Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics Seminar Series

Professor Corman is Chair of Transport Systems (Assistant Professor) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH Zurich. His main research interests are in the application of quantitative methods, analytics and operations research to transport sciences, especially the operational perspective of public transport, railways and logistics.  Professor Corman received a PhD in Transport Sciences from TU Delft, the Netherlands in 2010 where his research focused on operations research techniques for realtime railway traffic control.  His career combines industrial experience at IBM with academic experience from KU Leuven in Belgium and TU Delft as a research associate in transportation and logistics. In total he has published more than 100 peer reviewed journal and conference papers since 2007.  

Dr. Yafeng Yin is a Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works in the area of transportation systems analysis and modeling, and has published more than 100 refereed papers in leading academic journals. Dr. Yin is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Department Editor of Service Science, and Associate Editor of Transportation Science. He also serves on the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium of Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT). Dr. Yin received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2002, his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996 and 1994 respectively. Prior to his current appointment at the University of Michigan, he was a faculty member at University of Florida between 2005 and 2016. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher and then assistant research engineer at University of California at Berkeley between 2002 and 2005. Between 1996 and 1999, he was a lecturer at Tsinghua University. Dr. Yin has received recognition from different institutions. He was one of the five recipients of the 2012 Doctoral Mentoring Award from University of Florida in recognition of his outstanding graduate student advising and mentoring. One of his papers won the 2016 Stella Dafermos Best Paper Award and the Ryuichi Kitamura Paper Award from Transportation Research Board. 

Dr. Chen is currently an Assistant Professor at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at RIT. Additionally, he has specific expertise on the design of statistical experiments, simulation and econometrics, which will be critical for designing choice experiments that produce response data with desired statistical properties. Dr. Chen received his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, and BS and MS degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, all in Civil Engineering. His research agenda focuses on understanding and modeling the dynamics of user responses to real-time information systems and new communication technologies in transportation systems. He has worked on models of route and departure time choice, as well as activity-based models of travel demand. He has expertise in the development, estimation and application of advanced travel demand models, including his recent work on developing choice models with randomly distributed values of time (user heterogeneity), which have been integrated within dynamic traffic assignment modeling platforms for predicting responses to congestion pricing and varying weather patterns. Dr. Chen is currently a member of the TRB standing Committee ADB20, on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Travel Choices.

Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and a Director of MIT's Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. His research is in networked computer systems, with current interests in networking, data management, and sensing for a world of "truly mobile" devices connected to cloud services running in large datacenters. Based on the CarTel research project, he co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), a company that develops mobile sensing, inferencing, and data analytics technologies to change driver behavior and make roads safer around the world. He is an alumnus of UC Berkeley (winner of the 1998 ACM doctoral dissertation award) and IIT Madras (1993), which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2013. He was inducted to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for his contributions to networks and distributed systems.