Mobility Forum | Mobility Initiative

MIT Mobility Forum

The MIT Mobility Forum hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao showcases transportation research and innovation across the globe. The Forum is online and open to the public.

Please register at Zoom beforehand.

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Car-sharing – Has it finally come of age?

Alexandra Lougovoy, Anand Nandakumar, Andrés Ruiz, Justin Holmes

CMO at Vulog, Founder & CEO at Halo.car, Executive Vice Chairman at Minits, Head of Marketing & Public Policy at Zipcar

With ever increasing vehicle prices, higher maintenance costs, shortage of mechanics, complex electronics and reduced parking minimums, personal car ownership seems to be facing significant headwinds. Is this the hour of reckoning for carsharing to come out of the shadows and take a dominant position in our cities? Carsharing has traditionally struggled with profitability, but we are seeing a few examples of firms breaking even across the world. Join us as we invite expert panelists from car sharing providers with varying fleet types, new technologies and different business models from across the globe to discuss what is going well, what needs improvement and how carsharing can help us in decarbonizing transportation.

February 16, 2024 at 5:00:00 PM

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Retraining for the EV era

Kianna Scott, Rajeev YSR, Sunil Nair

SVP of Learning & Development at ChargerHelp!, Founder & CEO at EV Masterclass, VP of Zero Emissions & Fleet Technologies at New York MTA

As we navigate the transformative shift towards electric vehicles (EVs) of all types, shapes & sizes (including e-bikes), it is critical that we retrain our workforce with the relevant set of skills. The advent of EV technology brings about a fundamental change in the automotive and energy industry, requiring a workforce equipped with new skills and knowledge. From manufacturing, EV architecture design, engineering, selling, servicing/maintenance to sales and support of electric vehicles, e-scooters/bikes, charging infrastructure, home energy management systems etc., the entire ecosystem must adapt to the unique demands of electric mobility. This panel discussion aims to explore the key areas where reskilling is essential, identify the emerging roles within the EV sector, and discuss strategies to bridge the skills gap. This panel brings together entrepreneurs and executives from across the globe who are pioneering this space by offering such training opportunities to ensure we have a global workforce ready for the EV era.

February 23, 2024 at 5:00:00 PM

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Fiscal Cliff of Public Transit

Jeremy Fine, Jim Aloisi and Fred Salvucci

Chief Financial Officer at Chicago Transit Authority, Lecturer of Transportation Policy and Planning at MIT, Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate at MIT

US transit agencies serving large urban areas face serious financial constraints that require permanent, structural solutions. COVID-19 triggered massive ridership losses, and while ridership has recovered, it has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels for most agencies. With ridership and fare revenues down, transit agencies are challenged with reconsidering fare recovery expectations and finding revenue solutions that meet the needs and values of the moment. Our panel will review the relevant data, assess the value and importance of transit, and consider how federal, state and local decision makers can adopt measures that generate stable, sufficient new revenues to support public transport operations and capacity.

March 1, 2024 at 5:00:00 PM

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The Many Costs of Sprawl

Reid Ewing

Distinguished Professor of City and Metropolitan Planning, The University of Utah

Across the nation the debate over metropolitan sprawl and its impacts continues decade after decade. There is little agreement on the definition of sprawl or its alternatives: compact development, pedestrian-friendly design, transit-oriented development, and the catch-all term “smart growth.” There is also little consensus about how sprawl impacts everything from housing affordability and traffic congestion to open space preservation and air quality. In this study for the National Cancer Institute, the Ford Foundation, and Smart Growth America, we update the original sprawl indices. Additionally, we develop refined versions of the indices that incorporate more measures of the built environment. Finally, we validate these indices against U.S. American Community Survey (ACS) data for journey to work, Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data on traffic fatality and pedestrian fatality rates, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data on overweight and obesity, and other outcomes variables. It is our hope that the updated and refined sprawl measures developed and validated in this study will find as widespread use in the fields of urban planning and public health as have the original indices.

March 8, 2024 at 5:00:00 PM

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Risk within the Materials Supply Chain for Transportation

Elsa A. Olivetti

Associate Dean of Engineering, Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT

The use of renewable energy technologies within the mobility infrastructure is linked to increased demand for materials. Meeting this demand must be grounded in environmental, social and economic development of mineral supply. To support industrial strategy, policy, and technology innovation that meets this objective, we need robust approaches for evaluating the availability of materials, specifically incorporating economic feedback and a structural understanding of how material supply may evolves. This presentation will describe how analytical work can be used to evaluate the impact of factors such as the rate of demand growth, materials substitutability, resource quality, and recycling rates on availability in the long term through cases in copper, lithium, and nickel. The presentation content will cover nuances in battery supply chains and the geographies involved, but also offer thoughts on strategies that reduce the risk of materials supply constraints coupled to regulations that could support increased metal supply while considering environmental and social impacts.

March 15, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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Perspectives on Highway Safety: Contemporary issues and the forthcoming age of autonomous vehicles

Fred Mannering

Executive Director, Center for Urban Transportation Research & Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida

Highway safety has remained a perplexing problem that engineers and social scientists have been unable to solve. The persistence of the highway-safety problem can be traced to the complex interface between implemented safety improvements and human behavior (human responses to these improvements, their evolving behaviors, etc.). It is argued that historical safety policies have been hampered by traditional safety-data analytics that have have not fully considered the complexities involved in highway safety. Unfortunately, current safety-related applications of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) are making this same mistake, and this is likely to have disappointing safety consequences for the forthcoming multi-year period where autonomous vehicles will be interacting with human-driven vehicles. However, if the data-analytic pitfalls of the past are recognized and avoided, the potential exists for AI/ML to vastly improve safety, particularly in the forthcoming autonomous/human-driven vehicle environment.

