About Me

I am a third-year PhD student 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 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. You can reach me at the following email (CV available upon request).

Email: ugurel@uw.edu

News

• 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” [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