Gregory J. Barlow

Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

About

I am currently the CTO of Rapid Flow Technologies, a company we formed in 2015 to commercialize the Surtrac technology we have been developing at Carnegie Mellon University. Rapid Flow builds intelligent transportation technologies for smart cities.

I am still a part-time project scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I work with Stephen Smith in the Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory.

My current research is on real-time adaptive traffic signal control for urban road networks. We have developed a system called Surtrac (Scalable Urban Traffic Control), which we've been deploying in Pittsburgh since 2012. So far, we've deployed Surtrac at 50 intersections in the city.

I received my Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon in 2011. My dissertation focused on improving memory for optimization and learning algorithms on problems with dynamic environments. I developed two novel classes of explicit memory to exploit information from previous solutions as a problem changes.

My general research interests are in the application of optimization, learning, and search to real-world problems, particularly problems with dynamic or uncertain environments. One of my other research interests is evolutionary robotics, the design of robot controllers using evolutionary computation.

Education

Recent publications

  • Stephen F. Smith, Gregory J. Barlow, Xiao-Feng Xie, and Zachary B. Rubinstein. "SURTRAC: Scalable Urban Traffic Control." Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. Washington, DC. January 2013. (bib)
  • Xiao-Feng Xie, Stephen F. Smith, Liang Lu, and Gregory J. Barlow. "Schedule-driven intersection control." Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. Volume 24, pages 168-189. October 2012. (abstract, bib, pdf)
  • Xiao-Feng Xie, Stephen F. Smith, and Gregory J. Barlow. "Schedule-driven coordination for real-time traffic network control." International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Sao Paulo, Brazil. June 2012. (bib, pdf)
  • Xiao-Feng Xie, Stephen F. Smith, and Gregory J. Barlow. "Coordinated look-ahead scheduling for real-time traffic signal control." International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). Valencia, Spain. June 2012. (bib)
  • Xiao-Feng Xie, Gregory J. Barlow, Stephen F. Smith, and Zachary B. Rubinstein. "Self-Scheduling Agents for Real-Time Traffic Signal Control." IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Washington, DC. October 2011. (bib)