CYNTHIA BARNHART

Ford Professor of Engineering Cynthia Barnhart is Associate Dean of Engineering for Academic Affairs, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, and director of Transportation@MIT. Barnhart’s teaching and research interests involve the development of optimization methods for large-scale transportation and logistics problems. Her approaches often require the development of new models and algorithms, and their implementations in real operating environments. Her research foci include: integrated schedule planning, robust scheduling and real-time re-planning. Barnhart is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and has also served as co-director of both the Center for Transportation and Logistics and the Operations Research Center. She has served in editorial positions for Operations Research, Transportation Science, and Management Science, as president of both the INFORMS Women in Operations Research/ Management Science Forum and the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society, and as the liaison between the INFORMS Transportation Science Section and the INFORMS Aviation Applications Special Interest Group. Barnhart has been awarded the Franz Edelman Prize for Achievement in Operations and the Management Sciences, the INFORMS Award for the Best Paper in Transportation and Logistics, the Advancement of Women in Operations Research and Management Science Award, the Mitsui Faculty Development Chair, the Junior Faculty Career Award from the General Electric Foundation, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

Barnhart’s work has been published in several books and in research journals such as Transportation Science, Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and Annals of Operations Research. At MIT, she has developed and taught courses entitled, “Carrier Systems”, “Optimization of Large-Scale Transportation Systems”, “Transportation Systems Analysis”, “Airline Schedule Planning”, and “The Airline Industry.” Each course describes models and methods for designing, planning, analyzing and operating transportation and logistics systems. Barnhart earned a B.S. degree from the University of Vermont in 1981, and her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 and 1988, respectively.

 

 

MOSHE BEN-AKIVA

Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Moshe Ben-Akiva serves as a Senior Principal of Cambridge Systematics Inc. Dr. Ben-Akiva serves as a Senior Advisor of RAND Europe. He serves as an Advisor of Choicestream Inc. He is the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and serves as the Director of its Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Program, that he founded. As a Consultant, he was responsible for numerous studies of business and consumer choice among product, service, and pricing alternatives. He serves as a Director of Cambridge Systematics, Inc. He has been a Member of Advisory Board of Peninsula Holdings Group Ltd. (formerly, Satx Inc.) since July 2003. He has co-authored over two hundred research papers and two books, including the textbook Discrete Choice Analysis, published by MIT Press. Dr. Ben-Akiva led the development of two traffic simulators and supervised research on the applications and impacts of information technologies. His areas of research include transportation systems, transportation demand and network modeling, infrastructure management, market research and econometrics. Research done at ITS Program has been highlighted in articles in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Technology Review and on the television programs 20/20 and Scientific American Frontiers. Dr. Ben-Akiva has pioneered the development and application of Discrete Choice Analysis and related econometric methods. His work in this area was cited in the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Dan McFadden. He was the recipient of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Effective Teaching Award. He received his PhD degree in Transportation Systems from MIT and is the recipient of honorary doctor degrees from the Universite Lumiere Lyon, France and the University of the Aegean, Greece.

 

 

REX BRITTER (Visiting Scientist)

Expertise in turbulent fluid dynamics, particularly effects of buoyancy, flow and dispersion of hazardous materials, pollutant dispersion problems in complex geometries such as cities, formalised model evaluation procedures, urban air quality and sustainable energy use in cities. Formerly Director, Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants. Worked extensively with the UK, EU and US Government Agencies and industry particularly on the consequences of the release of hazardous materials. Member of a Government panel on the Sustainable Development of Heathrow.