March 22, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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Co-Design of Complex Systems: From Autonomy to Future Mobility

Gioele Zardini

Incoming Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT. Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University

When designing complex systems, we need to consider multiple trade-offs at various abstraction levels and scales, and choices of single components need to be studied jointly. For instance, the design of future mobility solutions (e.g., autonomous vehicles, micromobility) and the design of the mobility systems they enable are closely coupled. Indeed, knowledge about the intended service of novel mobility solutions would impact their design and deployment process, while insights about their technological development could significantly affect transportation management policies. Optimally co-designing sociotechnical systems is a complex task for at least two reasons. On one hand, the co-design of interconnected systems (e.g., large networks of cyber-physical systems) involves the simultaneous choice of components arising from heterogeneous natures (e.g., hardware vs. software parts) and fields, while satisfying systemic constraints and accounting for multiple objectives. On the other hand, components are connected via collaborative and conflicting interactions between different stakeholders (e.g., within an intermodal mobility system). In this talk, I will present a framework to co-design complex systems, leveraging a monotone theory of co-design and tools from game theory. The framework will be instantiated in the task of designing future mobility systems, all the way from the policies that a city can design, to the autonomy of vehicles as part of an autonomous mobility-on-demand service. Through various case studies, I will show how the proposed approaches allow one to efficiently answer heterogeneous questions, unifying different modeling techniques and promoting interdisciplinarity, modularity, and compositionality. I will then discuss open challenges for compositional systems design optimization, and present my agenda to tackle them.

March 29, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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Changing driver behavior to improve road safety

Samuel Madden

MIT College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing

Driving is the most perilous daily undertaking for most Americans, underscoring the paramount importance of road safety. Telematics-enabled Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) financially incentivizes drivers to avoid dangerous behaviors by gathering sensor data and providing immediate feedback on risky behaviors, including hard braking, speeding, and distraction. Although specific financial UBI incentives for safe driving vary, some examples include discounts on insurance premiums and periodic monetary rewards. In this talk I will examine the impact of telematics-enabled UBI programs on driving behavior. Specifically, I will explore changes in user behavior during UBI program participation and emphasize the crucial role of user engagement in enhancing safe driving behavior, including an assessment of multiple risky driving behaviors, including hard braking, phone distraction, and speeding, while controlling for the primary risk factor, mileage. For the three risky behaviors considered, I will show the connection between user engagement and improved driving behavior.

April 5, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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The Insidious Problem of Selection Biases: How to Recognize Them, and What to do about Them

Patricia L. Mokhtarian

Clifford & William Greene, Jr. Professor,
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology

In the (frequently-occurring) context of estimating the impact of a "treatment" (an intervention, or experiment) on an outcome of interest, using only cross-sectional data, selection biases are a common problem. Selection biases occur when the treatment is not randomly distributed, but rather, "treated" individuals (even before treatment) differ from "untreated" ones in unobserved ways that are relevant to the outcome. If such a bias is not properly accounted for, conventional methods will, in turn, yield biased estimates of the treatment effect. This talk explains the selection bias phenomenon in intuitive and partly technical terms, sketches a technical solution to it (the endogenous switching regression approach), and presents an empirical application to estimating the effect of teleworking on vehicle-miles traveled.

April 12, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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The Evolution of Urban Transportation Policy at the Federal Level

Polly Trottenberg

Deputy Secretary at the US Department of Transportation (USDOT)

With the unprecedented investments and new programs from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, how are federal investments in transit and rail projects, and new programs such as Safe Streets for All, Reconnecting Communities, and Neighborhood Access and Equity, transforming cities to enhance mobility, equity, sustainability, and accessibility? Coupled with the advent of electric vehicles and advanced air mobility, what are the challenges and rewards of partnering with the private sector to create more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive urban environments? Join us for a conversation with U.S. Deputy Secretary Polly Trottenberg to discuss how cities are leveraging federal investments to improve transportation connectivity and quality of life.

April 19, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

Transit Tech: Payment and Benefits Innovation

Ruth Miller, Avi Shavit, Lilly Shoup, Anson Stewart

Senior Product Manager at Jawnt, Senior Director at the Office of Innovation at LA Metro, Managing Director at Rebel, Research Scientist/Deputy Director, MIT Transit Lab

April 26, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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Rethinking AV Development with Foundation Models

Marco Pavone

Associate Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University. Director, Autonomous Systems Laboratory and the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford

Foundation models, trained on vast and diverse data encompassing the human experience, are at the heart of the ongoing AI revolution influencing the way we create, problem solve, and work. These models, and the lessons learned from their construction, can also be applied to the way we develop a similarly transformative technology, autonomous vehicles. In this talk I will highlight recent efforts from my research towards rethinking elements of an AV program both in the vehicle and in the data center, with an emphasis on (1) composing ingredients for universal and controllable end-to-end simulation, (2) architecting autonomy stacks that leverage foundation models to generalize to long-tail events, and (3) ensuring safety with foundation models in the loop. Background paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.11307.pdf

May 3, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM

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Engineering Ecosystems with AI

Sandy Pentland

Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Toshiba Professor;
Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Director

Our society is having difficulties engineering heterogeneous systems of people and technologie; for instance, our systems for dealing with pandemics, climate change, Inequality, or financial stress have been less than completely successful, in significant part because of unanticipated human behaviors. Perhaps as a consequence, Congress’s new infrastructure bill expands the definition of “infrastructure” to include human or social infrastructure. This talk will cover new approaches to engineering ecosystems that better integrate human behavior, and discuss how new technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) can help.

September 15, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Funding US Transportation needs in an electric, post-gas tax world

Jim Aloisi and Bhuvan Atluri

Lecturer of Transportation Policy and Planning & Program Manager, MMI

The gas tax has been a reliable, if inadequate source of transportation funding for most states since the early decades of the 20th century, and for the federal government since enactment of the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. As we transition away from fossil fuel driven mobility and towards hybrid/electric vehicles the deficit between the revenue needed to support mobility needs and the revenues actually generated to support those needs will grow to reach untenable levels. We need to replace the gas tax with new, fair, and stable mechanisms to meet transportation funding needs at the federal and state levels. This talk will highlight the persistent inequity of cost burdens built into the gas tax funding system and try and showcase more stable and equitable mechanisms to fund our mobility systems, along with a user-friendly tool to model a variety of EV adoption scenarios, funding schemes, and the impacts on transportation revenues.

