Algorithmic foundations for multi-modal transit systems (Helping Better Buses make Better Cities)

Affordable, equitable and efficient access to personal mobility is a fundamental societal need---with broad implications for personal well-being, economic mobility, education, and public health. Emerging mobility services have disrupted the urban transportation ecosystem and instilled hope that new data-driven mobility solutions can improve personal mobility for all. While these apps provide a valuable service, as evident by their popularity, there are many questions regarding their scalability, efficiency, impact on equity, and negative externalities (e.g. congestion). On the other hand, traditional mass transit systems provide affordable and community-oriented access to personal mobility, but have their own operational limitations. This talk will
focus on the algorithmic foundations of integrating mass transit operations with agile, demand-responsive services to enable personal mobility for all.

Samitha Samaranayake is an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University with graduate field faculty affiliations in Operations Research and Information Engineering, the Center for Applied Mathematics, and Systems Engineering. His research interests are in the modeling, analysis and control of networked infrastructure systems with a focus on transportation systems. He is particularly interested in developing computationally efficient solution techniques and algorithms that enable practical applications. Prior to joining Cornell he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. He completed his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in December 2014. He has worked in the server technologies group at Oracle, the design for test (DFT) group at Synopsys, the transit algorithms team at Google and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). Samitha received his Bachelors and M.Eng. in Computer Science from MIT and an M.Sc. in MS&E from Stanford University.