Café Scientifique - Alexandre Bayen

The question of how will self-driving cars will change urban mobility patterns is an open topic today. This talk describes scientific contributions in the field of reinforcement learning presented in the context of enabling mixed-autonomy mobility, the gradual and complex integration of automated vehicles into the existing traffic system. The talk explores the potential impact of a small fraction of automated vehicles on low-level traffic flow dynamics, using novel techniques in model-free deep reinforcement learning.

Illustrative examples will be presented in the context of a new open-source computational platform called FLOW, which integrates state of the art microsimulation tools with deep-RL libraries on AWS EC2. Interesting behavior of mixed autonomy traffic will be revealed in the context of emergent behavior of traffic.

Alexandre Bayen is the Liao-Cho Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley; a Professor of both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), and a Faculty Scientist in Mechanical Engineering, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Alexandre received the Engineering Degree in applied mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, France, in 1998, the M.S. and Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in 1999 and 2004, respectively. From 2000 to 2003, he was a Visiting Researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, and from January 2004 through December 2004, he worked as the Research Director of the Autonomous Navigation Laboratory at the Laboratoire de Recherches Balistiques et Aerodynamiques, (Ministere de la Defense, Vernon, France), where he holds the rank of Major.

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