September 22, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Demand-Responsive Microtransit: Design and Operations

Alexandre Jacquillat

Associate Professor, Operations Research and Statistics

Microtransit offers opportunities to enhance urban mobility by combining the reliability of public transit and the flexibility of ride-sharing. This paper optimizes the design and operations of a demand-responsive microtransit system that relies on reference lines and performs on-demand deviations in response to passenger demand. We formulate a Microtransit Network Design (MiND) model via two-stage stochastic optimization. The model features a tight second-stage formulation thanks to a subpath-based representation of microtransit operations in a load-expanded network, which optimizes on-demand deviations between checkpoint stops. We develop a double-decomposition algorithm combining Benders decomposition and subpath-based column generation armed with a tailored label-setting algorithm. Using real-world data from Manhattan, results suggest that our method scales to large practical instances, with up to 100 candidate lines and hundreds of stops. Comparisons with transit and ride-sharing benchmarks suggest that microtransit provides win-win outcomes toward efficient mobility (high demand coverage, low operating costs, high level of service), equitable mobility (broad geographic reach) and sustainable mobility (limited environmental footprint).

September 29, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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MIT Mobility Initiative: Three Years On

Jinhua Zhao & John Moavenzadeh

Founder & Faculty Director - MMI and Executive Director -MMI

As we close in on 3 incredible years since the MIT Mobility Initiative was founded, we will look back on the journey, present our progress, discuss current priorities and brainstorm future research pathways with our audience.

October 6, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Women Leaders in Transportation: Mobility Forum Sub-series Co-Hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao and Hyun-A Park

Laura Chace, Hyun-A Park, Victoria Sheehan and Polly Trottenberg

President & CEO - ITS America, President - Spy Pond Partner & MIT Corporation Member, TRB Executive Director, US DOT Deputy Secretary

In a time of incredible technological growth and ever-changing transportation trends, the impact of women entrepreneurs on the mobility landscape has never been more crucial. As part of the MIT Mobility Forum, the MMI is launching a new sub-series: “Women Leaders in Transportation”. It aims to celebrate, advance, and inspire the contributions of women in the ever-evolving landscape of transportation and mobility. Hyun-A Park has kindly agreed to join me as the co-host.

October 13, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Learning with Certificate Functions for Automotive Systems

Chuchu Fan

Wilson Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and PI of LIDS, MIT

Learning-enabled control of autonomous systems has demonstrated impressive empirical performance in numerous applications. However, this performance comes at the cost of reduced transparency and a lack of guarantees regarding the safety or stability of the learned controllers. In recent years, new techniques have emerged to learn certificate functions alongside control policies. These certificates provide concise, data-driven proofs that guarantee the safety and stability of the learned control system. These methods allow users to provide supervision during training, using safety and stability requirements to influence the training process itself. In this talk, we will present some recent updates on neural collision-avoidance certificates with a focus on their applications in ground vehicles.

October 20, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Cities, Mobility & Complexity in a Post-Pandemic World

Eric Miller

Professor, Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering, University of Toronto
Director, University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute

In this talk, Prof. Miller will discuss the role of transportation technology in historically shaping cities. It is argued that two technology-based “revolutions” in transportation and associated urban form have occurred: the 19th-century mechanization of (public) transport and the 20th-century rise of auto dominance/dependency. In complex systems terms, these represent two competing “attractors” driving travel behaviour and system performance, as well as land development. Understanding these competing attractors is critical to dealing with the “sustainability challenge” facing urban regions: how to accommodate continuing growth while improving environmental, social, economic and fiscal sustainability. In particular, it is important to develop a new urban system attractor that significantly reduces cities’ carbon footprint while at the same time improving social equity, overall quality of life and economic performance. It is proposed that, unlike the first two revolutions, this third revolution will not be technology-driven per se. Rather, a much more nuanced, proactive and effective approach to integrated transport–land use urban design (which exploits technology and urban informatics where appropriate) than has previously been attempted is required that holistically and systematically can enable urban regions to achieve their goals in the coming decades.

October 27, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Geopolitical Shifts: The Pivotal Role of China in Global Mobility

Join us as we give our online forum audience a sneak-peek into MMI's flagship event - the annual Vision Day via a special lunch panel. The automotive industry's shift from ICE vehicles to Electric Vehicles is resulting in a massive shift in geopolitical dynamics. This panel seeks to analyze the critical geopolitical aspects of this evolution, with a particular focus on China's growing influence. As the world's largest automotive market, largest EV manufacturer and key player across all stages of battery mining, processing, production, China has emerged as a central force in the global automotive landscape. The nation's ambitious industrial policies, advancements in EV/Battery technology, and strategic investments in critical resources have positioned it as a formidable contender in a sector traditionally dominated by Western countries. The US already has sanctions in place for Chinese built EVs. The EU which is being flooded by well-made and value for money EVs is mulling putting new sanctions in place. The panel will offer a multi-dimensional perspective on the changing dynamics of the automotive industry and the central role that China now plays within it.

November 3, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Fuel Cell Powered Vehicles – Opportunities and Challenges

Harry Tuller

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

The drive to limit global warming depends on our ability to broadly limit the use of fossil fuels in many sectors including those related to electric power generation, industrial and residential uses and transportation. Rapidly increasing populations, and their striving for higher standards of living, continue to drive the rapid growth in vehicles for transportation and commerce. Fortunately, we are beginning to see rapid growth in electric vehicle (EV) sales that promise markedly reduced overall emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. By far, the lions share of EV sales are based on lithium battery powered vehicles. In this presentation, we examine the opportunities and challenges for hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles that promise, at a minimum, extended operating range and rapid refueling. At the same time, one must confront the obvious present lack of adequate facilities for clean hydrogen generation, transportation and storage, raising the question of whether hydrogen powered vehicles will forever be the technology of the future? In light of these challenges, we report on progress that has been made on stationary reversible fuel cell/electrolysis cell devices capable of efficiently storing clean, but intermittent solar and wind energy, in the form of hydrogen, means for extending the life of such devices and the general challenges towards achieving cost effective and competitive fuel cell operated EVs.

