The Trucker Newspaper - April 15, 2018

Features
April 15-30, 2018 • 37
Goodyear honors 3 drivers at annual
Highway Heroes award presentation
Klint Lowry
klint.lowry@thetrucker.com
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Brian Bucenell hails
from Richmond, Virginia. Ryan Moody calls
Tacoma, Washington, home. And Frank Vieira
resides in Ancaster, Ontario, about 55 miles (or
89.5 kilometers, as he would say), southwest
of Toronto.
You would imagine fate would have to put
in some overtime to ever bring these three veteran
drivers together for any reason, much less
to share a spotlight in Louisville, Kentucky.
Yet there they were. On March 22, immediately
after the first day of the Mid-America
Trucking Show, a crowd gathered at the nearby
Crowne Plaza Louisville Airport Expo Center
hotel to celebrate serendipity’s fait accompli,
and three standup guys, as the Goodyear Tire
and Rubber Company marked the 35th anniversary
of its Highway Hero Award.
Each year since 1983, Goodyear has honored
professional truck drivers who perform
extraordinary acts of heroism, often at risk to
themselves. This year, Bucenell, Moody and
Vieira were the three finalists for the award.
Gary Medalis, marketing director for
Goodyear, said that over the years, the Highway
Heroes award has honored drivers who
have saved children’s lives, come to the aid of
police officers and have performed numerous
other feats of bravery. He added that the three
drivers selected as finalists this year are all fine
Virginia ‘Hackathon’ to pit techies against one another to invent way to thwart trafficking
Dorothy Cox
dlcox@thetrucker.com
Around
the Bend
When you read or hear the word, “hacking,”
what do you think of? I think of some
tech-savvy person breaking into an individual’s
or business’s computer system. Or, using
a machete to cut down heavy undergrowth
in a jungle somewhere. Or, not being able to
cope with something, as in, “he wasn’t able
to hack it, so he quit his job.”
Hacking comes from an old English word,
haccian, meaning to ‘cut in pieces’ and is related
to Dutch hakken and German hacken.
So when I heard about a “hackathon” in
Arlington, Virginia, April 14-15 I wrongly
thought people were going to learn how to be
better computer hackers so they could break
into computer systems for ill-gotten gain.
It turns out that’s not what it’s about at
all. But I bet you guessed that already.
choices as the award — the oldest of its kind in
trucking — marks this milestone year.
The incidents that led to these three drivers
being nominated for the Highway Hero Award
were about as far-flung from one another as
their hometowns, with one thing in common:
They all exhibited personal and professional
cool under pressure.
For Bucenell, an owner-operator, it all started
just after he’d merged onto the Ohio Turnpike
near Toledo. He heard chatter on the CB
about a high-speed chase going on somewhere
in the vicinity. Moments later, Bucenell saw
several state troopers in his rearview mirror
chasing a car and gaining on him fast.
Just then, he came upon a construction
zone. “We lost the far left lane,” he said. “It
went from three lanes to two lanes. They put up
a concrete barrier, blocking it off.”
When the car reached Bucenell’s truck another
truck was running alongside. Bucenell
said the car tried to pass him on the left, saw
the barrier, then cut back behind him.
From that point on, Bucenell said, the car
kept trying to pass, to the left, to the right, between
the two trucks. Every time he moved, Bucenell,
who’s been driving professionally for 10
years, moved over just enough to cut him off.
“I know my truck pretty well,” Bucenell
said. “It was a mixture of his lack of experience
and my knowing my truck. I think that’s
what let me be able to stop him.”
In this case hack means to put pieces of
something together in order to build something
else, not hacking or breaking into
something.
It means that local computer programmers,
college students, tech gurus, engineers,
tech specialists and others — about 100 people
so far — will be competing to come up
with an algorithm or app or some such thing
in order to thwart human traffickers.
This hackathon is being held by Blue
Compass, a tech development group which
works with government agencies to help
them use data to figure out answers to problems.
And that is way over-simplifying what
they do.
OK. OK. Just for example, say an agency
like the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children is trying to find out if traffickers
go after a type of child, or they’re
looking for a certain child who has been
kidnapped. Instead of having a human go
through miles of data and pictures of children,
they use all this data to create an algorithm
and feed that to a robot or some sort
of artificial intelligence thing-a-ma-bob and
have it come up with a pattern of what kind
The Trucker: KLINT LOWRY
From left are Goodyear Marketing Director Gary Medalis, 2018 Goodyear Highway Hero
Award winner, Frank Vieira, and finalists Brian Bucenell and Ryan Moody.
Finally, the driver tried to swerve on the
shoulder again. “I just whipped it toward the
guardrail and stopped,” Bucenell said. The
car was trapped, and the chase, which Bucenell
later found out had reached 100 mph
of children they’re looking for and what
types of children are at risk of being trafficked.
Or where a specific child might be.
The idea, says Christine Jung, president
and CEO of Blue Compass, is that technology
can be used to say, predict the kinds of
places where trafficking is more likely to occur.
From data they have already, they’ve
found it happens more in areas of the country
or in nations that are unstable economically,
where people are desperate and will take desperate
measures to get money. Those areas
are ripe for trafficking, Jung said. It could be
a third-world country or an inner city or rual
area in the U.S.
The participants at the hackathon will be
“everyday people,” she said, students from
area schools, young professionals, computer
techs, professors and also people who want
to learn about the subject of human trafficking.
In the trucking industry you hear about
“big data” being generated from the truck engine,
from on-cab cameras and other devices
like the ELD. That data is being used to help
carriers spot waste or garner proof it was the
at one point, was over.
“There were 20 cop cars on him in the blink
of an eye. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bucenell
said.
See Hero on p38 m
four-wheeler that hit the truck, not the other
way around or, some say, to spy on drivers.
One trucking company using trailertracking
devices discovered their trailers
were being used to move goods other than
theirs. And it was causing a lot of unnecessary
wear-and-tear to their equipment.
The idea, said Jung, is to understand large
volumes of data, the complexity behind the
data and then figure out how to make sense
of it and like the carrier whose trailers were
being used illicitly, put a stop to it. Whatever
“it” might be.
In this case, it would be trafficking.
Now, don’t ask me whether this will be an
app or what. This is so not my area of expertise.
Also invited to the “hackathon” will be
people who know about human trafficking
and the different ways traffickers use to victimize
children and young adults, such as
posing as a modeling agent or as someone
looking for a “date.”
I’ll keep you posted on what happens
with the event and I hope they will explain
it to me in plain English so that I can understand
it. Just sayin.’
Be safe out there and God bless. 8