Wen Dong focuses on modeling human interaction dynamics with stochastic process theory through combining the power of “big data” and the logic/reasoning power of state-of-the-art agent-based models, to solve our societies most challenging problems such as transportation sustainability and efficiency. His approach is to drive “simulation games” (alike SimCity) with petabyte-sized “data exhaust trails” of networked people to study our social systems and make decisions through playing the data-driven simulation games on super-computers (which solve the stochastic differential equations that describe the agent behavior). He has applied this approach to social systems of different sizes, ranging from the movement of millions of vehicle locations sampled every minute for years, the co-evolution of social network and individual behavior of different communities tracked by personal mobile phones and surveys, and Bales’ interaction process analysis of several individuals solving problems tracked by socio-metric badges. The applications have won both industrial and academic awards.

Computer Networks and Distributed Systems Computer Vision and Information Visualization Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, and Data Mining