CV
Civil engineering researcher in transportation science and urban mobility.
Basics
| Name | Watcharapong Wongkaew |
| Label | Civil Engineering Researcher · Transportation & Urban Mobility |
| w.wongkaew@csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp | |
| Phone | (+66) 85-333-8822 |
| Url | https://wattwong103.github.io/ |
| Summary | Master's student in the Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Tokyo, working on the Generative Urban Foundation Model in Sekimoto Lab (IIS, CSIS), which generates realistic human-mobility trajectories across cities worldwide from real data. Three years of research experience spanning transportation science, travel behavior, geography, and artificial intelligence. |
Work
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2024.04 - 2025.04 Bangkok, Thailand
Researcher
Academic Division, Pheu Thai Party
Data-driven transportation policy design for national and metropolitan government.
- Analyzed the 2022 Household Travel Survey (Ministry of Transport) to generate insights and design public-transport policy
- Congestion-charge policy planning for the Bangkok Metropolitan Area
- Planned bus routes and mode-shift incentives in Lat Krabang, Bangkok
- Built data and policy infrastructure using government datasets
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2023.07 - 2024.10 Bangkok, Thailand
Researcher
ARIISE Research Unit, Chulalongkorn University
Advanced Railway Infrastructure, Innovation and Systems Engineering — Transportation Behavior Research Group.
- Analyzed railway track geometry and buckling modes from FEM data and visualized results
- Researched sustainable transportation, railway-infrastructure resilience, and climate-change adaptation
- Led an independent project on public-transport cost and navigation in Thailand (2024)
- Modeled travel time and delay on national highways using Highway Traffic Operation Center data (2023–2024)
- Studied land-use-induced demand on public transportation in Bangkok (2024)
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2022.05 - 2022.08 Tokyo, Japan (Online)
Operations Intern
Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation
Urban-railway operations modeling for crew and train scheduling.
- Modeled urban railway crew/train scheduling against real-world cases, reaching ~80% accuracy on the BTS Yellow Line monorail and Gold Line APM
- Produced operation plans and operation curves for planned railway projects
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2021.07 - 2025.10 Bangkok, Thailand
Research Associate
Chulalongkorn University Transportation Institute (CUTI)
Transportation policy, planning, and survey research across national agencies and international partners.
- Analyzed motorcycle self-reported accident surveys (Chulalongkorn University, 2022)
- Coordinated congestion-charge workshops for the Thailand Clean Mobility Program (GIZ, 2022)
- Logistics- and railway-focused policy research for the Strategic Agenda Team, Thailand Science Research and Innovation (TSRI, 2022–2024)
- Surveyed and analyzed Don Mueang airport access/egress data (Airports of Thailand, 2023)
- Climate-sensitive transport planning in Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen with the GIZ UrbanAct Project (2023)
- Motor-tricycle (Tuk-tuk) safety study for the Department of Land Transport (2023–2024)
- Garbage-collection logistics analysis for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (2023)
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2020.07 - 2026.04 Nakhon Pathom, Thailand
Lecturer / Faculty Advisor
Mahidol Wittayanusorn School
Geography Olympiad instruction and Social Science department support.
- Created the syllabus and curriculum for the National Geography Olympiad
- Supported the Social Science department with classwork, exam reading, and fieldwork
- Trained students in Geography Fieldwork and Human Geography
Volunteer
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2021.04 - 2022.07 Bangkok, Thailand
PR Lead & Camp Organizer
Anurak CU Environmental Conservation Club
Organized environmental-conservation camps and public-relations activities for the university club.
- Organized the club's conservation camp
- Co-organized PR events for the club
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Chumphon, Thailand
Academic Tutor (Volunteer)
Police Border Patrol School, Chumphon
Volunteer academic tutor for students at a remote border-patrol school.