November 10, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Pedal, Power, and Tensions: A Panel Discussion on Micromobility and Cities

Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Mike Frumin, Dave Montague, Tony Ho

Chief of Streets for City of Boston, Director of Product & Data Science at Lyft Transit/Bikes/Scooters, CEO at Metromobility, VP of Robotics & Business Development at Segway

This panel discussion delves into the dynamic realm of micromobility in urban environments, where compact transportation modes such as e-scooters, bike-sharing systems, and electric skateboards are reshaping the way cities move. Bringing together experts from transportation, cities, and industry, the discussion will examine the multifaceted safety challenges and promising prospects associated with the integration and city wide expansion of micromobility. Given the resistance from certain cities, banning of e-scooters/skateboards from various college campuses the panel will explore infrastructural considerations, safety concerns, and regulatory frameworks, to the potential reduction of traffic congestion, environmental benefits, and the possibility of healthier urban lifestyles. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how cities can harness the potential of micromobility while addressing the complexities it brings.

November 17, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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The Evolving Role of Venture Capital in Mobility: Mobility Forum Sub-series

Martin Miodownik, Jessica Robinson, Laura Fox

Co-Founder & COO/CTO at NAVIT, Co-Founder & Partner at Assembly Ventures, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Streetlife Ventures

Venture capital has played a critical role in driving innovation in transportation systems, from autonomous systems to electrification & battery tech to eVTOLs. Deal flow into the mobility sector peaked in 2021. Looking forward, what is the role of venture capital in financing the transformation to a mobility system that is safe, clean and inclusive? How do startups view the relationship with venture capital and what do they look for in an investor?

December 1, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Dan and Eva Roos Best Dissertation Award and Presentations

Baichuan Mo, Rounaq Basu & Karthik Gopalakrishnan

Dan and Eva Roos Awardees

Join us as the winners of the Dan & Eva Roos Best Dissertation Award for 2023 present the findings of their thesis. 2023 Winner: Baichuan Mo -Toward a Resilient Public Transportation System: Effective Monitoring and Control under Service Disruptions Honorable Mentions: Rounaq Basu - Planning sustainable cities: Coordinating accessibility improvements with housing policies Karthik Gopalakrishnan - Modeling and Control of Networked Systems: Applications to Air Transportation

December 8, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Wheel and Deals: Institutional Investment in Mobility - Mobility Forum Sub-series - Jeff Shen & Meghan Sharp

Jeff Shen and Meghan Sharp

Co-CIO of Active Equity and Co-Head of Systematic Active Equity, BlackRock & Global Head of Decarbonization Partners, BlackRock

As part of the MIT Mobility Forum, the MIT Mobility Initiative is launching a new subseries on “Mobility and Investment”. Dr. Jeff Shen & Meghan Sharp of Blackrock will join us as we aim to examine the investment perspective of the global mobility system: history, disruptions, challenges, impacts, and future trends.

December 15, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Envisioning Profitable Autonomous Transit Networks

Alain Kornhauser

Professor of Operations Research & Financial Engineering
Director, Transportation Program, Princeton university

It has been almost 20 years since the DARPA "SmartDrivingCar" Challenges and 15 years since Google jumped in with the objective of providing demand-responsive automated mobility and we're still "envisioning" as if this challenge is like that of achieving nuclear fusion... always "50 years away, but once we get there, then the return to society is absolutely non-trivial". Presented is my perspective on automated mobility gained from a more than 50 year career largely focused on achieving safe, affordable, equitable, sustainable high-quality mobility for our towns and cities. Reviewed will be what was tried and why it failed; where we've been recently and why it has struggled; and where is it that we might be going and what are the challenges and chances of success. Looking forward, the concept of Autonomous Transit Networks is presented and assessed using the Princeton Synthetic Daily PersonTrip (PSDPT) data set of the 1.1 billion individual person trips made by the 320 million persons on a typical day. The mobility opportunity and operational challenges of several conceptual deployments are presented. The challenges associated with the scaled realization of such deployments will be discussed.

February 17, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Telemobility, Hybrid Work and the Next Normal

Hani Mahmassani

W. A. Patterson Chair in Transportation; Director, Northwestern University Transportation Center

The world has changed considerably for transportation planners since April 2020—and it is still changing, in many ways that are fundamental to how we work, shop, play, seek health care, and travel. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered the remote work landscape in the U.S. and there is growing evidence that at least some portion of the remote work trends will stick beyond the pandemic. The next normal for work will result from complex interactions amongst multiple factors, shaped by the experience of both employees and employers whose joint decisions will determine the evolutionary pathway of the hybrid workplace. To help understand the forces shaping these experiences, we have conducted separate longitudinal tracking surveys of both employees (7 waves) and employers (5 waves). We aim to understand employee satisfaction with telework, and reveal and characterize clusters of telework trajectories through and beyond the pandemic. We study the effect of telework on the activity participation behavior of teleworkers, especially with regard to the frequency, location and timing of out-of-home non-work activities. We also study the employer-side perspective on telework from a descriptive analysis of responses from top executives at 100 large employers in North America with regard to how remote work evolved through the pandemic and how employer response to remote work varied across departments, sectors of operation and their pre-COVID and April 2020 remote work policies.

February 24, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Tectonic shifts in science, technology, and industrial policy: looking ahead

Liz Reynolds & David Mindell

Lecturer, DUSP, MIT; Former Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and Economic Development at the National Economic Council & MIT Professor, Executive Chairman at Humatics, Co-founder at Unless

Several factors are converging to drive a new industrial revolution in the U.S and beyond. Advances in manufacturing technologies are reducing costs and lead times as well as creating new industrial capabilities. Companies are rethinking supply chain resilience in the face of global supply chain challenges brought on by the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical crises. And the federal government has passed historic legislation in the past year plus that will lead to billions of public and private-sector investment in key industries such as transportation, semiconductors and clean tech in cities and states across the country. Mindell and Reynolds will discuss the confluence of these developments, their implications for manufacturing, scale up, innovation, and the work of the future and the opportunities they present for the MIT Mobility Initiative and MIT more broadly.

