News
Publication Update First Half 2019
1st July 2019
Since I haven't given any updates on publications, I'll summarise what has happened in the first half of the year in one post. We have published a survey paper on agent-based simulation on heterogeneous hardware in the renowned journal ACM Computing Surveys. Additionally, together with Prof Christoph Sommer and some colleagues we have published a book chapter on the recent developments of our Veins simulation framework. Other publications include one paper at ACM Pads, two papers at the A-ranked conference ICCS (International Conference on Computational Science) 2019. Our collaboration with SMART (MIT in Singapore) was published at KES-STS-19. Upcoming publications include two papers at the ITSC 2019 and one workshop paper at HeteroPar 2019.
Related Publications
Jiajian Xiao, Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "A Survey on Agent-based Simulation Using Hardware Accelerators," ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), vol. 51 (6), pp. 131:1-131:35, February 2019.
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Christoph Sommer, David Eckhoff, Alexander Brummer, Dominik S. Buse, Florian Hagenauer, Stefan Joerer and Michele Segata, "Veins -- the open source vehicular network simulation framework," in Recent Advances in Network Simulation, Antonio Virdis and Michael Kirsche (Eds.), Springer, 2019.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Philipp Andelfinger, Jordan Ivanchev, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "From Effects to Causes: Reversible Simulation and Reverse Exploration of Microscopic Traffic Models," Proceedings of 2019 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), Chicago, IL, June 2019, pp. 173-184.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Boyi Su, Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Henriette Cornet, Goran Marinkovic, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "An Agent-Based Model for Evaluating the Boarding and Alighting Efficiency of Autonmous Public Transport Vehicles," Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2019), Faro, Portugal, June 2019, pp. 534-547.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Jordan Ivanchev, Alois Knoll, Daniel Zehe, Suraj Nair and David Eckhoff, "A Macroscopic Study on Dedicated Highway Lanes for Autonomous Vehicles," Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2019), Faro, Portugal, June 2019, pp. 520-533.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Chunling Luo, Xinrong Li, Yuan Zhou, Aakil M. Caunhye, Umberto Alibrandi, Nazli Y. Aydin, Carlo Ratti, David Eckhoff and Iva Bojic, "Data-driven disruption response planning for a Mass Rapid Transit system," Proceedings of KES International Symposium on Smart Transportation Systems 2019 (KES-STS-19), St. Julians, Malta, June 2019, pp. 205-213.
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CREATE PI-Series Seminar Talk
7th June 2019
I was invited to speak at the monthly CREATE PI Seminar to share more on the topic – Privacy in the Smart City: Trade-off or Opportunity. I presented the various privacy challenges, that both data collectors and individuals face today, such as the increase of privacy protection which could reduce data utility for researchers and scenarios when individuals would lose their right to their own data. To further emphasize the importance of privacy, the risks of data publishing were highlighted. I showed the ways actual personal data could be obtained through data publishing, even with anonymization, which proved the danger of how the seemingly harmless, published data could be used against an individual. So, how can we continue to enjoy the convenience of new and improved technologies for a smart city without compromising our privacy wholesale? I went on to cite two possible ways in which an individual’s data can be protected – by enabling plausible deniability through differential privacy and by the use of synthetic datasets. I had a lot of fun giving this talk as I felt the topic is timely and the audience was interested, asking good questions in the Q&A session.
Two accepted Research Proposals
1st June 2019
Two of my research proposals for the 5th round of the Intra-CREATE seed call have been accepted. In the first one, where I act as a Co-Investigator, we would like to compare the research in the simulation domain among the many CREATE entities such as MIT, ETH and TUMCREATE. We all have our simulation tools (CityMoS, MATSIM, SimMobility) but no common foundation in terms of data and scenarios. We would like to learn more about the trustworthiness and reproducibility of traffic simulators and give insights to what extent our simulations agree and more importantly, where they don't. The second proposal which I was leading is a collaboration with the University of Illinois-Champagne, NUS, NTU and my long-term peer Dr Isabel Wagner from DMU Leicester. We want to continue our research on privacy protection in smart cities and developed a common framework to manage and analyse privacy risks in complex, interconnected systems. This common framework has been on Isabel's and my plans for a long time and I can't wait to start this exciting project, especially given the chance to welcome Isabel back to Singapore for two short research visits.
