Cathy Wu

Please share with anyone who might be a great fit!

Join us in our mission to use 𝗔𝗜/𝗠𝗟 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗹𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 and to enable 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲-𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹-𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀.

🗓️ Applications are reviewed 𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗶𝘀, starting immediately.
🔗 Details + how to apply: cathywu.github.io/prospective

📣 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝘆 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽!

I’m looking to hire 𝟭–𝟮 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰𝘀 to work with us across the group’s research areas, including:
🤖 Deep reinforcement learning
🚦 Traffic modeling & control
🧠 Neural combinatorial optimization

Tesla's Roadmap to Nowhere I'll give him this: Elon Musk has a solid grasp of futurity-as-PR.

I'm gearing up for next week's Hype Studies conference in Barcelona, so I'm thinking about this stuff a lot. @davekarpf.bsky.social makes some great points here, but there's a 'Yes and...'

Yeah, same deal with navigating a city thanks to google maps

I think it goes beyond cost. There’s also talent and the know-how to adapt & implement the tech. For example, I don’t think the public sector has caught up on the last bunch of waves of tech yet, despite it getting commoditized. In general, I think it’s the rich getting richer phenomenon.

I've been struggling with this since realizing that the rich and powerful get first dibs on new tech. The only way I've been able to resolve the issue for myself is to deliberately work on applications for the public interest.

do you mean cost-benefit of research that's already done?

We should be asking ourselves more what research should be done vs what research can be done

Inviting #orms @thserra.bsky.social @vanhentenryck.bsky.social @vidalthi.bsky.social @bistradilkina.bsky.social @akazachk.bsky.social @lawlessopt.bsky.social @annanagurney.bsky.social

DiffCoALG@NeurIPS 2025 About this Workshop Combinatorial algorithms are fundamental across a wide range of domains, owing to their ability to model optimization and decision-making tasks under complex constraints. These alg...

🔥 New workshop at @neuripsconf.bsky.social!
DiffCoALG bridges the gap between classic algorithms & differentiable learning.
Think: LLM reasoning, routing, SAT, MIP — neurally optimized.
📌 Submit by Aug 22! 🤖🧠
🔗 sites.google.com/view/diffcoa...
#NeurIPS2025

This work would not have been possible without lead author @vindulaj.bsky.social and collaborators Baptiste Freydt, Ao Qu, Cameron Hickert, Edgar Sanchez, Catherine Tang, Mark Taylor, Blaine Leonard, as well as the financial support of UDOT, NSF, and Amazon AWS, and support from MIT SuperCloud.

Website: vindulamj.github.io/eco-drive/
Published paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2408.05609

Eco-driving measures could significantly reduce vehicle emissions Implementing co-driving techniques, like the use of intelligent speed controls to mitigate congestion at traffic lights, can significantly reduce intersection carbon dioxide emissions without impactin...

MIT News article: news.mit.edu/2025/eco-dri...

This project was 4 years in the making and it's finally out!

We found that controlling vehicle speeds to mitigate traffic across a city can cut carbon emissions between 11 and 22 percent. To do this, we used deep reinforcement learning to optimize one million eco-driving scenarios. 🚗🤖🧠

Eco-driving measures could significantly reduce vehicle emissions Implementing co-driving techniques, like the use of intelligent speed controls to mitigate congestion at traffic lights, can significantly reduce intersection carbon dioxide emissions without…

A new study led by Prof. Cathy Wu and colleagues reveals that eco-driving measures, such as dynamically adjusting vehicle speeds to reduce stopping and excessive acceleration, can cut carbon emissions between 11 and 22 percent. news.mit.edu/2025/eco-dri...

We’ve got an awesome workshop tomorrow at RLC on real-world RL! Also, I’m moderating the panel, so let me know if you have questions about applying RL. 🤖🧠🤖

Propose some socials for RLC! Research topics, affinity groups, niche interests, whatever comes to mind!

rl-conference.cc/call_for_soc...

Trying to make Ai2 so effective that people start seriously referring to us as "American DeepSeek" 🙏 lots of hard work to do.

Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic drivi...

Hiring a postdoc to scale up and deploy RL-based planning onto some self-driving cars! We'll be building on arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349 and learn what the limits and challenges of RL planning are. Shoot me a message if interested and help spread the word please!

Full posting to come in a bit.

I’ll consider it! Been meaning to start a blog and maybe this is just the push I needed!

This is soooooo fun and so blazingly fast.

Are there any documented cases of meta-science or scientific meta-research? Does that have a name? Research is an activity, a process to obtain knowledge, which has been greatly empowered by the scientific method. We can collect lots of information about research, consider impact factors, etc.

That is, what constitutes good ways to perform science is necessarily philosophical or based on beliefs.

Quote from academia.stackexchange.com/a/17275

I found this insightful and wonder what you think:

“If the objective of meta-science is to determine what are the good ways to perform science, it immediately runs into a major methodological hurdle: it is necessarily going to beg the question.”

Feeling like a fish learning about water. Insightful thread

#metasci or should I say meta metascience

I’m incredibly happy to have found metascience bluesky. Science is messy and beautiful, and there is a group of people thinking hard about how and why.

I’m pretty shocked. I was just appointed to a serve on a standing committee in April. TRB has definitely helped me find my footing in the field.

Organizations and conferences that have the potential to partially fill the void left by TRB (a thread):

I would be remiss not to mention RERITE (www.rerite.org) - which was in the process of integrating into the TRB committee structure