Live at #INFORMS2023: Advanced Air Mobility … not just for The Jetsons!

Published: December 1, 2023

Welcome to the latest episode in a special series of the Resoundingly Human podcast, recorded in person at the 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix. For this episode I am joined by Hamsa Balakrishnan with MIT. Hamsa is delivering the keynote session, “Advanced Air Mobility: Are We There Yet?” and she is joining me today to explore this topic.

There is actually an interesting problem here on where there is likely to be a lot of demand and that would likely be cities, so people refer to that as Urban Air Mobility where it’s going to be in a city environment where lots of people might want to use it but it’s also where the problem tends to be the hardest. Where I think it’s more likely to provide the most benefit is going to be in places where there are typically long distances. You don’t have the same challenges of doing this in an urban environment, but really there is a need for having increased mobility in those places.

Interviewed this episode:

Hamsa Balakrishnan

MIT

Hamsa Balakrishnan is the William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is also affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. She was previously the Associate Department Head of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research is in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation. She is the co-founder and chief scientist of Lumo, a Boston-based travel startup.

Prof. Balakrishnan is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2008, the inaugural CNA Award for Operational Analysis in 2012, the AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award in 2012, the American Automatic Control Council’s Donald P. Eckman Award in 2014, the MIT AIAA Undergrad Advising (2014) and Undergraduate Teaching (2019) Awards, and multiple best paper awards.