Cathy Wu
Class of 1954 Career Development Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
I am interested in enabling faster, evidence-driven decisions for sociotechnical systems.
Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in EECS at UC Berkeley, and my B.S. and M.Eng. in EECS at MIT. I have also spent time at Microsoft Research, OpenAI, Waymo, Dropbox, Facebook, and startups.
Research Interests
My research advances data-driven algorithms for transportation systems modeling, control, and optimization. My approach is use-inspired: I gravitate to problems with societal stakes for which existing tools fall short, and I build methods that generalize beyond the original problem. This orientation led me to transportation, a domain vital to economic and social well-being yet far from meeting its sustainability, safety, and access goals. Data and computing are reshaping the field, primarily through monitoring and retrospective analysis.
Prospective counterfactual analysis instead estimates how proposed strategies would affect outcomes before deployment. Making such analysis scalable and trustworthy remains difficult, but it could complement costly field experiments and user studies. It could answer questions such as “What would adding bike lanes in Boston do to traffic and safety?” or “Which US cities should implement congestion pricing after NYC?” My work develops computational tools needed for such analysis.
My work most closely intersects with these communities:
Recent and Selected News
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July 2026
I’m excited to announce that we are organizing Special Issues with T-ITS and TR Part C to publish high-quality transportation benchmarks. Please express your evaluations and datasets needs through this Google Form.
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July 2026
I’m taking part in this year’s Climate Change AI Virtual Summer School with a lecture on AI in Transportation.
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June 2026
Ryan Hardesty Lewis is selected as a 2026-2027 MathWorks Engineering Fellow from the MIT School of Engineering.
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May 2026
I’m honored to keynote the 2026 Swiss Transport Research Conference, speaking on Tackling the Long Tail of Transportation Optimization Problems with Machine Learning.
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Feb 2026
Learning to Segment for Vehicle Routing Problems was selected for an Oral (1%) presentation at ICLR 2026!
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Apr 2025
I’m so excited to be awarded the 2025 Ole Madsen Mentoring Award from the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). Mentoring is a large part of what makes this job so rewarding.
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Apr 2025
I was honored to keynote MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) that welcomes the newly admitted undergraduate class to campus. I remember how fun my CPW was! I spoke about: What If We Could Design Societal-Scale Systems That Just Work?
See the Group page for lab members and alumni, or visit Prospective Members to get involved.
Selected Publications
View all publications →Representative recent papers from my research.
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FeaturedLearning to Segment for Vehicle Routing Problems
Also presented at: 12th Triennial Symposium on Transportation Analysis conference (TRISTAN XII) (33% acceptance) -
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FeaturedLearning-Guided Rolling Horizon Optimization for Long-Horizon Flexible Job Shop Scheduling
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025 MIT Home Page Feature (32% acceptance rate)Media:MIT News -
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FeaturedReproducibility in Transportation Research: A Hands-on Tutorial
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FeaturedNeural Neighborhood Search for Multi-agent Path Finding
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024 MIT Home Page Feature (31% acceptance rate)
Teaching
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Previously 6.7950/6.246.
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6.231 Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning Spring 2022
Outreach and Professional Education
These courses are intended for industry professionals and not MIT students.
Awards & Honors
- MIT CEE Ole Madsen Mentoring Award, 2025
- NSF CAREER Award, 2023 – 2028
- IEEE ITS Best Dissertation Award, First Place Award, 2019
- Microsoft Location Summit, First Place Award, Hall of Fame Inductee, 2019
- CUTC Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award, 2018
- UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, CS189 Machine Learning, 2018
- ACM Future of Computing Academy, Inaugural Class, 2017
- UC Berkeley ITS Outstanding Graduate Student Award, 2017
- IEEE Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2016
- Rising Stars Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), 2016
- Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship (DDETFP), Awardee, 2015
- National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Graduate Fellowship, Awardee, 2013
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship, Fellow, 2013 – 2018
- UC Berkeley Chancellor's Fellowship for Graduate Study, 2013 – 2017
Selected Professional Service
View all service →Highlighted entries indicate leadership roles or particularly impactful service contributions.
Leadership & Professional Society Service
- Chair of Steering Committee, RERITE Working Group, 2025-2028
- Board of Governors, IEEE ITSS, 2024-2026
- Technical Program Committee, NSF CPS PI Meeting, 2025
- Organizer, Session on AI for Transportation, NAE CAFOE, 2024
- Early Career Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) Member, TR-C, 2021– . . .
Editorial & Conference Service
- Guest Editor, Transportation Research: Part C (TR-C), Special Issue on Evaluations and Datasets, 2026- . . .
- Guest Editor, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS), Special Issue on Evaluations and Datasets, 2026- . . .
- Associate Editor, OPRE, 2026-2029
- Associate Editor, TR-C, 2025-2028
- Program Chair, RLC, 2025
- Associate Editor, ICRA, 2025
- Area Chair, NeurIPS, 2024
- Area Chair, ICML, 2024
- Program Committee, TRC-30, 2024
- Program Committee, L4DC, 2020
- Reviewer for TR-C, JMLR, T-ITS, Nature, Science Advances, NeurIPS, ICML, ICRA, ISTTT, ITSC, CoRL, CDC, etc.
Community Organization
- Competition Chair, League of Robot Runners (LoRR), 2022– . . .
- Organizer, ITSC Trajectory Data Camp 2026: Transforming Observations into Real-World Impact, 2026
- Organizer, ITSC Workshop on Reproducible Microscopic Traffic Modeling: Benchmarking and Evaluation-as-a- Service, 2026
- Organizer, AAMAS League of Robot Runners (LoRR) Competition, 2026
- Organizer, IV Workshop on Trustworthy and Open Science for Intelligent Vehicles: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Testbeds, 2026
- Organizer, NeurIPS Workshop on Differentiable Learning of Combinatorial Algorithms: From Theory To Practice, 2025
- Organizer, ITSC Reproducibility in Transportation Research: A Hands-on Tutorial 2.0 – Reproducible Manuscripts, 2025
- Organizer, RLC Workshop on Practical Insights into RL for Real Systems (RL4RS), 2025
- Organizer, CPS-IoT Week Workshop on Going Public with Your CPS Code and Data, 2025
- Organizer, ITSC Reproducibility in Transportation Research: A Hands-on Tutorial, 2024
- Organizer, RSS Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles Across Scales (AVAS), 2024
- Organizer, Automated Road Transportation Symposium (ARTS), Session on Environmental, Economic, and Social Impacts of AV Use, 2021
- Organizer, ITSC Tutorial on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Transportation, 2018
- Organizer, ITSC Workshop on Reinforcement Learning for Transportation, 2018