People

Principle Investigator

Yili (Kelly) Tang, Ph.D, P.Eng

Assistant Professor

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Western Ontario (Western University), Ontario

Dr.Tang leads the MoTech Research Group. She actively engages in diverse academic and industry activities in Canada, United States, Hong Kong, Denmark, and Japan. She leads and participates in national and international research grants (over $4.3 million) funded by NSERC, SSHRC, Mitacs, Denmark DFF, Hong Kong RGC, US NSF and leading private companies. She has won over six awards in research and entrepreneurship. Her research studies have been published in top-tier journals in transportation engineering and science, economics, and energy domain. Her publications has been awarded as one of the most cited articles in the top journal Transportation Research Part B, and Best Paper Award in Multimodal Transportation. 

Research Interests

Analysis, modeling and optimization of the transportation system (Mobility-As-A-Service, public transport, ride-sharing, and emerging transportation technologies), travel behavior and transport economics, data mining and decision analytics (statistical model, machine learning/deep learning), mechanism design and game theory.

Institutional Affiliation

Current Group Members

Jingwen Yao, PhD student (2024 - ), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Jingwen is working on integrated public transit and system optimization.

Yi Wei, PhD student (2024 - ), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Yi is working on on-demand transit, electric bus optimizations and behavioral modeling.

Suryakant Buchunde, PhD student (2024 - ), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Surya is working on public transit crowding, passenger behavior analyses and spatial-temporal data and AI. 

Zelin Zhang, Master student (2024 - ), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UWO. Zelin is working on unsupervised/self-supervised machine learning algorithms for pattern recognition. 

J. Adrián Martínez-Hernández, PhD student (2023 - ), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Adrian is working on public transit, travel behavior, sustainable transportation systems

Kristen Zhang, Research Assistant (2024 - ), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Ivey Business School, UWO. Kristen is working on multi-sensing data synchronization and robotic system designs.  

Ramin Torkan, PhD student (2024 - ), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, UofR. Ramin is working on smart grid and energy transmissions with electric vehicles. Ramin is co-supervised with Prof. Zhanle Wang.

Dr. Tangjian Wei, Postdoctoral Associate (2023 - ), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Dr. Wei is working on optimization, demand modeling and high speed rail. 

Dr. Ellie Sofiani, Postdoctoral Associate (2023 - ), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, UofR. Ellie is working on stochastic and discrete queuing theory and modeling of charging behaviors. Ellie is co-supervised with Prof. Eman Almehdawe.

Majid Emami Javanmard, PhD student (2023 - ), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Majid is the winner of Best Paper Award at Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. He is working on Long-term and short-term forecasting for passenger demand, energy demand and GHG emissions in the transportation sector.

Duha Adbulla, Research Assistant (2023 -), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Duha is the winner of 2022 Canada ITE Student Presentation Competition and winner of the University of Regina Retirees Legacy Scholarship competition. She is working on electric vehicle empirical studies and SP surveys at UWO.

Alumni and Previous Group Members

Mohammad Faraz Idris Siddiqui, Mitacs GRI Research Assistant (2024), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Faraz is working on AI in public transit and resilience for predictive operations and dynamic simulations.

Shreyas Patil, Mitacs GRI Research Assistant (2024), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Shreyas is working on crowdsourced data and language processing algorithms for electric vehicle charging recommendations.

Edmund Co., USRI Research Assistant (2024), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UWO. Edmund is working on tractable AI algorithms for infrastructure monitoring with non-constructive Ground-penetrating radar sensing data. Edmund is co-supervised with Prof. Ayan Sadhu.

Zaima Tasneem, MASc (2023 - 2024), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, UofR. Zaima is the winner of 2023 Canada ITE Student Presentation Competition and awardee of the Women Entrance Scholarship. She is currently working on economic analyses of on-demand transit services.

Md Ferdous Haque Shikder, MASc (2022 - 2024), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Ferdous is the awardee of SGI Traffic Scholarship and Thesis Only Scholarship. He worked on real-time dynamic traffic safety analyses. He is currently working in the City of Regina. 

Xinyu Liu, Research Associate (2022 - 2024), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Xinyu worked on multi-agent robotic mobility and connection.

David Elumeze, Research Assistant (2022 - 2023), Faculty of Science. David worked on robot controls and mapping.

Sotonye Ignoiko, MEng project-based (2023), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Sotonye worked on the Application of gpr in asphalt roads traffic modeling. Co-supervisor: Dr. Shahid Azam. 

Wong Lo (Borison) Hang, Mitacs GRI Research Assistant (2023 ), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Borison worked on on-demand transit network designs and cost-benefit analyses.

Jefferson Araujo, ELAP Research Assistant (2023), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Jefferson is the awardee of Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program. He worked on the logistics network and safety analyses on dangerous goods transportation and assisted with the on-demand transit. 

Adrian Martinez, ELAP Research Assistant (2021-2022), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Adrian is the awardee of Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program. He worked on air passenger and freight transportation demand forecasting, correlation analyses and electric vehicle behavioral analyses.

Duha Adbulla, Research Assistant (2021-2022), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Duha is a highly motivated and enthusiastic Environmental Systems Engineering student with four years of research and development experience passionate to develop environmental sustainability and policy-making solutions. She worked on the on-demand transit service data analytics and interpretations. 

Hafiz Sami Ullah, Research Associate (2021), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Hafiz is a data scientist and machine learning engineer with experience in collecting, cleaning, organizing, and understanding data using end to end machine learning pipeline. He currently works on the database and online decision-making infrastructure for real-time transit operations.

Adesola Maryam Adewuyi, Research Assistant (2021), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Adesola is a motivated and self-directed engineering student that invests passion and commitment to achieving the corporate vision. She applies analytic methodology and is interested in the latest technology. She was working on the transit network data analysis. 

Last update: August, 2024. We are updating this information, stay tuned!