papers

Publications (27)

cs.CY2024

Shared lightweight autonomous vehicles for urban food deliveries: A simulation study

Ainhoa Genua Cerviño, Naroa Coretti Sanchez, Elaine Liu Wang +2

In recent years, the rapid growth of on-demand deliveries, especially in food deliveries, has spurred the exploration of innovative mobility solutions. In this context, lightweight…

cs.MA2022

Future urban mobility as a bio-inspired collaborative system of multi-functional autonomous vehicles

Naroa Coretti Sánchez, Juan Múgica González, Luis Alonso Pastor +1

The fast urbanization and climate change challenges require solutions that enable the efficient movement of people and goods in cities. We envision future cities to be composed of…

cs.CY2021

Simulation study on the fleet performance of shared autonomous bicycles

Naroa Coretti Sánchez, Iñigo Martinez, Luis Alonso Pastor +1

Rethinking cities is now more imperative than ever, as society faces global challenges such as population growth and climate change. The design of cities can not be abstracted from…

cs.HC2018

Finding Places: HCI Platform for Public Participation in Refugees Accommodation Process

Ariel Noyman, Tobias Holtz, Johannes Kroger +2

This paper describes the conception, development and deployment of a novel HCI system for public participation and decision making. This system was applied for the process of alloc…

cs.AI2025

HugAgent: Benchmarking LLMs for Simulation of Individualized Human Reasoning

Chance Jiajie Li, Zhenze Mo, Yuhan Tang +11

Simulating human reasoning in open-ended tasks has long been a central aspiration in AI and cognitive science. While large language models now approximate human responses at scale,…

cs.CR2020

Assessing Disease Exposure Risk with Location Data: A Proposal for Cryptographic Preservation of Privacy

Alex Berke, Michiel Bakker, Praneeth Vepakomma +2

Governments and researchers around the world are implementing digital contact tracing solutions to stem the spread of infectious disease, namely COVID-19. Many of these solutions t…

cs.AI2025

Perspective-Aware AI in Extended Reality

Daniel Platnick, Matti Gruener, Marjan Alirezaie +3

AI-enhanced Extended Reality (XR) aims to deliver adaptive, immersive experiences-yet current systems fall short due to shallow user modeling and limited cognitive context. We intr…

quant-ph2024

Fourier series weight in quantum machine learning

Parfait Atchade-Adelomou, Kent Larson

In this work, we aim to confirm the impact of the Fourier series on the quantum machine learning model. We will propose models, tests, and demonstrations to achieve this objective.…

cs.HC2019

CityScopeAR: Urban Design and Crowdsourced Engagement Platform

Ariel Noyman, Yasushi Sakai, Kent Larson

Processes of urban planning, urban design and architecture are inherently tangible, iterative and collaborative. Nevertheless, the majority of tools in these fields offer virtual e…

cs.ET2025

Understanding Demand for Shared Autonomous Micro-Mobility

Naroa Coretti Sanchez, Kent Larson

This study examines the behavioral and environmental implications of shared autonomous micro-mobility systems, focusing on autonomous bicycles and their integration with transit in…

cs.RO2019

Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management

Antonio Luca Alfeo, Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, Yago Lizarribar Carrillo +9

Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has b…

cs.AI2026

When Does Delegation Beat Majority? A Delegation-Based Aggregator for Multi-Sample LLM Inference

Yasushi Sakai, Allen Song, Kent Larson

Majority voting is the default unsupervised aggregator for multi-sample LLM inference, but it discards two signals: within-group answer entropy and between-group reasoning geometry…

cs.CY2024

Insights from an experiment crowdsourcing data from thousands of US Amazon users: The importance of transparency, money, and data use

Alex Berke, Robert Mahari, Sandy Pentland +2

Data generated by users on digital platforms are a crucial resource for advocates and researchers interested in uncovering digital inequities, auditing algorithms, and understandin…

cs.LG2024

TransFlower: An Explainable Transformer-Based Model with Flow-to-Flow Attention for Commuting Flow Prediction