 

 

JOSEPH FERREIRA

Professor of Urban Planning and Operations Research Associate Department Head and Head of Urban Information Systems Group. Professor Ferreira was the founding director of the Planning Department's Computer Resource Lab and is now head of Urban Information Systems. Professor Ferreira teaches analytical methods and computer-based modeling for planning and urban management. His current research interests focus on spatial data infrastructure, interactive spatial analysis tools, and geographic information systems for land use planning, urban modeling, and risk management. He is the principal investigator for a number of research projects at UIS, including those involving the MIT ortho-browser, 'Urban Respiration', the Boston office market, and the revitalization of Beirut. Both Prof. Ferreira's undergraduate degree (in electrical engineering) and his PhD degree (in operations research) are from MIT. Currently, he is active in a number of professional and academic organizations including serving as President of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), an interdisciplinary organization that is the oldest professional association focused on the use of information systems to improve our urban and regional areas.

 

 

EMILIO FRAZZOLI

Emilio Frazzoli is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Laurea degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Rome, "Sapienza" , Italy, in 1994, and a Ph. D. degree in Navigation and Control Systems from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2001. Between 1994 and 1997 he worked as an officer in the Italian Navy, and as a spacecraft dynamics specialist for the European Space Agency Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, and Telespazio, in Rome, Italy. From 2001 to 2004 he was an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2004 to 2006 he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was the recipient of a NSF CAREER award in 2002. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, and for the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications.

Dr. Frazzoli's main research interests lie in the general area of planning and control for mobile cyber-physical systems, with a particular emphasis on autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, and transportation networks.

 

 

PATRICK JAILLET

Following his graduate studies at MIT in 1985, Patrick Jaillet held successive positions as a tenured faculty in applied mathematics at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC) in Paris from 1985 to 1991, and as a professor in management science at the University of Texas at Austin from 1991 to 2002. He came back to MIT as professor and head of civil and environmental engineering in 2002, joined LIDS and EECS in September 2009, and became the Dugald C. Jackson Professor in July 2010. Prior to becoming head of civil and environmental engineering at MIT in 2002, Professor Jaillet was chair of the department of management science and information systems at University of Texas at Austin, where he also co-founded and was the first director of the Center for Computational Finance. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), and served as Associate Editor for the INFORMS journal Operations Research from 1994 until 2005. He is also an Associate Editor for the scholarly journals Networks, Transportation Science, and Naval Research Logistics. He was recognized as a Fulbright Scholar in 1990.

 

 

DINA KATABI

Dina Katabi, Professor, EECS Sloan Fellow Class of 1947 Career Development Professor. "My research interests are in computer networks and data communication. They encompass congestion control, network measurements, scalability and robustness of communication systems, differentiated services, Internet pricing, routing, content distribution, peer-to-peer systems, self-configurable and wireless networks, and network security. I have a particular interest in adapting tools from various fields of applied mathematics such as control theory, coding theory, and AI to solve problems in computer networks."

 

 

KRISTIAN KOECKL

Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Research Scientist

 

 

AMEDEO ODONI

Amedeo Rodolfo Odoni is a Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Since 2009, he has also been associated as the Lead Principal Investigator and, subsequently, as a Principal Investigator, with the Future Urban Mobility research project, sponsored by Singapore’s National Research Foundation in connection with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). From 1999 to 2009 he served as co-director of the Global Airline Industry Center at MIT, a research and education project on the international airline industry sponsored primarily by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and from 1996 to 2002 as co-director of the FAA’s National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR). Previously, he was head of the Systems Division of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department (1991-96) and co-director of MIT’s Operations Research Center (1985-1991).

His research interests are in applied probability theory, stochastic processes and decision-making under uncertainty. His principal application domains are airport planning and operations, air traffic management, urban service systems, queuing theory, and location theory.

Professor Odoni is the author, or co-author, of three books and about 100 professional publications, as well as co-editor of six books. He served as editor-in-chief of Transportation Science from 1985 to 1991, and is a current or past member of the editorial boards of many professional journals. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and the recipient of many awards for his teaching and research. He has supervised 41 Ph.D. students, several of whom have won major prizes for their research and dissertations, and has been a member of the Ph.D. thesis committees of more than 100 other students. He has served as consultant to national and international organizations, and to many of the busiest airports in the world on projects related to practically every aspect of airport planning and design, and of air traffic management.

