Welcome

I want to help design cities for people

Computer science and city planning

Throughout my life, I have had the chance to explore large quantity of places, and to meet a lot of unique people. These different experiences have formed my fascination with understanding how cities shape our lives. We come across and meet people in parks, rivers’ banks, museums, restaurants, bars, or clubs. Likely, the very same people become friends, and sometime lovers or even family.

Interestingly, I have realized that cities are constantly evolving due to people and technology. I have envisioned that the history of city planning in the era of new technologies is still to be made by people that are following their dreams and their sensibilities. Therefore, I decided to pursue a PhD between UC Berkeley and Ecole Polytechnique co-advised by Prof. Alexandre M. Bayen and Prof. Eric Goubault at the same time I joint the French government as part of the Corps des Ingénieurs des Ponts, des Eaux et des Forets. I am currently a research scientist at Google working on efficient transportation systems.

Planning and optimizing cities for people

Given the prior interests I have mentioned, I am now connecting city planning and computer science to bring real-life improvements to communities. Due to current and constant improvements of computational power and data available to scientists and engineers (Artificial Intelligence), computers will surely soon be able to drive cars (Autonomous Vehicles). The impact of autonomous vehicles on city planning will presumably be enormous; whether it is exceptional or disastrous.

I want to help cities to use autonomous cars to improve our transportation system. More technically, I am carrying out research about how current traffic control can be improved by including the large amount of data available and the increase number of controllers like traffic signals, variable speed limits, road pricing, navigational applications or even autonomous cars themselves. I strongly believe that traffic engineering should not be only about improving traffic congestion but also about improving sustainability and social wellbeing induced by transportation systems. Making mine Jan Gehl’s sentence about trying to “turn a neighborhood, town or city from a place you can’t wait to get through to one you never want to leave”, my work includes improving traffic conditions in Fremont, CA and implementing socially aware routing algorithms between Google Research and Google Maps.

Feel free to contact me or to take a look at my resume.