March 3, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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Modelling Sustainable Options - the importance of habit and perceptions

Juan de Dios Ortuzar

Emeritus Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Habit and its potential hysteresis effect, have been recognized as difficult problems in travel demand modelling and forecasting for over 45 years. Past efforts to deal with the problem have included the formulation and estimation of panel data models, including the potential help of shock effects in the series. In the last years, and with the incorporation of techniques borrowed from psychological research, we have been increasingly capable of understanding the role of habit (and also of other latent variables, such as being risk prone or averse or being green or uncaring about the environment), by using hybrid choice models. In this talk, a quick review of these issues will be provided, and also some recent examples of the new approach in the case of modelling bicycle use, car and motorcycle ownership, and motorcycle use.

March 10, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM

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The case against transportation policy priority one being electrified personal cars

Robin Chase

co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, Buzzcar and GoLoco

At the COP in Glasgow, in the Inflation Reduction Act (the US’s largest infrastructure commitment since Eisenhower), in wealth country subsidies, and in major philanthropic investments, the electrification of personal vehicles has been touted as the single most important way to address CO2 emissions in the transport sector. It’s not. I’ll do a scan of life cycle analyses, the implications for lithium supply, demographics of the planet, and the opportunity to multipurpose investments and then discuss better and more effective policy choices. Promoting quality car-independent lifestyles is paramount.

March 17, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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From Reinforcement Learning to Sequential Decision Analytics with Applications in Transportation and Logistics

Warren Powell

Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Chief Innovation Officer at Optimal Dynamics

Sequential decision problems are an almost universal problem class, spanning dynamic resource allocation problems, control problems, optimal stopping/buy-sell problems, active learning problems, as well as two-agent games and multiagent problems. Application settings span engineering, the sciences, transportation, health services, medical decision making, energy, e-commerce and finance, but in this talk we will emphasize applications in transportation and logistics. These problems have been addressed in the research literature using a variety of modeling and algorithmic frameworks, including (but not limited to) dynamic programming, stochastic programming, stochastic control, simulation optimization, stochastic search, approximate dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, model predictive control, and even multiarmed bandit problems. We will present a universal modeling framework that can be used for any sequential decision problem in the presence of different sources of uncertainty, using a “model first” strategy that optimizes over policies for making decisions. We will present four (meta)classes of policies that are the foundation of any solution approach that has ever been proposed for a sequential problem, either in the research literature or used in practice (including policies that have not been invented yet). We will close by making the case for teaching sequential decision analytics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including to students in fields centered on applications as well as methodology.

March 24, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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How safe is safe enough for Autonomous Vehicles

Philip Koopman

Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Author - How Safe Is Safe Enough? Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety

A pressing question for deploying autonomous vehicles is: will they be safe enough? The usual answer of "at least as safe as a human driver" (e.g., Positive Risk Balance) is likely to be both too simplistic and much more complex than might be apparent. Which human driver, under what conditions? And are fewer total fatalities OK even if it means more pedestrians die? Who gets to decide what safe enough really means when billions of dollars are on the line? And how will anyone really know the outcome will be as safe as it needs to be when the technology initially deploys without a safety driver? This talk covers risk acceptance frameworks, what people mean by "safe," setting an acceptable safety goal, measuring safety, accounting for uncertainty, a framework for deciding when to deploy, and a sampling of ethical challenges that must be addressed. The emphasis is not on how to build machine learning based systems, but rather on how to measure whether vehicles based on this technology will be acceptably safe for real-world deployment. An approach to deployment safety should include at least: a governance model that encompasses stakeholder concerns, a sound safety case, a definition of acceptable risk, an approach to safety engineering, a metrics strategy, an approach to uncertainty management, a defined deployment decision process, a security plan, a safety culture plan, and a plan to address relevant ethical considerations.

March 31, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Moving from Citations to Collective Wisdom in Travel Behavior Research

Joan Walker

Professor, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley

This talk focuses on the disconnect between the incentives for academic researchers and the production of collective wisdom to inform transportation planning and policy. While the former emphasizes numbers of publications and citations, the latter is about producing knowledge in a manner that produces societal good. Unsurprisingly, the emphasis on counts has led to tremendous growth in the number of academic papers. However, it is questionable whether this leads to a commensurate amount of wisdom and is arguably harmful. For example, encapsulating the literature is arduous not only due to the volume but also because uniqueness is paramount for publication. To that end, thoughts are presented on how incentives may be realigned to increase the societal impact of academic research in travel demand, and input from the audience is also solicited. Included in the talk will be research related to autonomous vehicles, telecommuting, and public transportation.

April 7, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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What about pedestrians in urban mobility

Panel : Andres Sevtsuk, Peter Norton & Kris Carter

Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning, MIT, Associate Professor of History Department of Engineering and Society, University of Virginia, & Chair, New Urban Mechanics, City of Boston

After a century of car-oriented urban growth, cities around the world are implementing policies and plans that aim to make their neighborhoods and streets more walk-able and transit oriented. Renewed attention to non-auto mobility is driven simultaneously by the impending climate crisis, public health concerns, and inter-city economic competition. This has given rise to increasing demands to shift the dominant research and policy focus from merely electrifying, sharing, or automating the vehicle fleet, to developing city environments that are more conducive to pedestrians and transit riders to begin with. This session invites three active mobility experts to explore what it takes to achieve more walk-able and transit-oriented urban environments from the perspectives of public policy, current research, and history.

April 14, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Last-mile logistics on steroids: how to connect humans, machines, and algorithms to deliver to the future needs of consumers

Matthias Winkenbach

Director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab & Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics

Dr. Matthias Winkenbach, Director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab, will discuss how novel technologies and advanced algorithms can enable future last-mile logistics services to create superior value for consumers and businesses. Based on his lab’s research with major players from the supply chain and logistics industry, he will reflect on the disruptive potential of recent advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as technology innovations such as drones. He will share his perspective on how one can harness emerging technologies to create the next generation of last-mile logistics services by connecting the power of algorithms with the wealth of human experience.

April 21, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Traffic Management Challenges in Advanced Air Mobility

Hamsa Balakrishnan

William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations—characterized by electric and hybrid aircraft, and highly-automated or even autonomous operations—are expected to dramatically transform the way in which we transport people and goods. The deployment of these new vehicle types, business models, and aircraft operators will increase competition for already constrained airspace resources. In addition, AAM will also require a shift in how traffic management services are provided. In this talk, I will discuss emerging AAM traffic management challenges, and some of our initial work in overcoming them.

