Leonel Aguilar awarded as an innovator under 35
How do you evacuate a large city like Tokyo in the event of a natural disaster? For his interdisciplinary research on this topic, Leonel Aguilar (D-GESS, D-INFK), a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, has won a prize for "Innovators under 35 in Latin America".
Both in Guatemala and in Japan, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wind and sea storms or tsunamis occur time and again. Faced with this constant challenge from natural disasters, Guatemalan engineering and cognitive scientist Leonel Aguilar developed a software during a stay at the University of Tokyo that can simulate how large crowds of people behave in emergency situations.
This software is able to simulate the behaviour of 10 million evacuees and various modes of transport in a 625 km2 area of Tokyo with an accuracy of one meter. Accordingly, this software can help to improve evacuation and disaster control measures in critical situations and to solve urban traffic problems. MIT Technology Review has now named him an "Innovator under 35 Latin America 2019" for his development.
Leonel Aguilar works as a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in Christoph Hoelscher's Cognitive Science Group (COG) and with Ce Zhang from the DS3 laboratory of the Institute for Computing Platforms at ETH Zurich. In order to accurately reproduce the behaviour of millions of people over hundreds of square kilometres, Leonel Aguilar combines cognitive science methods related to human behaviour and decision-making with methods of supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI).
He studied transportation science and civil engineering and then deepened his research expertise in supercomputing and machine learning in Japan and Switzerland. His main interest lies in the modelling and simulation of human mobility in large cities. His goal is to use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help solve the mobility problems of today's and future cities.