Meet Jimi Oke: He wants to optimize space and interactions through network modeling and simulation
Jimi Oke is a postdoc at MIT, where he is working on pushing the boundaries of network analytics using SimMobility. Originally from Nigeria, Jimi’s first interests were physics and music — guitar, piano, and bass — as well as architecture. His interest in transportation was spawned by the latter, where he looked at how to optimize space and interactions between the natural and built environments. That took him into network problems in a big way, from looking at hot topics like equity, social benefits, and sustainability, as well as more personal goal of “not living my life in traffic.” That makes his work on SimMobility just as compelling on personal as well as professional levels.
Using city testbeds to evaluate the effect of vehicle technologies
Jimi’s work on SimMobility involves evaluating test beds in several urban typologies representative of cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Singapore, and Tel Aviv. For each typology, they develop a simulatable prototype city by synthesizing a population and obtaining the network topology from a candidate city. Demand models are calibrated based on initial estimates from similar cities. He is looking primarily at energy and transport strategies, especially the effects of autonomous vehicles and vehicular technologies on networks. Six broad strategies will be compared and contrasted using the tools he’s building, enabling him and his colleagues — and hopefully many more of us — to evaluate a wide range of alternate futures. His ideas about explicitly treating uncertainty are refreshing to hear.
His challenges largely mirror my own — dealing with software frameworks that can be difficult to keep as current as the issues we are asked to inform with our models. And like me he sees the importance of managing himself as well as organizing colleagues to deliver things bigger than he can do alone. Jimi hopes to be done with his research in December of this year, and spend the first half of 2019 writing it up. I’m keen to see it, as the impressively wide perspectives driving his work suggest that it’ll be breakout stuff. Jimi is someone very much worth following.
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This post is part of a series of posts profiling people+perspectives in the travel analysis industry. The Zephyr Foundation’s mission is to advance rigorous transportation and land use decision-making for the public good by advocating for and supporting improved travel analysis and facilitating its implementation.