Yan Luo, Zhuoyue Wan, Yuzhong Chen +3

Understanding the link between urban planning and commuting flows is crucial for guiding urban development and policymaking. This research, bridging computer science and urban stud…

cs.CY2019

The tradeoff between the utility and risk of location data and implications for public good

Dana Calacci, Alex Berke, Kent Larson +2

High-resolution individual geolocation data passively collected from mobile phones is increasingly sold in private markets and shared with researchers. This data poses significant…

cs.CY2025

Measuring risks inherent to our digital economies using Amazon purchase histories from US consumers

Alex Berke, Kent Larson, Sandy Pentland +1

What do pickles and trampolines have in common? In this paper we show that while purchases for these products may seem innocuous, they risk revealing clues about customers' persona…

cs.MA2020

Urban Mobility Swarms: A Scalable Implementation

Alex Berke, Jason Nawyn, Thomas Sanchez Lengeling +1

We present a system to coordinate 'urban mobility swarms' in order to promote the use and safety of lightweight, sustainable transit, while enhancing the vibrancy and community fab…

cs.CY2025

Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought

Chance Jiajie Li, Jiayi Wu, Zhenze Mo +10

Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior; it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revi…

cs.AI2025

Graph RAG as Human Choice Model: Building a Data-Driven Mobility Agent with Preference Chain

Kai Hu, Parfait Atchade-Adelomou, Carlo Adornetto +5

Understanding human behavior in urban environments is a crucial field within city sciences. However, collecting accurate behavioral data, particularly in newly developed areas, pos…

cs.MA2021

Dynamic Urban Planning: an Agent-Based Model Coupling Mobility Mode and Housing Choice. Use case Kendall Square

Mireia Yurrita, Arnaud Grignard, Luis Alonso +4

As cities become increasingly populated, urban planning plays a key role in ensuring the equitable and inclusive development of metropolitan areas. MIT City Science group created a…

cs.CR2024

zkTax: A pragmatic way to support zero-knowledge tax disclosures

Alex Berke, Tobin South, Robert Mahari +2

Tax returns contain key financial information of interest to third parties: public officials are asked to share financial data for transparency, companies seek to assess the financ…

cs.RO2026

Do Robots Need Body Language? Comparing Communication Modalities for Legible Motion Intent in Human-Shared Spaces

Jonathan Albert Cohen, Kye Shimizu, Allen Song +3

Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as exp…

econ.GN2022

Can autonomy make bicycle-sharing systems more sustainable? Environmental impact analysis of an emerging mobility technology

Naroa Coretti Sanchez, Luis Alonso Pastor, Kent Larson

Autonomous bicycles have recently been proposed as a new and more efficient approach to bicycle-sharing systems (BSS), but the corresponding environmental implications remain unres…

cs.LG2022

Generating synthetic mobility data for a realistic population with RNNs to improve utility and privacy

Alex Berke, Ronan Doorley, Kent Larson +1

Location data collected from mobile devices represent mobility behaviors at individual and societal levels. These data have important applications ranging from transportation plann…

cs.SI2025

Propagational Proxy Voting

Yasushi Sakai, Parfait Atchade-Adelomou, Ryan Jiang +3

This paper proposes a voting process in which voters allocate fractional votes to their expected utility in different domains: over proposals, other participants, and sets containi…

cs.CY2025

Evaluating Amazon Effects and the Limited Impact of COVID-19 With Purchases Crowdsourced from US Consumers

Alex Berke, Dana Calacci, Alex +2

We leverage a recently published dataset of Amazon purchase histories, crowdsourced from thousands of US consumers, to study how online purchasing behaviors have changed over time,…

cs.AI2024

TravelAgent: Generative Agents in the Built Environment

Ariel Noyman, Kai Hu, Kent Larson

Understanding human behavior in built environments is critical for designing functional, user centered urban spaces. Traditional approaches, such as manual observations, surveys, a…