Kaveh Shahabi has been awarded the USC Esri Development Center Student of the Year honor by the faculty of the USG GIS Research Laboratory. The award recognizes Kaveh’s work on dynamic planning of emergency evacuation routes that will constitute his dissertation.
Shahabi has developed a network analysis tool for ArcGIS called ArcCASPER (Capacity-Aware Shortest Path Evacuation). The software addresses the challenge of routing many people or vehicles away from a specific location while minimizing the congestion experience on any given route. The results will most effectively move the maximum number of people along the available pathways. This will help city officials, public safety and other emergency departments to perform evacuation planning more intelligently and efficiently than previously.
ArcCASPER is Kaveh Shahabi's evacuation routing tool for ArcGIS.
Shahabi’s research will be published in an upcoming edition of ArcUser, a periodical published by Esri, the firm that develops the geographic information software ArcGIS.
GIS Research Laboratory Director John P. Wilson described Shahabi’s dissertation research as “truly outstanding” and praised his ability to integrate “all of the related work in computer science, geography, and other fields … to bring the best computational tools to the tasks at hand.”
As USC Esri Development Center Student of the Year, Shahabi becomes a nominee for the Esri Student of the Year Award.
Shahabi is a third-year student in the Computer Science Ph.D. program and has also worked on shortest-path tools for a project investigating the influence of pesticide exposure on cancer rates.
