I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, specializing in Transportation Engineering under the guidance of Samitha Samaranayake. I was a visiting student at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hosted by Professor Cathy Wu. I received an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Seoul National University (SNU) in 2020, under the supervision of Professor Dong-Kyu Kim. I also hold a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from SNU, conferred in 2018. 

My research investigates the principles of network systems that interact with human and emergent decision-making challenges. I envision an autonomous decision-making that incorporates multiple transportation modes and reconciles conflicting interests of stakeholders. By implementing a coordinated mobility system, we can achieve better societal goals, such as enhanced accessibility and equity, reduced congestion and emissions, and improved user satisfaction. Methodologically, I am interested in network optimization, econometric choice modeling, deep/reinforcement learning, and game theory. During my PhD, I propose analytical approaches that integrate econometric behavioral models into the core network optimization problem. Three different applications are considered, spanning multiple time horizons: 1) real-time operation of behavior-aware high-capacity ride-pooling services, 2) strategic decision-making for a transportation network company and policy evaluation, and 3) long-term infrastructure planning and prediction of travel demand patterns.

News

• 03/20/2025 - I defended my PhD dissertation!!!

• 03/13/2025 - I gave an invited talk at KAIST ISE!

• 03/07/2025 - I gave a talk in Cornell 15th Annual CEE Graduate Research Symposium. I selected as winners in the oral presentation! 

• 03/03/2025 - I gave an invited talk at Vanderbilt University CEE!

• 02/26/2025 - I gave an invited talk at UCLA CEE!

• 01/15/2025 - Our extended abstract has been accepted to TRISTAN. See you in Okinawa!  

• 01/07/2025 - I gave a poster presentation at TRB. My session is on Travel Forecasting Methods and Theory, 1:30 PM - 3:15 PM. 

• 12/19/2024 - I gave a talk at the ISE Winter Symposium at KAIST. 

• 12/16/2024 - Our paper has been accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems!

• 12/11/2024 - I gave an invited talk at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Seoul National University, hosted by Dong-kyu Kim.

• 12/10/2024 - I gave an invited talk at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, KAIST, hosted by Jinwoo Lee.

• 09/25/2024 - Our paper "Estimate then Predict: Convex Formulation for Travel Demand Forecasting" has been accepted to 2025 TRB Annual Meeting (AEP50). 

Selected Publications

(* indicates equal contribution)

2025

• Learning to Prune: Fast Feasible Trip Generation for High-capacity Ridepooling
  Youngseo Kim, Sirui Li, Hins Hu, Wenbin Ouyang, Samitha Samaranayake, Cathy Wu, Extended abstract accepted in TRISTAN 2025.

• Estimate then Predict: Convex Formulation for Travel Demand Forecasting
  Youngseo Kim, Gioele Zardini, Samitha Samaranayake, Soroosh Shafiee, Under review in Transportation Research Part B [available at SSRN].

• Learning Augmented Vehicle Dispatching with Slack Times for High-capacity Ride-pooling
  Youngseo  Kim, Vindula Jayawardana, Samitha Samaranayake, Major revision in Transportation Research Part C [SSRN].

2024

• Strategic Pricing and Routing to Maximize Profit in Congested Roads Considering Interactions with Travelers
  Youngseo Kim*, Ning Duan*, Gioele Zardini, Samitha Samaranayake, and Damon Wischik, Accepted in Transactions on Control of Network Systems [SSRN], 2024.

2023

• Rolling Horizon based Temporal Decomposition for the Offline Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows
  Youngseo Kim, Danushka Edirimanna, Michael Wilbur, Philip Pugliese, Aron Laszka, Abhishek Dubey, Samitha Samaranayake, The 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023. (acceptance rate: 19.6%)

2021

• Tourists’ Preference on the Combination of Travel Modes under Mobility-as-a-Service Environment
  Eui-Jin Kim, Youngseo Kim, Sunghoon Jang, Dong-Kyu Kim, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2021.

• A Comparative Analysis of the Users of Private Cars and Public Transportation for Intermodal Options under Mobility-as-a-Service in Seoul
  Youngseo Kim, Eui-Jin Kim, Sunghoon Jang, Dong-Kyu Kim, Travel Behaviour and Society, 2021.

• Interpretable Machine-learning Models for Estimating Trip Purpose in Smart Card Data
  Eui-Jin Kim, Youngseo Kim, Dong-Kyu Kim, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers-Municipal Engineer, 2021.

Invited Talks

• Macroscopic Models using the Entropy Maximizing Principle for Co-Designing Mobility Systems

Talk at MIT in Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (hosted by Gioele Zardini), September 19, 2024.

• Considering Travelers in Transportation Network Design and Operation: Integrating discrete choice modeling with optimization

Talk at Technical University of Denmark (DTU) management (hosted by Francisco Pereira), June 27, 2024.

• Considering Travelers in Transportation Network Design and Operation
  Talk at Cornell in the Information and Decision Science Laboratory (hosted by Andreas Malikopoulos, virtual), May 8, 2024.

• Learning Augmented Vehicle Dispatching with Slack Times for High-capacity Ride-pooling
  Talk at MIT in the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory (hosted by Anuradha Annaswamy), April 16, 2024.

• Optimization in Transportation: Integrating Discrete Choice Modeling with Optimitzation
  Talk at University of Seoul in the Civil Engineering Department (hosted by Shin Hyoung Park), January 4, 2024.

• Optimization in Transportation: Routing, Matching, and Pricing for Sustainable Mobility-on-Demand in Large Scale Network
  Talk at KAIST in the Cho Chun Shik Graduate School of Mobility (hosted by Jinwoo Lee), January 6, 2023.

• Optimization in Transportation: Routing, Matching, and Pricing for Sustainable Mobility-on-Demand in Large Scale Network
  Talk at KAIST in the Department of Operations Research (hosted by Woo Chang Kim), January 4, 2023.

• Optimization in Transportation: Routing, Matching, and Pricing for Sustainable Mobility-on-Demand in Large Scale Network
  Talk at Seoul National University (hosted by Dong-kyu Kim), December 29, 2022.

Awards

• Microsoft Azure Credit Grants ($21,900)

• TSL Cross-regional Doctoral Grant ($1,500)
  Travel fund to encourage collaboration across the region in the Transportation Science and Logistics community.

• CEE Rising Stars Workshop in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Two-day event designed to guide and inspire Ph.D. candidates who are aiming for a career in academia, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 19-20, 2023.

• 2023 Hyundai Vision Conference
  Three-day immersive experience focusing on future mobility technologies, Seoul, Korea, August 7-9, 2023.