April 28, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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AI and Public Transit

Jinhua Zhao

Director, MIT Mobility Initiative and Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Prof. Zhao and MIT Transit Lab researchers will showcase three sets of A.I. applications in public transportation: prediction, monitoring, and control. 1) Prediction: deep hybrid model with satellite images and graph embedded road networks for demand prediction in Chicago; 2) Monitoring: computer vision for bus travel time estimation in Boston and text mining for sentiment analysis in WMATA; and 3) RL-based bus operation control in CTA. We will cover examples of unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning and give a flavor of some future research: causal analysis with ML, generative AI, and multi-channel view of cities.

May 5, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Entrepreneurship Returning to Automotive Industry: Electric Vehicle as a case study

Charlie Fine

Chrysler Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at MIT Sloan

Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) often go together. Following the 19th Century product innovations of Karl Benz, the most important auto industry innovator/entrepreneurs in the 20th Century were probably Henry Ford and Eiji Toyoda/Taichi Ohno, noted primarily for process innovation. Although Ferdinand Porsche built and sold the first-known hybrid-electric vehicles in 1901, it wasn’t until the late 1990's that Toyota reintroduced hybrids to then relatively slow moving auto industry, and triggered a soft re-introduction to the world of electro-mobility. In this century, Tesla has catalyzed dramatically increased clockspeeds across the industry, with (at recent count ) over $850B committed to EV development and production during the remainder of this decade. Electrification has reignited I&E across the automotive and transportation value chains. As companies grow and mature, their I&E muscles can begin to atrophy, as young startups race ahead, typically unencumbered by the organizational complexities inherent in the industrial giants. As such the automotive industry in this decade seems to be populated with numerous large, incumbent auto makers trying valiantly to re-ignite dormant I&E cultures within their walls, racing against the dozens or hundreds of startups, ready to take risk in search of outsized rewards. One domain of some interest is in the development of public EV charging networks. Europe seems well underway in building out a viable EV charging network. In the U.S., Tesla’s still-mostly-closed network works well for its customers, but many non-Tesla EV owners find that state of public charging to be quite poor, limiting the market to those who have single family homes or other situations where they can get assured charger access. In this talk, we will share some thoughts on the challenges facing the auto industry’s transition to EV’s, with particular emphasis on the dynamics of I&E in large and small players and — possible paths to scaling public charging in the U.S.

May 12, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM

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Shifting Gears

Susan Handy

Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California at Davis

September 16, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Public Transit in the US : Challenges & Opportunities

Jim Aloisi & Fred Salvucci

Lecturer of Transportation Policy and Planning & Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate

September 23, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Tough To Decarbonize Transportation : MIT Climate Grand Challenge

Steven Barrett & Bill Green

Director, Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment & Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in Chemical Engineering

September 30, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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The Future Of Working From Home

Prof. Nicholas Bloom

William D. Eberle Professor of Economics , Stanford

October 7, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Roads, Transit, and the Denseness of São Paulo's Urban Development

Chris Zegras, Adriano Borges Costa, Siqi Zheng

Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning, Department Head DUSP & Post-doctoral Researcher & STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability

October 14, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Credit-based Congestion Pricing for Win-Win Traffic Solutions

Kara Kockelman

Dewitt Greer Centennial Professor of Transportation Engineering at UT, Austin

October 21, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

Daniela Rus & Alexander Amini

Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT & Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

October 28, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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New paths for solving emergent problems of the EV sector

John Paul MacDuffie

Professor of Management, Wharton

November 11, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Flexibility and coordination in on-demand transportation: from ride-sharing to micromobility

Alex Jacquillat

Assistant Professor, Operations Research and Statistics

November 18, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Entry and Coordination in the U.S. Electric Vehicle Charging Industry

Jing Li

William Barton Rogers Career Development Professor of Energy Economics

December 2, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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EV Policy and Regulation As Seen by a Regulator, Academic, and Policy Wonk

Dan Sperling

Founding Director, ITS-Davis;Distinguished Blue Planet Prize Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Environmental Science

December 9, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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The Supply of AVs in Open Platforms

Daniel Freund

Assistant Professor of Operations Management

December 16, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Efficient Deep Learning for Automotive Applications

Song Han

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

February 11, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Regional Air Mobility: Initial Thoughts

David Mindell

Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics & Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing

February 18, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Bumps along the Road to Widespread Adoption of Electric Vehicles

Donald Sadoway

John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry

February 25, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Transit Oriented Development in Disruptive Time

Robert Cervero

Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

March 4, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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The Impact of Data Science on Freight Transportation Procurement

Chris Caplice

Executive Director, Center for Transportation & Logistics

March 11, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

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Making Roads Safer by Making Drivers Better

Hari Balakrishnan

Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

March 18, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Shared Mobility and Automated Vehicles: Responding to Socio-Technical Changes and Pandemics

Susan Shaheen

Professor In-Residence, Energy, Civil Infrastructure and Climate, Transportation Engineering, UC Berkeley

March 25, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Highway construction and displacement in African American neighborhoods: 1940-2000

Brent Ryan

Head of the City Design and Development Group and Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

April 1, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Human-Centered Driving Research at Toyota Research Institute

John Leonard

Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering

April 8, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Future of Work and Urban Mobility

Jinhua Zhao

Director, MIT Mobility Initiative and Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

April 15, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Certifiable Perception Algorithms and High-level Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles

Luca Carlone

Leonardo Career Development Associate Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

April 22, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Transportation from Earth to Space and back - latest developments

Olivier de Weck

Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems

April 29, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Economic Perspectives on Infrastructure Investment

James Poterba and Edward Glaeser

Mitsui Professor of Economics, MIT and Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Harvard

May 6, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Building Climate Resilience in Transportation System

Andrew Whittle

Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

May 13, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Building the Future of Transportation

Gill Pratt

Chief Scientist and Executive Fellow for Research of Toyota Motor Corporation

May 20, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM

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Towards zero environmental impact aviation

Steven Barrett

Associate Department Head of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment

