Professional Bio

The overarching themes of my work have been the development of computational methods to improve the efficiency, sustainability and security of transportation systems. Along the way I have worked on many other problems in computer science and smart cities.

I retired from UCI in June 2022 after more than 25 years, and have taken a position directing the Master’s Degree in Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics at the University of Washington, Seattle.

I am not accepting new graduate students or post docs for the foreseeable future.

My current research interests include combinatorial optimization, warehouse logistics, optimal contracting, freight transportation planning, technology adoption in transportation, machine learning tools for temporal-spatial data analysis, congestion pricing, technologies to improve the safety, comfort and convenience of pedestrians and disabled travelers and matching markets for urban resource allocation.

By far the most interesting work I am doing right now concerns improving the computational power of column generation methods for solving large scale mixed integer programming problems. Those papers are under review, but most are available in arXiv. Dr. Julian Yarkony is the leader in this effort, and we are seeing speedups of 10X to 250X on medium sized representative problems. We have many ideas that should lead to even more dramatic speedups on large problems. We believe that this work will have a significant impact on industrial, military and humanitarian logistics.

I was the founding Director of the Master of Computer Science Program
The MCS program is a practically oriented four quarter program with an optional summer internship (Fall-Winter-Spring-Summer Internship-Fall) which complements our research oriented MSCS and PhD programs in Computer Science. For more information see: http://www.cs.uci.edu/professional-master-of-computer-science/.

I was the Director of the Transportation Science MS, PhD Programs from 2015-2018
The Interdisciplinary (Engineering, Economics, Urban Planning and Computing) Programs in Transportation Science complement our discipline specific MS and PhD programs in Transportation Engineering, Economics, Urban Planning and Computer Science which also allow students to focus on Transportation and Logistics problems. Transportation Science is a STEM approved program for the purposes of CPT and OPT for international students.

Since 1997, my research has been supported various sources including the National Science Foundation, the Transportation Research Board and JB Hunt Inc., and has been published in more than 160 refereed journal articles and conference proceedings papers in Journals including (among others) IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Network, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Transportation Research (A, B, C and E), Transportation Science, Operations Research and INFOR.

My dissertation research was supported by an Eisenhower Fellowship from the US Federal Highway Administration. I received a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1999.  I am very grateful to both of those agencies for supporting my early research development.

My first appointment at UCI was in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering but I moved after eight years to the Department of Computer Science.  I was the Associate Dean for Student Affairs in the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences from 2006-2009.

I have also taught short courses at the Athens University of Business and Economics and the Technical University of Denmark.

Prior to joining the PhD program at the University of Texas I worked as a research engineer, software engineer and operations research analyst for the Association of American Railroads and United Parcel Service.

I served on a four year National Research Council Study to Assess Fuel Economy Technologies for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles Phase II from March 2013 to February 2017.  This was an exceptionally interesting study examining how new and existing fuels and new and existing technologies for trucks, buses and vocational vehicles, as well as related governmental rule-making efforts, will impact future fuel consumption for this sector and its impact on the environment.

I am currently serving on an 18 month NAS/Transportation Research Board Committee on best practices for the efficient supply of chassis for transporting intermodal containers (December, 2022- May, 2023).

I believe in the promise of electrical vehicles for all kinds of operations, including commercial vehicles, but in my opinion large scale adoption will be driven less by environmental concerns than by performance issues. The life cycle concerns of electrification will eventually be solved, and electric vehicles will prove more efficient, quieter and will last much longer than typical conventional vehicles.

Education

BAS Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

MS Applied Mathematics, Johns Hopkins University

MSE, PhD Civil (Transportation Systems) Engineering, University of Texas

Beliefs about Advising Students

I have been blessed to work with outstanding students at all levels — this includes high school students through post doctoral researchers. The greatest joy of this job is seeing students succeed academically and then thrive in their careers.

My PhD students have been in Computer Science, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Transportation Science and Networked Systems. They taken faculty jobs in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Logistics, Management, Marketing and Cyber-Systems Departments. The rest work in the IT and Transportation and Logistics industries. I have worked with students from many countries and cultures as well as many US states.

