Nicolas Saunier

Research Interests
Funding and Fellowships
Supervised Students
Publications
Talks
Resources (Code and Data)
Contact Information
Links

Welcome to Nicolas Saunier's professional homepage.

I am an assistant professor in transportation at École Polytechnique de Montréal (EPM) in Canada (official page). You can find my CV (in French) and a short bilingual biography.

I am a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT), the Québec network for research and innovation in road safety and of Catherine Morency's research Chair on the evaluation and implementation of sustainability in transportation (MOBILITÉ Chair). I am co-head of the ITS lab of CIRRELT with Teodor Gabriel Crainic (UQàM). I am also a member of the following TRB committees: Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications (ABJ70), Committee on Safety Data, Analysis, and Evaluation (ANB20) and Pedestrian Committee (ANF10).

Feel free to contact me in general if you have good grades and are interested in research in transportation and computing (see my research interests). Due to large volume of sollicitation by email, make sure to make a well articulated case for yourself and provide relevant information, or you will be ignored. Although all teaching is done in French at École Polytechnique, you may write your thesis in English.

News will be provided more regularly on this blog and you can follow my delicious account.

Research Interests

My research interests focus on intelligent transportation systems, road safety and information technology for transportation (data collection, processing, using machine learning techniques, and visualization).

I am interested in really intelligent transportation systems, i.e. systems that actually exhibit intelligent features such as adaptation to changing conditions with minimal supervising. Using video sensors and computer vision techniques, road users' trajectories can be extracted automatically. This rich microscopic data can then be interpreted automatically to understand road users' behaviour and analyze road safety (without waiting for accidents to happen). A robust probabilistic framework was developed for automated road safety analysis. I am also very interested in mobility in general, in particular vulnerable road users, cyclists and pedestrians (or active modes of transportation). Research on them has been typically limited, in particular in regard of their importance.

Massive amounts of data are now collected continuously in our highly connected world, from geo-location devices in common cell phones to video sensors. If this data can be automatically analyzed, there are great opportunities for a better understanding and optimization of transportation systems, from their management to user information. The field of computational transportation science is thus emerging at the intersection of computer science and transportation, to apply advanced data processing techniques to transportation. The following is a list of keywords that are relevant to my research interests:

Finally, I am a supporter of open science for many reasons, both from a philosophical and moral point of view, and from a practical point of view. From a philosophical and moral point of view, it is the right thing to do, especially for publicly funded research institutions and it allows reproducible research: why should you trust my claims if you cannot replicate my work? From a practical point of view, it is a better method (open source software is a better software development technique) and my research benefits from collaboration and sharing code and data with you, as you reference my research and release publicly your improvements in turn). Join the movement!

Funding and Fellowships

Research funding has been obtained from various sources, in particular the Québec Ministry of Transportation (MTQ), the Québec for Research on Nature and Technology (FQRNT), Québec Fund for Health Research (FRSQ) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

Supervised Students

Publications

Disclaimer: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be re-posted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

An html page exported from JabRef is available here with bibtex entries (whole bibtex file). My Google Scholar profile is here.

Talks

Resources

As stated in my research interests I support open science, i.e. sharing data and code. My most important project is a code repository called Traffic Intelligence, containing various tools for transportation data processing, in particular an implementation of a feature-based tracking algorithm similar to our CRV paper of 2006 (work in progress).

The dataset used in the TRB 2010 paper "Large Scale Automated Analysis of Vehicle Interactions and Collisions" is available. Please send me an email if you are interested. There is also a lot of relevant research links on my del.icio.us account.

Contact Information

Links

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