• Seminar Title: The Role of Academia in Large Scale Urban Planning: example of the mobility index and NEOM in the KSA
• Speaker: Prof. Alexandre Bayen – Associate Provost for Moffett Field Program Development, Liao-Cho Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley
• Time: Thursday, December 28, 2023 | 4 – 5 P.M
• Venue: C401, VinUniversity
• Registration: https://forms.office.com/r/enZhphxYcv

About the Seminar

This informal talk will present the Mobility Future Readiness Index developed by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies and Oliver Wyman. The index currently ranks 60 cities in the world by competitiveness using a combination of 55 KPIs that characterize the attractiveness of the city for mobility innovation, as well as operational levels of services in these cities. Lessons learned from the development of this index will be shared in the context of urbanization in Vietnam.

The talk will also present some examples of master planning for new cities at very large scales in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in particular, NEOM. It will describe the different attempts and phases at designing a city on the basis of innovation in mobility technology, livability, and other criteria inherent to urban planning. Finally, the talk will discuss informally, in the very specific context of the Vin Group, the ability to rely on VinFast technology to integrate mobility more deeply into the urban space, in particular through the futuristic concept of self-driving districts.

While the talk will start with a formal presentation, the goal of the presentation is to initiate the dialogue with the audience in the context of the Vingroup, and understand how academic institutions can help shape the urban space, by interfacing with city stakeholders and officials.

About the Speaker

Prof. Alexandre Bayen is the Associate Provost for Moffett Field Program Development at UC Berkeley, and the Liao-Cho Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley.

Prof. Alexandre Bayen is regarded as an expert in control and optimization in the Amazon Science lenses. The platform went on to highlight his contributions to a variety of transportation projects, ranging from cutting-edge, open-source traffic simulation and optimization to large-scale freeway observation, which involves placing automated vehicles in real-world traffic to investigate the impact of ML-derived self-driving behaviors. He is also known as one of the three founding fathers of FLOW – the first platform that can combine three components including: machine learning, cloud computing and simulation tools.