September 10, 2021 at 4:00:00 AM

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Rethinking Traffic Flow with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Ennio Cascetta, Hani Mahmassani, Kaan Ozbay, Markos Papageorgiou, Steve Shladover and Moshe Ben-Akiva

September 17, 2021 at 4:00:00 AM

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Pedestrian Impact Assessments for Urban Development Projects

Andres Sevtsuk

Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

September 24, 2021 at 4:00:00 AM

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Value-Sensitive Design in Mobility: A Conversation on Mobility Equity

Stephen Zoepf & Sarah Thornton

October 1, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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High-Speed Rail, Subway Network and Urban Vibrancy

Siqi Zheng

Samuel Tak Lee Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Center for Real Estate

October 8, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Learning Risk and Social Behavior in Mixed Human-Autonomous Vehicles Systems

Daniela Rus

Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

October 15, 2021 at 6:00:00 PM

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Optimization under uncertainty for various transportation problems

Patrick Jaillet

Dugald C. Jackson Professor. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

October 22, 2021 at 11:00:00 PM

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"Deep Neural Networks for Choice Analysis" Dan and Eva Roos Transportation Thesis Award Presentation

Shenhao Wang

October 29, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Applications of Machine Learning for Aviation Collision Avoidance

James Kuchar

Assistant Head of the Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory

November 5, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Towards Zero-Carbon Cities (Kendall Square as a Case Study)

Kent Larson

Director of the City Science research group at the MIT Media Lab

November 19, 2021 at 5:00:00 PM

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Urban mobility: using mathematical models to predict where and how often we go

Carlo Ratti and Paolo Santi

December 3, 2021 at 5:00:00 PM

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Understanding and Improving Transportation Systems

Thomas Magnanti

Institute Professor and a Professor of Operations Research

December 10, 2021 at 5:00:00 PM

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Incentivize safe driving: a RCT with behavioral information

Chris Knittel

George P. Shultz Professor of Applied Economics

February 12, 2021 at 5:00:00 PM

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Mixed Autonomy Traffic: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Cathy Wu

Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Enginerring

February 19, 2021 at 5:00:00 PM

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Navigating The New Transportation Demands Of An Aging Society

Joe Coughlin

Founder and Director, MIT AgeLab

February 26, 2021 at 5:00:00 PM

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Crowdsourcing the Missing Crash Data

Sarah Williams

Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning; Chair, Urban Science & Computer Science Program

March 5, 2021 at 5:00:00 AM

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Transit-centric multimodal system design

Jinhua Zhao

Director, MIT Transit Lab; Director, MIT Mobility Initiative; Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning

March 12, 2021 at 5:00:00 AM

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Supply Chain management beyond Covid-19

Yossi Sheffi

Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems

March 19, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Online-retailing and transportation systems

Steve Graves

Abraham J. Siegal Professor of Management

April 2, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Tri-POP, an online Prediction, Optimization and Personalization platform for on-demand mobility and e-commerce deliveries

Moshe Ben-Akiva

Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering

April 9, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Cybersecurity and the Future of Transportation

Sanjay Sarma

Vice President for Open Learning and Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering

April 16, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Calculating the value of car ownership

David Keith

Assistant Professor of System Dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management

April 23, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Research trends in transportation: A conversation with the editor of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological

Chandra Bhat

Editor, Transportation Research Part B; Director, US DOT Center on Data-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning (D-STOP)

April 30, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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A New Approach for Vehicle Routing with Stochastic Demand: Combining Route Assignment with Process Flexibility

David Simchi-Levi

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director, MIT Data Science Lab

May 7, 2021 at 4:00:00 AM

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Research trends in transportation: A conversation with the editors of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

Elisabetta Cherchi

Co-Editor in Chief Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice; Professor of Transport, Newcastle University, UK

May 14, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Rhythmic Traffic Management and Control in a Fully Automated Vehicle Environment

Yafeng Yin

Professor and Associate Department Chair of Graduate Programs, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan

May 21, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

Part I: Large-scale monitoring and control of multi-modal urban networks

Part II: Research trends in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technology

Nikolas Geroliminis

Editor in Chief, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies; Associate Professor, Urban Transport Systems Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

May 28, 2021 at 4:00:00 PM

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Introducing the MIT Mobility Initiative

Jinhua Zhao

Edward H. and Joyce Linde Associate Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Mobility and transportation are at the dawn of the most profound changes with an unprecedented combination of new technologies (autonomy, electrification, computation and A.I.) meeting new and evolving priorities and objectives (de-carbonization, public health, and social justice). And the timeframe for these changes – de-carbonization in particular – is short in a system with massive amounts of fixed, long-life assets and entrenched behaviors and cultures. It's this combination of new technologies, new purposes, and urgent timeframes that makes an MIT-led Mobility Initiative critical at this moment. The Mobility Initiative (MMI) is designed to effect fundamental changes in the long-term trajectory of sustainable mobility development. It serves to coalesce all mobility and transportation activities at MIT, knitting together our efforts on research, education, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement at the Institute into a greater whole. The Executive Director of the new Initiative will outline its vision, mission, and on-going activities.

September 11, 2020 at 4:00:00 PM

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The Social Consequences Of Mobility Systems

Sandy Pentland

Director, MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory and MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program

September 18, 2020 at 4:00:00 AM

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Autonomous Vehicles, Mobility, and Employment Policy: The Roads Ahead

John Leonard

Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

September 25, 2020 at 4:00:00 PM

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Microlocation in Transit: The New York City Subway System

David Mindell

Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing (STS) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

October 2, 2020 at 4:00:00 AM

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The Edge of Optimization: Large Scale Transportation Systems

Dimitris Bertsimas

Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management

October 9, 2020 at 4:00:00 AM

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Transportation Inequities: Whose Data Counts?

Tamika Butler

Transportation Consultant; former Executive Director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust; former Director of Planning for California and the Director of Equity and Inclusion at Toole Design

October 14, 2020 at 4:00:00 AM

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Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transportation: Technical Options and Societal Choices

Bill Green

Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in Chemical Engineering

October 16, 2020 at 4:00:00 PM

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The Inefficiency of Dynamic Pricing in Ridehailing Systems

Daniel Freund

Assistant Professor of Operations Management

October 23, 2020 at 4:00:00 PM

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Mobility services without carbon emissions

Jessika Trancik

Associate Professor, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Prof. Trancik’s research centers on evaluating the environmental impacts and costs of energy technologies, and setting design targets to help accelerate the development of these technologies in the laboratory. Her work involves assembling and analyzing expansive datasets, and developing new quantitative models and theory.