I am deeply committed to increasing diversity in Computer Science and Engineering and to “Inclusive Excellence”.

PhD Students Graduated

1. Xiubin Wang (Ph.D, December 2000), Professor of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M University, Dissertation: Dynamic and stochastic carrier fleet management: Application to local truckload trucking operations

2. Xiangwen Lu (Ph.D, September, 2001), Business Analyst, Cisco, Dissertation: Dynamic and Stochastic Routing Optimization: Algorithm Development and Performance Analysis

3. Jiongjiong (John) Song (PhD, June 2003), Associate Vice President, AECOM, Austin Texas, Dissertation: Optimal strategies in combinatorial auctions: The case of freight transportation contracting

4. Minyoung Park (PhD, December, 2005), Professor and Dean, Inha University, South Korea. Dissertation: Capacity analysis for large scale freight transportation systems

5. Srinivas Nandiraju  (PhD, March, 2006),  VP, Supply Chain Optimization & Data Science, Apple, Dissertation: Optimal contracting for freight transportation services

6. Choong Heon Yang (PhD, March, 2008), Senior Researcher, Korea Institute of Construction Technology, Dissertation Research: A Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Prioritizing Potential Alternative Truck Management Strategies

7. Pruttipong (Palm) Apivatanagul (PhD, Fall 2008), Lead Data Scientist, T.N. Inc., Bangkok Thailand, Dissertation Research: Network Design Formulations, Modeling, and Solution Algorithms for Strategic Planning Long Haul Freight Movements

8. Jiana-Fu (Jeff) Wang (PhD, Fall, 2008) Associate Professor, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan,  Dissertation Research: Optimization of large scale cross docking operations

9. Mei-Ting (May) Tsai (PhD, Fall, 2009) Associate Professor, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, Dissertation Research: A real-options approach to freight transportation derivatives contract development

10. Joseph Chow (PhD March, 2010), Associate Professor, New York University, Dissertation Research: Network Design Under Uncertainty using a Real Options Approach

11. Rex Chen (PhD Fall, 2010), 5G Wireless Evangelist, Venture Investor, Dissertation Research: Broadcasting in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

12. James Benvenuto (PhD, Fall 2010), Senior R&D Engineer, Smart Action, Los Angeles, Dissertation Research: Epitaxis A System for Deductive and Constructive Program Queries

13. Di Wu (PhD, Winter 2013), Professor of Computer Science, Hunan University, China, Dissertation Research: Location Based Services in Vehicular Networks

14. Tianbing Xu (PhD, Fall 2013), Senior Research Scientist, Facebook, Menlo Park, CA, Dissertation Research: Online Advertising: A Large Scale Computing Perspective

15. Dmitri Arkhipov (PhD, Summer 2016), Software Development Consultant, Dissertation Research: Computational Models for Scheduling in Online Advertising

16. Scott Godfrey (PhD, Fall 2016), Senior Software Engineer, Zoox, Dissertation Research: Cross-System Runtime Prediction of Parallel Applications on Multi-Core Processors

17. Karina Hermawan (PhD, Summer 2018), Senior Data Scientist, Hyundai Air Mobility, Dissertation Research, Transportation Network Companies and their Impacts on Congestion

18. Reza Asadi (PhD Spring 2020), Machine Learning Research Engineer, Uber AI, Dissertation Research, Neural Network Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Forecasting and Analysis

19. Amari Lewis (PhD, Spring 2021), Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, San Diego, Dissertation Research, Case Studies in Secure Contraction and Communication in Transportation systems. Amari was a 2018-2021 NSF GRFP Fellow.

20. Dalal Alharthi (PhD, Spring 2021), Assistant Professor of Cyber Systems, University of Arizona, Dissertation Research, Developing Effective Social Engineering Security Policies (SESPs): An Empirical Study.

21. Caesar Aguma (PhD, Summer 2022), Dissertation Research, Auction Mechanism Design for Urban Resource Allocation, Research Engineer, ETS.