the railroads. For example, implementing a reliable and accurate AI model to provide tangible results for improving PTC requires a significant amount of data. The AI model would suffer from poor performance and generality without access to valuable data. First, one should propose a platform for gathering the required data to train the models.