Using the Crowd as a Means of Transportation

Date and Time of the talk: April 27 2021, 7:00 PM EDT (April 28 9AM Melbourne time)

Information of the Speaker

Egemen Tanin, University of Melbourne

Egemen Tanin completed his PhD at the University of Maryland at College Park before joining the University of Melbourne in 2003. He is an Associate Editor of ACM TSAS and served as a PC Chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2011 and 2012. He was elected to serve as the Treasurer for ACM SIGSPATIAL and served in this role till 2017. He was recently elected to be the next Vice-Chair. Dr Tanin is also the co-founder of ACM SIGSPATIAL Australia as well as the founding editor for ACM SIGSPATIAL Special. He has supervised 15 graduate students to completion and published more than 150 papers in spatio-temporal data management, appearing in top venues such as the VLDB Journal, VLDB, SIGSPATIAL, etc. He is currently co-supervising 7 PhD students at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Melbourne. He has won numerous prestigious ARC Discovery Project Grants in Australia in his career.

Abstract

Using other fellow travelers and their cars as a means of transportation has been around for many decades, known as carpooling in the 20th century. In recent times, resurgence of this line of thought in the form of ride-sharing has become popular. We will first discuss classical and new ways of using the crowd as a means of transportation. We will then further discuss what ride-sharing truly means and how to represent it as a graph problem and present some solutions. We will extend this shared-economy-based line of thought for the coming era of connected-autonomous vehicles and beyond, and also consider transporting goods as well as people. We focus on spatio-temporal aspects of this hot area of research and show why the associated graph problems are hard to solve and how they relate to other problems in graphs.