November 6, 2020 at 5:00:00 PM

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Transportation Systems Resilience

Saurabh Amin

Robert Noyce Associate Professor

November 13, 2020 at 5:00:00 PM

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The Global Rise of Platform Firms in Urban Mobility Markets

Jason Jackson

Assistant Professor of Political Economy and Urban Planning

November 20, 2020 at 5:00:00 PM

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On demand urban aerial mobility planning: an adaptive discretization approach

Alexandre Jacquillat

Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Statistics

December 4, 2020 at 5:00:00 PM

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The Value of Time: Evidence From Auctioned Cab Rides

Tobias Salz

Castle Krob Career Development Assistant Professor

December 11, 2020 at 5:00:00 PM

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Community Discussion: Addressing Transportation Conundrums

October 30, 2020 at 4:00:00 PM

Transportation Community Exchange

February 4, 2022 at 5:00:00 PM

MIT Mobility Forum

The MIT Mobility Forum hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao showcases transportation research and innovation across the globe. The Forum is online and open to the public. Please register at Zoom beforehand.

Car-sharing – Has it finally come of age?

Retraining for the EV era

Fiscal Cliff of Public Transit

The Many Costs of Sprawl

Risk within the Materials Supply Chain for Transportation

Perspectives on Highway Safety: Contemporary issues and the forthcoming age of autonomous vehicles

Co-Design of Complex Systems: From Autonomy to Future Mobility

Changing driver behavior to improve road safety

The Insidious Problem of Selection Biases: How to Recognize Them, and What to do about Them

The Evolution of Urban Transportation Policy at the Federal Level

Transit Tech: Payment and Benefits Innovation

Rethinking AV Development with Foundation Models

Engineering Ecosystems with AI

Funding US Transportation needs in an electric, post-gas tax world

Demand-Responsive Microtransit: Design and Operations

MIT Mobility Initiative: Three Years On

Women Leaders in Transportation: Mobility Forum Sub-series Co-Hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao and Hyun-A Park

Learning with Certificate Functions for Automotive Systems

Cities, Mobility & Complexity in a Post-Pandemic World

Geopolitical Shifts: The Pivotal Role of China in Global Mobility

Fuel Cell Powered Vehicles – Opportunities and Challenges

Pedal, Power, and Tensions: A Panel Discussion on Micromobility and Cities

The Evolving Role of Venture Capital in Mobility: Mobility Forum Sub-series

Dan and Eva Roos Best Dissertation Award and Presentations

Wheel and Deals: Institutional Investment in Mobility - Mobility Forum Sub-series - Jeff Shen & Meghan Sharp

Envisioning Profitable Autonomous Transit Networks

Telemobility, Hybrid Work and the Next Normal

Tectonic shifts in science, technology, and industrial policy: looking ahead

Modelling Sustainable Options - the importance of habit and perceptions

The case against transportation policy priority one being electrified personal cars

From Reinforcement Learning to Sequential Decision Analytics with Applications in Transportation and Logistics

How safe is safe enough for Autonomous Vehicles

Moving from Citations to Collective Wisdom in Travel Behavior Research

What about pedestrians in urban mobility

Last-mile logistics on steroids: how to connect humans, machines, and algorithms to deliver to the future needs of consumers

Traffic Management Challenges in Advanced Air Mobility

AI and Public Transit

Entrepreneurship Returning to Automotive Industry: Electric Vehicle as a case study

Shifting Gears

Public Transit in the US : Challenges & Opportunities

Tough To Decarbonize Transportation : MIT Climate Grand Challenge

The Future Of Working From Home

Roads, Transit, and the Denseness of São Paulo's Urban Development

Credit-based Congestion Pricing for Win-Win Traffic Solutions

VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

New paths for solving emergent problems of the EV sector

Flexibility and coordination in on-demand transportation: from ride-sharing to micromobility

Entry and Coordination in the U.S. Electric Vehicle Charging Industry

EV Policy and Regulation As Seen by a Regulator, Academic, and Policy Wonk

The Supply of AVs in Open Platforms

Efficient Deep Learning for Automotive Applications

Regional Air Mobility: Initial Thoughts

Bumps along the Road to Widespread Adoption of Electric Vehicles

Transit Oriented Development in Disruptive Time

The Impact of Data Science on Freight Transportation Procurement

Making Roads Safer by Making Drivers Better

Shared Mobility and Automated Vehicles: Responding to Socio-Technical Changes and Pandemics

Highway construction and displacement in African American neighborhoods: 1940-2000

Human-Centered Driving Research at Toyota Research Institute

Future of Work and Urban Mobility

Certifiable Perception Algorithms and High-level Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles

Transportation from Earth to Space and back - latest developments

Economic Perspectives on Infrastructure Investment

Building Climate Resilience in Transportation System

Building the Future of Transportation

Towards zero environmental impact aviation

Rethinking Traffic Flow with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Pedestrian Impact Assessments for Urban Development Projects

Value-Sensitive Design in Mobility: A Conversation on Mobility Equity

High-Speed Rail, Subway Network and Urban Vibrancy

Learning Risk and Social Behavior in Mixed Human-Autonomous Vehicles Systems

Optimization under uncertainty for various transportation problems

"Deep Neural Networks for Choice Analysis" Dan and Eva Roos Transportation Thesis Award Presentation

Applications of Machine Learning for Aviation Collision Avoidance

Towards Zero-Carbon Cities (Kendall Square as a Case Study)

Urban mobility: using mathematical models to predict where and how often we go

Understanding and Improving Transportation Systems

Incentivize safe driving: a RCT with behavioral information

The MIT Mobility Forum hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao showcases transportation research and innovation across the globe. The Forum is online and open to the public.

Please register at Zoom beforehand.

Part I: Large-scale monitoring and control of multi-modal urban networks

Part II: Research trends in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technology