It has been an intense couple of weeks for the laboratory with back-to-back international conferences and research seminars, so I want to post a brief update here.
First stop, hEART 2025 @ Munich
It all started with the 13th Symposium of the European Association for Research in Transportation (a.k.a. hEART 2025) hosted by Technical University Munich, we had two posters and one lectern session. The first poster was from Mr. Sato Koki, who presented his ongoing collaboration with the Ajou University team in Korea on the potential for LLMs to undesrtand unstructured text data to predict joint activities. The second poster was from Ms. Joanna Ji, PhD candidate at Technical University Munich, who presented our ongoing collaboration on incorporating joint accessibility measures on large scale activity-travel simulators. In the lectern session, Mr. Hiroshi Uemura, PhD candidate at UT2 (a.k.a. our lab), presented his work on the impact of availability of bike sharing system on rental housing value. Rumour has it there was a “not-so-secret” karaoke room at TUM.
And off to Okinawa – TRISTAN XII
Right after hEART, we were part of the organizing comittee of the Triennial Symposium on Transportation Analysis (TRISTAN) held in okinawa, were Professor Parady presented part of our ongoing collaboration with TUM on joint acessibility measures. The venues were impressive, both for the conference and the gala dinner. Also, the level of the conference was very high, due to record number of submissions and very small number of slots (hence, the review process was a bloodbath…)
Next stop, Kyoto – CASPT and Transit Data 2025
This summer was a combo deal of transportation conferences in Japan, so the next stop was the CASPT and Transit Data 2025 held at Kyoto University. Here, Mr. Itsuki Sato (a.k.a. Sato #2) presented his work on transit accessibility measures accounting for delays. The gala dinner included a perfomance by Maiko (apprentice Geisha) and Geiko (Geisha).
And then?
If that was not enough, the monday after CASPT finished in Kyoto, Bastian Henriquez, Assistant Professor at University of Chile, stayed with us for a couple of days. This happened to coincide with a visit from Dr. Sung Hoo Kim, Assistant Professor at Hanyang University, Korea, and Ms. Phoebe Ho, JSPS visiting research from UC Berkeley. And of course, when so many interesting people coincide in one place, there is only one thing one can do. A research seminar! which is exactly what we did, when we held the second installement of our “what we talk about when we talk about research” seminar series.
And then over right?
You would think that would be enough conferences, seminars and travel, right? but you’d be wrong. Because two days later we hopped on the Shinkansen to Hiroshima University where we joined yet another international seminar.
Now it’s over… right?!
Yes. That concluded a couple of busy weeks of conferences, seminars and travel. Now we will stay put and not move for few weeks (thank god!). Although there are some rumours about a trip to Kathmandu… so stay tuned.