Choreography with computers

SMU School of Information Systems Assistant Professor Akshat Kumar envisioned the development of computational techniques that will allow the complex ecosystems of autonomous cars and ships to run like well-oiled machines in our increasingly connected urban societies. His computational models are based on real data, some of which is made available to researchers through the Fujitsu-SMU Urban Computing and Engineering Corp Lab. His work on optimising maritime traffic in the Singapore Straits was recently published in a paper titled “Coordinating Vessel Traffic to Improve Safety and Efficiency” in the 2017 Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Beyond transportation, Assistant Prof Kumar’s work on multiagent decision-making can also be applied to connected urban environments in general, which are increasingly being populated with smart homes, personal digital assistants and Internet-of-Things devices.