Arthur Delarue

About me

I am a third-year PhD student at the MIT Operations Research Center, advised by Professor Dimitris Bertsimas. I am interested in new applications of mixed-integer optimization, with a focus on transportation and statistics/machine learning. Some of my transportation projects include:

Designing a new optimization-based approach to reconstruct travel time patterns in an urban network from taxi origin-destination data.

Developing mixed-integer methods for routing school buses and optimizing school bell times. Our team won first place and a $30K prize in the Boston Public Schools Transportation Challenge in June 2017. You can read about the project in our SIAM News blog post or visualize BPS school buses in action . In January 2019, our project was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Franz Edelman Award.

I have had the pleasure of collaborating with Sebastien Martin on both of these projects.

Publications

Optimizing Schools' Start Time and Bus Routes (with D. Bertsimas and S. Martin).
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2019.
Winner, MIT ORC Best Student Paper Award, 2018.
Second Place, INFORMS Doing Good With Good OR Student Paper Competition, 2018.

Travel Time Estimation in the Age of Big Data (with D. Bertsimas, P. Jaillet and S. Martin).
Operations Research, published online in Articles in Advance 18 Mar 2019.

Talks

MIT LIDS Student Conference, Cambridge, 2019. Driving Policy with Optimization.
Second Place, Best Student Presentation.

INFORMS Annual Meeting, Phoenix, 2018. Finding Equitable Start Times for Boston Public Schools.

MIT ORC Fall Seminar Series, Cambridge, 2018. Driving Policy with Optimization.

ISMP, Bordeaux, France, 2018. Travel Time Estimation in the Age of Big Data.

MIT ORC Special Seminar on Operations Research for Social Good, Cambridge, 2018. 8 Months on a School Bus: Analytics for Public Policy.

INFORMS Annual Meeting, Houston, 2017. Travel Time Estimation in the Age of Big Data.

Teaching

15.S60: Computing for Optimization and Statistics (graduate seminar)
Jan 2019: Co-organizer (with Brad Sturt and Phil Chodrow) and Instructor (distributed computing)
Jan 2018: Instructor (Julia and JuMP)

15.S41: Software Tools for Business Analytics (undergraduate seminar)
Jan 2018: Instructor (Optimization in Julia)

15.071: The Analytics Edge (MBA elective)
Spring 2019: Guest Lecturer (Faculty: Robert Freund, Amr Farahat and Carine Simon)
Spring 2018: Teaching Assistant for Robert Freund

15.071C: The Advanced Analytics Edge (PhD/MS elective)
Spring 2018: Guest Lecturer (Faculty: Dimitris Bertsimas)

Press

My work with Boston Public Schools has received coverage from several sources, including

The Wall Street Journal: How Do You Solve A School Bus Problem? Call MIT.

WBUR (NPR Boston): 2 MIT Engineers Use Math To Plot A Path For Boston's School Buses.

The Boston Globe: In A Bid to Save $5m, City Will Slice Bus Routes,
Boston School Bus Performance Improves Dramatically,
Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer.

WIRED: What the Boston school bus schedule can teach us about AI

We also presented our work for the Rhode Island Special Legislative Commission on School Start Times.

In January 2019, the project was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Franz Edelman Award. The INFORMS press release is available here.

Miscellaneous

My project Shared Responsibility: Social Forces in Response to Market Failures (with Will Eger, Sebastien Martin, and Spencer Wyant) won first place in the Future of Work track at the 2018 MIT Policy Hackathon .