I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA. My research focuses on solving design and operational problems in complex, interconnected systems in transportation and logistics, with a particular emphasis on human behavior. We aim to build innovative human-centered urban mobility systems with a focus on accessibility and sustainability. Our research will develop efficient computational tools and algorithms to support these systems.

Prior to joining UCLA, I completed my Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering at Cornell University, advised by Professor 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 and Gioele Zardini. 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. 

Selected Publications

Prospective students and potential collaborators are strongly encouraged to consult the following articles.

(* 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.