Best paper at DS-RT 2018
20th November 2018
We received the Best Paper Award at the "22nd International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT)" held in Madrid in October. This symposium, now in its 22nd iteration, serves as a forum for both academia and industry to present recent research results in the domain of distributed simulation. Our award-winning paper explores possibilities to substantially improve the performance of traffic simulation by using not just conventional processors (CPUs) but also incorporating graphics cards (GPUs). One method is to compute parts of the traffic simulation both on CPU and GPU. Additionally, we show how the simulation can be moved to the GPU entirely, significantly increasing the simulation speed.
Related Publications
Jiajian Xiao, Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "Exploring Execution Schemes for Agent-Based Traffic Simulation on Heterogeneous Hardware," Proceedings of 22nd International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT), Madrid, Spain, October 2018, pp. 243-252. Won Best Paper Award
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Best paper at PADS 2018
14th June 2018
We were awarded the best paper award at ACM SIGSIM PADS 2018! The ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS) is a prestigious and unique forum for Simulation and Modeling. In our paper, we propose an innovative method to improve the performance of traffic simulation. The basic concept is to avoid unnecessary computation by dynamically reducing the update frequency. The proposed method enables more timely results in traffic simulation studies without compromising accuracy.
Related Publications
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Talks Talks Talks
13th April 2018
This week was rather busy as I had to give three (different) presentations within two days. First, I was invited by the Singapore-ETH Centre to give a talk on how to write proposals and acquire funding. It was a lot of fun to talk to 40+ other early career researchers and discuss the funding landscape of Singapore. Secondly, a delegation of some 50 Roland Berger (and other) consultants visited TUMCREATE and I gave a presentation in the CREATE theatrette on Smart Cities and how intelligent transport systems can be simulated. Lastly, we were honoured by the visit of a team around Detlev von Platen, a member of the executive board of Porsche. In a small circle, we had the chance to discuss our research and the role of automotive OEMs in future cities.
Some updates on publications
17th Mach 2018
My paper together with Dr Isabel Wagner "Technical Privacy Metrics: A systematic Survey" has been accepted to ACM Computing Surveys. This work has been in the making since 2015 and it is nice to see that it has now come to completion. I also published two articles in the journal Elsevier Computer Communications, one with my colleague Rainer Stahlmann about the exploration of GLOSA systems, the other one on readjusting the privacy goals in vehicular networks, together with my colleague Prof Christoph Sommer. Lastly, my book chapter for the 'excellent dissertations' series by the German Computer Scientist Society (GI) is now finally available. All the articles mentioned can be found as an author's version on my website.
Visit of 2nd Mayor of Munich
9th December 2017
TUMCREATE hosted a delegation from the City of Munich consisting of the 2nd Mayor of Munich, BMW, Infineon, UnternehmerTUM, TÜV SÜD and Prof Manfred Broy. I had the honor to present our research to them and engage in interesting discussions on how the research conducted in Singapore can be transfered to Munich.
Accepted Research Proposals
7th December 2017
Two of my research proposals were accepted by the National Research Foundation, Singapore. The first is a collaboration together with Nanyang Technological University (Prof Anwitaman Datta) and MIT/SMART (Dr Iva Boijc) and deals with privacy protection in mobility data. The second proposal together with MIT, Berkeley, and ETH looks at mobility solutions in the case of public transport disruptions. I'm eager to start working in these exciting projects and we are actively looking for researchers who want to spend some time in Singapore.
IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials
Sep 2017
My paper "Privacy in the Smart City -- Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions" (together with Dr. Isabel Wagner) has been accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, which is currently the journal with the highest impact factor in Computer Science. The article can already be accessed via IEEE Xplore and will be published in one of the upcoming issues. It provides useful taxonomies and a detailed overview of smart city applications, technologies, privacy types, and attacker models.
Related Publications David Eckhoff and Isabel Wagner, "Privacy in the Smart City -- Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions," IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 20 (1), pp. 489-516, 2018.
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