The trip went well.
On our way to Beijing, our flight was delayed one day so we ended up staying one night in Virginia. This unexpected incident was actually not bad for me, because ...
According to the feedback I received, the presentations and demos (both at Tsinghua and at BTRC) were good. It would be great if we can really do something good for the transportation problem in Beijing. To my surprise, they have amazing quality and quantity of traffic data (including real-time travel time data!) What they need is a dynamic traffic assignment system like DynaMIT that can process those data, predict congestion, and analyze various scenarios. I am sure such applications would be of great value to the city, which is about the hold the 2008 Olympics in roughly 220 days.
There are a lot of interesting stores about this trip. I'll write some of them down when I have time.