Urban Mobility AI Workshop

Emmanuel Kattan is Director of the Alliance Program. He was previously Director of the British Council in New York, where he oversaw academic collaboration programs. He created partnerships with the Henry Luce Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation to launch initiatives connecting higher education institutions across the Atlantic. Before joining the British Council, Emmanuel was Senior Adviser at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, where he managed strategic communications and engagement with academic communities. He also held senior positions at the Commonwealth Secretariat and at the Quebec Delegation in London, where he was in charge of academic relations programs. A native of Montreal, Emmanuel studied politics at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and earned a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of four books: an essay on the politics of memory and three novels.

Andrea is an Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion. He is a member of the Operations Research and Information Engineering field at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he was a Herman Goldstine Fellow at the IBM Mathematical Sciences Department, NY in 2005–2006, full professor of Operations Research at DEI, University of Bologna 2007-2015 and Canada Excellence Research Chair in “Data Science for Real-time Decision Making” at Polytechnique Montréal 2015-2022. His main research interests are in Mixed-Integer Linear and Nonlinear Programming and Data Science and his work has received several recognitions including the IBM and Google faculty awards. Andrea is the recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society 2021 Farkas Prize and has been elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2023. Andrea has been the principal investigator of scientific projects (often involving industrial partners) for Italy, European Union, Canada and USA. In the period 2006-2021, he was a consultant of the IBM CPLEX research and development team, developing CPLEX, one of the leading software for Mixed-Integer Optimization.

Matthias Preindl received the B.Sc. degree from the University of Padua (summa cum laude, 2008), the M.Sc. degree from ETH Zurich (2010), and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Padua (2014), in electrical engineering. He is an Associate Professor at Columbia University, USA. Prior to joining Columbia in 2016, he was an R&D Engineer of Power Electronics and Drives at Leitwind AG (2010-2012), a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at McMaster University, Canada (2014-2015). Dr. Preindl serves as Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and VTS Distinguished Lecturer (class 2023). He was the general chair of 2022 IEEE/AIAA ITEC+EATS. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, Fellow of IET, recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2017), and co-recipient of the AutoTech Breakthrough Awards Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Innovation of the Year (2023). His research interests include the design and control of motor drives, power electronics, and batteries for transportation electrification.

Yiren Lu is a Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer at Waymo Research, focusing on developing ML agents for autonomous driving motion planning and multi-agent simulation. His research encompasses reinforcement learning, imitation learning, data-driven simulation, and foundation models. He has collaborated with Sergey Levine on deep RL methods for learning driving behavior policies. Previously, Lu worked as a software engineer at Google Search and the Assistant team, dedicating 20% of his time to robotic learning from demonstrations with the Brain-Robotics team. He holds a Master's degree in Robotics from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was advised by Prof. Daniel D. Lee. Lu's research interests span machine learning and robotics, with a particular focus on advancing learning techniques for safe, reliable, and generalizable intelligent agents capable of autonomous reasoning, planning, and decision-making in real-world scenarios. His professional experience includes internships at Google, Microsoft Research, and Morgan Stanley.

Dr. Xuan (Sharon) Di is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University in the City of New York, and co-chairs the Smart Cities Center in the Data Science Institute. Dr. Di directs the DitecT (Data and innovative technology-driven Transportation) Lab, focusing on transportation systems. Her overarching research mission is to empower mobility for all, emphasizing the use of technology for social good. She is currently focused on pioneering the development of digital twins for urban transportation management, leveraging cyber-physical systems technology. Within this framework, her research spans diverse areas, including autonomous vehicle control on shared roads with humans, multi-modal mobility optimization, and the intersection of transportation with health considerations. Details about DitecT Lab and her research can be found here.