Taking research abroad
PhD student works on transportation research with collaborators in France
Conducting research at UIC allows students to work on cutting-edge projects. It also provides students with the opportunity to contribute to international collaborations.
For PhD student Isaac Salvador, a collaboration between Professor Sybil Derrible and Angelo Furno in Lyon, France, brought Salvador to France for nine months to conduct a portion of his doctoral research at the Université Gustave Eiffel. Salvador spent that time collaborating with members of the LICIT-ECO7 Transport and Traffic Engineering Laboratory and participating in joint research opportunities.
This opportunity was facilitated by the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program offered by the Embassy of France in the U.S. aimed at reinforcing a collaborative partnership and joint projects between French and American research teams.
Salvador’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the simulation of individuals and how their choices and actions affect transportation networks/systems. He’s leveraging artificial intelligence and large language models to simulate individuals in a population at a fidelity and level of detail previously unheard of.
“The goal is to see what large-scale phenomena arise in a transportation network when thousands or millions of simulated individuals react to disturbances in the network. From mundane, everyday events like a traffic jam or a flat tire, to system-wide impacts such as extreme weather events or a global pandemic,” he said.
While Salvador is enjoying the food and weather in France, he is grateful for the opportunities he had at UIC and in Derrible’s lab.
“Working with Professor Derrible has been wonderful. He has advised me since the beginning of my master’s degree in 2021 while working full-time in the transportation industry and has been instrumental in shaping my approach to research,” he said. “We have a bit of a laissez-faire attitude to research, with him giving me the freedom to pursue research interests I am passionate about and encouraging me to explore unique and novel solutions to the research problems I am facing.”
Salvador said the most rewarding part of doing research at UIC has been the opportunity to collaborate across multiple departments at the university.
“In the pursuit of my research interests, I have taken classes in urban planning and policy, information and decision sciences, and computer science. Not only have these classes augmented and complemented the work I have done in the CME department, but I have made friends and connections with doctoral students and professors all over campus,” he said.
After graduating, Salvador wants to take on transportation projects in the U.S., where initiatives incur a massive cost to the public financially and socially.
“A poorly planned transportation investment can negatively affect communities for decades, and a bad transportation system isn’t just congestion and late trains, it’s a barrier to social mobility and economic opportunity,” he said. “My goal is to use my research to effectively assess how individuals, communities, and entire populations make use of new transportation systems. By using the AI simulation tools I am developing in this research, I hope to capture a glimpse into what a proposed transportation project would be like in real life, and how people and communities are affected before it actually happens,”
“Isaac is clearly one of the brightest and most resourceful graduate students I know. His experience in urban engineering and expertise in artificial intelligence and big data technologies is unparalleled in civil engineering. Isaac is destined to great things, and I am thrilled that he has decided to pursue is doctoral journey in my research group,” said Derrible, director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory at UIC.