Zhenliang (Mike) Ma

Name: Dr. Zhenliang (Mike) Ma

Title: Lecturer

Affiliations: Southeast University – Monash University joint Graduate School

Zhenliang (Mike) Ma is a Lecturer at the Institute of Transport Studies, Monash University, and jointly appointed with the SEU-Monash Graduate Program (Transportation) in China. Mike received Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and Master’s in Communication Engineering from Shandong University, China and Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia. Before joining Monash as a faculty staff, Mike was a Postdoc Research Associate at the US-DOT Beyond Traffic Innovation Center and Lecturer (part-time) at Northeastern University, Team-leader of the MIT-Mass Transit Railway (MTR), Hong Kong program at MIT Transit Lab (https://transitlab.mit.edu/), and Research Affiliate with the MIT Urban Mobility Lab (https://mobility.mit.edu/). He also collaborated on various projects funded by world-leading agencies, Transport for London, and MBTA, the Transit Authority in Boston.

Mike’s contributions on urban data analytic and applications in transportation are published in prestigious transportation journals/conferences and patented by the National Intellectual Property Administration. The established models/methodologies/tools are industrialized in the fields of practitioners in urban railway systems, such as network state monitoring and prediction with opportunistic sensor data in MTR, Hong Kong. He serves as reviewer for Journals and Science Foundations, such as Nature-Scientific Data, Transportation Research Series, and Chile NSF. He is invited to contribute in writing research proposals to various agencies (US, Europe and China), such as US NSF Engineering Research Center (NEU), US National Transportation Board (MIT), Google (KTH, Sweden) and DiDi (Tsinghua University, China).

Mike’s general area of research is at the intersection of optimization, machine learning, and computer simulation. Under the umbrella of buzz words ‘big data’, ‘IoT’, and ‘sharing economy’, his research focuses on the inference (understand), prediction (inform) and optimization (design), through the integration of novel data sources, mostly from connected devices or infrastructures, into mathematical learning models. The applications include public transport (e.g. bus and urban railways) and shared mobility-on-demand services (e.g. Uber, Lyft, DiDi, micro-transit). The application topics cover service planning (e.g. network extension), operation control (e.g. probabilistic routing), behavioral modeling (e.g. habitual, information, disruption, and intervention), demand management (e.g. nudge behavior), and personalized travel (e.g. Chatbot).

Technology drives innovation, but smart and sustainability go beyond technology. Currently, Mike focuses on:

  • Revitalizing public transport through big data analytics – planning, monitoring, information, control and demand management;
  • Designing platform strategy and operation business models to engineering the sharing economy (in mobility) to attain predictable and socially desirable outcomes, and value creation for public and private sectors (NSF-ERC-SHARE, https://web.northeastern.edu/rcshare/).

The University of Queensland, School of Civil Engineering, Australia
Ph.D., Transportation, 2015
Dissertation: Reliability and Distribution of Travel Times in Transit

Shandong University, School of Information Science and Engineering, China
M.Sc., Communication Engineering, Information Fusion, 2012
B.Sc. with Honors, Electrical Engineering, System Control, 2009

MTR Industrial Application, MTR Corporation, 2017
Editorial Selected Paper, Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2016
Outstanding Reviewer, Transportation Research Part C, 2016
Graduate School International Travel Grant, The University of Queensland, 2015
ASTRA Chair Fellowship, Center for Transport Strategy, Australia, 2013/2014
PhD Program Fellowship, Ministry of Education of China, 2012-2016
Outstanding Graduate Award, Education Department, Shandong Province, China, 2012
Graduate Student Fellowship, Shandong University, 2011
National Endeavour Fellowship, Ministry of Education of China, 2007
Undergraduate Student Fellowship, Shandong University, 2006-2008

Funding Reviewer: Chile National Science Foundation (NSF)

Paper Reviewer: Nature-Scientific Data; Transportation Research Part C & Part E; IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems; Journal of Advanced Transportation; IET Intelligent Transport Systems; ASCE Transportation Engineering; MDPI Sensors; MDPI Sustainability; ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information; Transportation Research Boarding (TRB) Annual Meeting; IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Research Affiliate: Transit Lab at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Urban Mobility Lab at Department of Urban Study and Planning, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States

Member: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (Informs), Transportation Research Board (TRB)

CIV 5406: Modelling Transportation Systems (Travel Demand Modeling and Forecast)

CIV 5319: Quantitative Methods (Engineering Probability and Statistics)

To view full record of publications please visit GoogleScholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=p-pzfG4AAAAJ&hl=en