Members

Dr. Luis Daniel Otero is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Systems and Director of the Transportation Systems Engineering Research (TSER) Lab at Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech), Melbourne, FL. Dr. Otero holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. He also holds an M.S. in Engineering Management, an M.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Florida Tech. 

Prior to joining Florida Tech, Dr. Otero had over 10 years of significant industry and practical experience that included various engineering and science positions. He has held positions as software/systems engineer for major defense corporations, research assistant at the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR), National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellow at the University of South Florida, and structural/civil engineer at Ingalls Shipbuilding. 

Dr. Otero has a strong research interest in transportation systems engineering, with particular focus on improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and cost related to structural inspections (e.g., bridge inspections). He has been awarded various research grants at both state and federal levels, leading the research efforts as the principal investigator. Dr. Otero has authored over 50 publications in peer-reviewed scientific academic journals and conference proceedings. He is the author of a book chapter called Managing Software Engineering Projects (the book has been adopted by major top tier universities). He has presented research work multiple times in academic conferences nationwide, and has given various invited presentations (e.g., FDOT, NASA, Aerojet Rocketdyne Jet). 

As TSER Director, Dr. Otero continuously seeks funding opportunities at both state and federal levels to contribute to the body of knowledge in the field of transportation systems engineering. Because of his contributions to academia and industry, in 2013 Dr. Otero was nominated and elevated to the level of IEEE Senior Member.

Email: lotero@fit.edu 

Phone: 321-674-7173

Dr. Paul Cosentino is a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Florida Tech. Dr. Cosentino has a unique combination of industrial and academic experience, which lends real-world knowledge to his classroom teaching. He has been the Principal Invesitgator on well over $3 million of research on numerous projects in multidisciplinary areas. These areas include fiber optic sensors for geotechnical and traffic classification and vehicle weight, sustainability in highways involving re-use of waste materials such as waste-to-energy ash, waste tires, reclaimed asphalt pavement and classical geotechnical research with Pressuremeter instrumentation and pile driving in soils that produce excessive pile rebound. He has worked on numerous geotechnical and geo-environmental consulting projects; reviewed papers and proposals for national research organizations and is a registered Professional Engineer in Florida. He is a member of the ASCE Airfield Pavements Committee and the Transportation Research Board's University Representative. He has served as a lecturer for short courses on Landfill Design, and Pavement Design plus Shallow and Deep foundations.   

Dr. Adrian M. Peter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Systems and the Co-Director of the ICE (Information Characterization & Exploitation) Laboratory at Florida Institute of Technology. He has over 10+ years of algorithm development experience, with professional and academic work in areas such as statistical data analysis, mathematical optimization, and probabilistic modeling. He has previously held several positions in industry: Intel Corporation (technology initiatives program manager ), Harris Corporation (research engineer), and Northrop Grumman (Chief Scientist of the Advanced Analytics Group in the Information Systems sector). Dr. Peter is the co-inventor on eight patents which cover exploitation across a wide variety of sensors (e.g. LiDAR, SAR, and Hyper/Multi-spectral). He is a member of the IEEE and an active reviewer on several journal publications and leading conferences in computer vision and computational reasoning. Dr. Peter's research interests are in applied machine learning with a focus on geometric information exploitation in a variety of domains, such as signal processing, image analysis and text mining.

Dr. Aldo Fabregas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Systems at the Florida Institute of Technology. His research areas cover business analytics applications on transportation systems including intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Prior to this position, Dr. Fabregas was a Research Associate with the ITS Team at the University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) for four years. Dr. Fabregas has over 8 years of experience on diverse transportation related projects including traffic simulation, ITS technology selection, and transportation planning decision support systems.

Dr. Carlos E. Otero is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology. He has been a tenure-track faculty in the College of Engineering at University of South Florida, Tampa, and the University of Virginia, Wise. Prior to that, he worked for 11 years in private industry as a computer software engineer for military computer systems, including satellite communications, command and control, wireless security, and unmanned aerial vehicle systems. His research interests are in computer systems engineering, with particular emphasis on the design, performance evaluation, and optimization of systems and processes across a variety of domain areas (including wireless, intelligence, and big data systems). Dr. Otero is a senior member of the IEEE.