 

 

LI-SHIUAN PEH

Li-Shiuan Peh, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been at MIT since 2009. Prior to serving on the faculty of Princeton University, she graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2001, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 1995. Her research focuses on low-power interconnection networks, on-chip networks and parallel computer architectures. She was awarded the CRA Anita Borg Early Career Award in 2007, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2006, and the NSF CAREER award in 2003. Peh coins her research thrust as “networkdriven computing,” where the architecture of future computer chips is more significantly driven by how the compute cores are interconnected, rather than the design of the cores themselves. Her research has motivated, proposed and prototyped these on-chip networks, so as to enable the continued scaling of Moore's Law into future many-core chips.

 

 

CARLO RATTI

Associate Professor of the Practice Director, SENSEable City Laboratory. A designer, engineer and agit-prop proponent, Carlo Ratti teaches at MIT, where he directs the SENSEable City Laboratory. He also practices architecture in Turin, Italy. His work has been shown at many venues, including the Venice Biennale (2004, 2006 and 2008), the Graz Kunsthaus (2005), the Design Museum in Barcelona (2008), the World Expo (2008) and MoMa the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008).

Recent Awards: Member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Urban Management | Curator of the 2012 BMW Guggenheim Pavilion in Berlin | Forbes Magazine Names You Need To Know in 2011 | Fast Company's 50 Most Influential Designers in America in 2011 | 2011 Presenter at TED | Blueprint Magazine 25 People Who Will Change the World of Design 2010 | Queensland's Innovator in Residence 2009 | Esquire's Best and Brightest 2008 | Time Magazine Best Inventions of the Year in 2007.

 

 

DANIELA RUS

Daniela Rus is a professor in the EECS department at MIT. She co-directs the CSAIL Center for Robotics. Previously, she was an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth. She holds a PhD is Computer Science from Cornell University. Her research interests include robotics, mobile computing, sensor networks, and information organization. She is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow.

 

 

P. CHRISTOPHER ZEGRAS

Zegras holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning (2005), a Master of Science in Transportation (2001) and a Master in City Planning (2001), all from MIT. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Cum Laude) in Economics and Spanish from Tufts (1990). As a research assistant with MIT’s Alliance for Global Sustainability, Zegras developed and co-managed a multi-university research project on ways of designing and measuring sustainable urban development in South America and Africa.

As an independent consultant, he has worked with an international consortium to evaluate transportation options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions via the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), with support from Canadian International Development Agency. He also investigated, for the state of Mexico, alternative financing schemes for a Bus Rapid Transit project in Mexico City. For the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, he devised a classification scheme for the world’s urban areas, selected ‘archetype’ developing country cities, managed research for transportation analyses of those cities, and identified primary drivers of future urban transportation growth and the policy implications of that growth.

Over the past several years, he has conducted research at MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment and at the Institute’s Cooperative Mobility Program, as well as at the World Bank’s Latin America & Caribbean Regional Office and at the International Institute for Energy Conservation.

He is a member of the Committee on Transportation in Developing Countries, the Transportation Research Board and the National Research Council (1997-present). Zegras has contributed to a number of recent books in his field and has published widely in transportation and planning journals.

Prof. Christopher Zegras’ research interests include the influence of the built environment on individual travel behavior, transportation infrastructure and system financing, developing indicators of sustainable transportation, comparative analyses of metropolitan transportation systems, and mitigating transportation greenhouse gas emissions. Along with teaching graduate-level courses in urban transportation planning, statistics, and land use-transportation planning in the Department of Urban Studies he serves as the MIT Lead for the MIT-Portugal Program Transportation Systems Focus Area. He is also a member of the Campus Energy Task Force of the MIT Energy Initiative. Zegras holds a Master in City Planning and a Master of Science in Transportation from MIT and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, also from MIT.