Ekin Uğurel

Ekin Uğurel

PhD Candidate at the University of Washington, advised by Cynthia Chen (CEE) & Shuai Huang (ISE). Interested in the intersection of contemporary ML and travel behavior.

About Me

I am a fourth-year PhD Candidate in the THINK lab at the University of Washington-Seattle, where I am advised by Cynthia Chen. My work at the UW is supported by the College of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship. Before this, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, where I conducted research with Christian Claudel. At UT, I was supported by a variety of scholarships including the Endowed Presidential Scholarship, James F. and B. M. Hinton Scholarship, and the Canning Scholarship.

My current research aims to innovate novel methods to model mobile data (i.e. GPS traces from mobile devices) for human mobility analysis. I am particularly interested in kernel-based techniques to uncover non-linear spatiotemporal relationships in high dimensions. I find mobile data a particularly powerful tool for the future, as it can give an approximation of human movements at various geographical scales.

More broadly, I am interested in high-dimensional probability, generative techniques, and causality studies in the context of modern transportation problems. In the long-term, I aim to bridge traditional travel behavior frameworks with contemporary advances in machine learning, focusing on developing robust, scalable methods that can infer and predict complex mobility patterns.

You can reach me at the following email (CV available upon request).

Email: ugurel@uw.edu

News

  • 2025 - I started a visiting Ph.D. role with the Machine Learning for Smart Mobility group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), supervised by Professor Filipe Rodrigues. I will be here until September :)
  • 2025 - New journal publication out! “A Framework for Measuring and Benchmarking Fairness of Generative Crowd-Flow Models” in the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies [pdf] [code]
  • 2025 - New journal publication out! “Beat the Morning Rush: Survival Analysis-Informed DNNs with Collaborative Filtering to Predict Departure Times” in the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems [pdf]
  • 2025 - New journal publication out! “Exploring biases in travel behavior patterns in big passively-generated mobile data from 11 U.S. cities” in the Journal of Transport Geography [pdf]
  • 2024 - Granted the Michael Kyte Region 10 Outstanding Student of the Year Award from PacTrans.
  • 2024 - New journal publication out! “Metropolitan Planning Organizations’ Uses of and Needs for Big Data” in Transport Findings. [pdf]
  • 2024 - New journal publication out! “Learning to generate synthetic human mobility data: A physics-regularized Gaussian process approach based on multiple kernel learning” in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological. [pdf] [code]
  • 2024 - Served as a co-project lead on a Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) project @ the eScience Institute. [website]
  • 2024 - Joined Instacart as an Machine Learning (ML) PhD summer intern.
  • 2024 - Invited podium presentation at the 25th International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT 25). [code]
  • 2024 - New journal publication out! “Correcting Missingness in Passively-Generated Mobile Data with Multi-Task Gaussian Processes” in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. [pdf] [code]
  • 2024 - New preprint out! “Event detection from novel data sources: Leveraging satellite imagery alongside GPS traces”. [pdf][code]
  • 2024 - Invited workshop host at the 2024 Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (AMPO) on MPO uses of and needs for big data.
  • 2024 - Invited talk at the 2024 Annual INFORMS Conference in Seattle, WA on Behavioral-informed Analytics and Decision-making for Urban Transportation Systems.
  • 2023 - Invited talk at the 2023 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA).
  • 2023 - Invited submission for ISTTT 25.
  • 2023 - Invited talk at the 2023 Annual INFORMS Conference in Phoenix, Arizona on Large-scale Data Analytics for Transportation Systems.
  • 2022 - Started summer internship as a Consulting Intern at Fehr & Peers in Seattle, WA.
  • 2022 - Invited talk at the 2023 Annual Transportation Research Board (TRB) Conference in Washington, DC on Correcting Missingness in Passively-generated Mobile data with Multi-task Gaussian Processes.
  • 2021 - Joined the THINK lab at the University of Washington-Seattle.
  • 2021 - Graduated with a B.S. in Civil Engineering Honors and a Minor in Business Foundations from the University of Texas at Austin.
  • 2021 - Awarded a College of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship from the University of Washington.