Professor Carolina Osorio presents ‘Efficient search in high-dimensional spaces: the case of Bayesian optimization for large-scale urban traffic control’

In this talk, we consider high-dimensional traffic signal control problems that arise in congested metropolitan areas.

We focus on the use of high-resolution urban mobility stochastic simulators and formulate the control problems as high-dimensional continuous simulation-based optimization (SO) problems. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of designing SO algorithms for these problems. An important component in high-dimensional problems is the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. We discuss work that has focused on improving the exploitation capabilities of SO algorithms. We then present novel exploration techniques suitable for high-dimensional spaces. We consider a Bayesian optimization setting, and propose the use of a simple analytical traffic model to specify the covariance function of a Gaussian process. We show how this enables the Bayesian optimization method to more efficiently sample in high-dimensional spaces. We present validation experiments on synthetic low-dimensional problems.

We then apply the method to a high-dimensional traffic control problem for midtown Manhattan, in New York City.

Carolina Osorio is an associate professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and holds the SCALE AI Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence for Urban Mobility and Logistics at HEC Montreal, and is also a staff research scientist at Google Research.

Osorio’s work develops operations research techniques to inform the design and operations of urban mobility systems. It focuses on simulation-based optimization algorithms for, and analytical probabilistic modeling of, congested urban mobility networks.

Osorio was recognized as one of the outstanding early-career engineers in the U.S. by the National Academy of Engineering’s EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an MIT CEE Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, an MIT Technology Review EmTech Colombia TR35 Award, an IBM Faculty Award and a European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Presented by University of Toronto ITE Student Chapter, UT-ITE.

Free. All are welcome.

If any specific accommodations are needed, please contact ite@studentorg.utoronto.ca. Requests should be made as early as possible.

Join link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/s/81320181425. Please note that the same Zoom link will be used for all UT-ITE seminars this term.