August 13, 2024
Brian Daily is the longest tenure employee at VTTI.
For nearly 30 years, Brian has been contributing to the success of software development, systems administration, database development, and all things technology. Starting in December of 1995, when the institute was known as the Center for Transportation Research, Brian remembers that he was hired to be “the computer guy.”
Since then, Brian has had a multitude of responsibilities including his current role as lead of the database group in the Division of Technology Development & Deployment where he manages VTTI’s databases that house millions of miles of naturalistic driving data.
“I can’t tell you how many different things I have had the opportunity to work on,” said Brian. “I really enjoy the challenges that come with solving problems and learning new things.”
One of those projects was the development, and continued support, of the National Academies of Science – Transportation Research Board’s Second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) Naturalistic Driving Study database. The SHRP 2 database houses over 10 petabytes (or 10,000 terabytes) of storage and includes:
- Information describing the 3,400+ drivers and vehicles that participated in the naturalistic driving study.
- 5,400,000+ Trip summary records that describe individual trips recorded during the study.
- 36,000+ Crash, near crash, and baseline driving events
With this data being critical in transportation safety research, Brian is at the helm of ensuring that it is accessible and manageable for users. Specifically, he is responsible for coding the criteria that allow the data to be securely transferred to the users while ensuring they are receiving what was requested. He does this through a system that he created called shadow collection which limits what data can be made available to someone accessing it.
Brian Daily poses with a Virginia 511 sign in his VTTI office.
An additional project of note that Brian worked on occurred in the early 2000s when he helped to develop and implement what became Virginia 511. He was responsible for developing the early voice recognition technology that would provide information to individuals calling the 511 number for traffic information.
When Brian isn’t writing code and supporting the institute’s data needs, he likes to spend his time coaching and playing soccer as a goalkeeper. For the past few years, Brian has been the assistant/goalkeeper coach for the girls’ soccer team at Giles High School. He also plays goalkeeper in a local, New River Valley-based league.
Brian graduated from Virginia Tech in 1992 with a degree in electrical engineering and a computer science minor.