Spending a few hours outdoors
In 2017, Francesco Corman joined ETH Zurich as Tenure Track Assistant Professor. Six years later he has been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Transportation Systems at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. Get to know him in this short interview.
Professor Corman, congratulations on receiving tenure at ETH Zurich! What are your research interests?
Thanks! My research interests are in transport systems: the integrated perspective of everything that allows us to move. Within that, I focus on public transport systems. In Switzerland, the public support for public transport is particularly good, but we need to better consider the complementarity with private traffic, and especially how the public transport interacts with active modes like walking and cycling, if we want to make our environments more livable.
We also still have a lot of things to do to improve the flexibility and performance of public transport systems. Certain things are designed many years in advance and can hardly be changed (like vehicles, infrastructure); some other things vary all the time. In this combination, it can be challenging to find good answers on when to use what resources to address the mobility needs of people. To this end, we use a broad range of techniques including operation research and artificial intelligence. In addition, we also connect to research groups in Mathematics, Computer Science, and the AI Center.
What is the impact of your research on society?
Do you live on Hönggerberg? Most likely, no. So, probably, you took some choices on how to travel to campus, and you might have been either happy or not about the possible choices you had. Making people choose collective mobility has a lot to do with the quality of what is proposed, and its social acceptance has to do with costs. The balance between those factors has to connect with real-life phenomena and good utilization of limited resources.
For instance, people complain about delays; this is not a random variation but has a lot of regular characteristics (think about peak hour), and a lot of irregular characteristics which can be relatively well described (think about the average time spent at a traffic light). Then there are phenomena which are unplanned and random but can be assessed fairly precisely in advance (weather, special events, incidents somewhere in the network). Traffic operators actually keep controlling and changing the system under our feet; we rarely notice it. Finally, there are also a lot of factors that are truly uncontrollable.
In reality, we only see the sum of all those effects, and as citizens, we ignore most of them. As researchers, we need to quantify them, trace them back to their origin, and where possible, identify an improvement for them.
What was your first contact with transport systems?
It was actually somehow sideways. As a master’s student, I was looking for ways to apply computer science and optimization theory. A possibility popped up for a master’s thesis abroad on railway traffic, and from there it all started.
Where were you working before you came to ETH?
In the Benelux region, with my last post as an analytics consultant at IBM. It was a very good injection of real life, compared to the academic bubble we seem to be in most of the time. It also connected to a lot of real-life practicalities that the clean beautiful models of academia mostly tend to ignore.
Which courses are you teaching at ETH?
I focus on the courses on public transport at the bachelor and master levels; and a course on logistics which we are redesigning this semester. Then, there is a series of transport courses, shared with road transport systems and transport planning groups. Finally, I support other courses, including the course on active mobility, which describes pedestrians and cycling. There are so many interconnected aspects to take care of!
What do you do if you have a few minutes to spare?
Reorganizing my to-do list, probably. These last months, it looks always too long! If I would have a few free hours of worktime, probably I would be happy to still do data analysis and testing of a lot of ideas in the back of my mind. I have been shifting the balance between my individual research and the management of a research group. But if I would have some hours to myself, I would spend them outside! There are so many nice things to see big and small, close and far from our daily routines. Keeping the enthusiasm and surprise to see beautiful things in the common life is probably what gives me the most energy. Already walking in the woods close to the campus one can find amazing things. And actually, a good thing about doing an academic job is that I need to read a lot, and this can be productively done also while traveling!
What advice would you give to students who are just starting out in civil engineering?
I would advise them to find their balance between studying domain-specialist courses, and study methods that will be useful to differentiate themselves. I am quite certain that they will become very competent specialists in their field of expertise. I can only add, to not forget to look at things from far away when possible. I see many times people doing consistently good steps, which end up in a direction they actually do not want. In research, we are often stuck solving the wrong problem perfectly. It takes quite some training and energy to critically understand why we are doing things, and what we should actually do!
To the Chair of Transportation Systems led by Professor Francesco Corman