Simulating the Future of Traffic with RL with Cathy Wu

Today we're joined by Cathy Wu, Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. We had the pleasure of catching up with Cathy at NeurIPS to discuss her talk "Mixed Autonomy Traffic: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective." In our conversation, we discuss Cathy's transition to applying machine learning to civil engineering, specifically, understanding the potential impact autonomous vehicles would have on traffic once deployed. To better understand this, Cathy built multiple reinforcement learning simulations, including track and intersection scenarios. We talk through how each scenario is set up, how human drivers are modeled for this simulation and the results of the experiments.