Smart Transport Group

Lijun Sun

Ph.D. / Director / Assistant Professor



Lijun Sun is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at McGill University. He received his PhD degree in Civil Engineering (Transportation) from National University of Singapore, and earned a Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering from Tsinghua University. During his PhD, he worked at Mobility and Transport Planning module at the Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH center. Prior to joining McGill, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab.

Research Interests

  • Urban computing & smart cities
  • Machine learning for mobility modeling
  • Intelligent transportation systems
  • Spatio-temporal traffic state modeling/predication
  • Infrastructure resilience
  • Data-driven urban/transportation systems modeling
  • Human mobility and travel behavior
  • Agent-based modeling and simulation
  • Public transportation operation & planning

Selected Publications

  • Wang J, Sun L (2020) Dynamic holding control to avoid bus bunching: A multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 116: 102661. (doi:10.1016/j.trc.2020.102661)
  • Liu L, Sun L, Chen Y, Ma X (2019) Optimizing fleet size and scheduling of feeder transit services considering the influence of bike-sharing systems. Journal of Cleaner Production 236: 117550. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.07.025)
  • Wang J, Kong X, Xia F, Sun L (2019) Urban human mobility: data-driven modeling and prediction. ACM SIGKDD Explorations 21(1): 1-19. (doi:10.1145/3331651.3331653)
  • Gao J, Sun L, Cai M (2019) Quantifying privacy vulnerability of individual mobility traces: A case study of license plate recognition data. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 104:78-94. (doi:10.1016/j.trc.2019.04.022)
  • Zhang M, Zhou X, Zhang Y, Sun L, Dun M, Du W, Cao X (2019) Propagation index on airport delays. Transportation Research Record 2673(8): 536-543. (doi:10.1177/0361198119844240)
  • Chen X, He Z, Sun L (2019) A Bayesian tensor decomposition approach for spatiotemporal traffic data imputation. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 98:73-84. (doi:10.1016/j.trc.2018.11.003)
  • Alabdulkareem A, Frank MR, Sun L, AlShebli B, Hidalgo C, Rahwan I (2018) Unpacking the polarization of workplace skills. Science Advances 4(7):eaao6030. (doi:10.1126/sciadv.aao6030)
  • Sun L, Erath A, Cai M (2018) A hierarchical mixture modeling framework for population synthesis. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 114:199-212. (doi:10.1016/j.trb.2018.06.002) [Code]