Education
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2025.10 - 2027.10 Tokyo, Japan
M. Eng. (expected Oct 2027)
The University of Tokyo
Civil Engineering — Geospatial Engineering
- Center for Spatial Information Science (CSIS), Department of Civil Engineering
- Pseudo-PFLOW: synthetic mobility simulation for nationwide transportation analysis
- Authored technical documentation for the truck and taxi ABMs (calibration, data provenance, cross-verification)
- Investigator on the Generative Urban Foundation Model in Sekimoto Lab (IIS, CSIS)
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2019.08 - 2023.06 Bangkok, Thailand
B. Eng. (First-Class Honors)
Chulalongkorn University
Civil Engineering — Transportation Engineering
- Graduated with first-class honors
- Research apprenticeship at the Chulalongkorn University Transportation Institute (2021–2023)
- University Fund recipient: AI On-demand Transportation research
- Engineering Student Committee (2020–2021)
- Head of the RTUS Ideathon Bangkok transportation team (EU-led youth urban-development incubation)
- Dissertation: contemporary time-specific 4-step transportation modeling of public transit in Nakhon Ratchasima
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2016.05 - 2019.03 Salaya, Nakhon Pathom
High School Diploma (Grade 12)
Mahidol Wittayanusorn School
STEM Concentration
- Applied GIS to evaluate and survey flood-risk areas in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand
- Bronze medalist, International Geography Olympiad
Awards
- 2023.10
- 2018
Bronze Medal, International Geography Olympiad
International Geographical Union
Awarded for performance in the international round of the Geography Olympiad.
- 2021
Finalist, Thailand Innovation Awards 2021
National Innovation Agency (NIA), Thailand
On-demand ride application for urban areas.
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Honorable Mention, GPSC Greenovation Startup Sandbox
Global Power Synergy (GPSC)
Concept for hydrogen-powered buses.
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Honorable Mention, AWS Build on ASEAN
Amazon Web Services
Tracking low-CO2 emissions from delivery users.
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Honorable Mention, German Embassy EV Hackathon
Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany
Solving urban superblock problems.
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Honorable Mention, Last Mile Hackathon
EIT Urban Mobility
First- and last-mile connectivity in Bangkok.
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Honorable Mention & Popular Vote, Falling Walls Lab
Falling Walls Foundation
On-demand transportation pitch.
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Third Place, Environhack
Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, Thailand
Motorcycle EV conversion concept.
- 2021.07
Research Apprenticeship
Chulalongkorn University Transportation Institute
Awarded a research apprenticeship at CUTI (2021–2023).
Certificates
| Management of Urban Infrastructures | ||
| École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) | 2024 |
| Qualitative Research Methods | ||
| University of Amsterdam | 2024 |
| Human Mobility in Future Cities Specialization | ||
| University of Amsterdam & EIT Urban Mobility | 2024 |
| Bayesian Statistics Specialization (Inference, Time Series, Hierarchical Models) | ||
| University of California, Santa Cruz | 2024 |
| Causal Inference | ||
| Columbia University | 2024 |
| Mathematics for Machine Learning | ||
| Imperial College London | 2024 |
| Neural Networks and Deep Learning | ||
| DeepLearning.AI | 2024 |
| Introducing Cellular Automata | ||
| Coursera | 2023 |
| Sustainable Neighborhoods | ||
| Johns Hopkins University | 2023 |
| Sustainable Regional Principles, Planning and Transportation | ||
| Johns Hopkins University | 2023 |
| Transportation, Sustainable Buildings, Green Construction | ||
| Johns Hopkins University | 2023 |
| Sustainable Transportation Networks and Streetscapes | ||
| Johns Hopkins University | 2023 |
| The Data Scientist's Toolbox | ||
| Johns Hopkins University | 2023 |
| Technology and Innovative Entrepreneurship | ||
| Stanford University | 2023 |
| Geographical Information Systems | ||
| École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) | 2023 |
Publications
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2026 Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Land Use and Ridership: A Geographically Weighted Regression Analysis of Bangkok's MRT Blue Line
Public Transport (special issue) — 16th Int. Conference on Advanced Systems in Public Transport (CASPT 2025)
Geographically weighted regression linking land use and MRT Blue Line ridership across space and time.
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2024.04.14 Data-driven machine learning prognostics of buckling failure modes in ballasted railway track
Discover Applied Sciences 6, 212
Machine-learning approach to predict snap-through and progressive buckling failure modes in ballasted railway track, including a tropical-climate case study in Thailand.
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2024 Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Land Use and Ridership (MRT Blue Line)
3rd International Workshop on Geographic Modelling and Simulation (IWGMS 2024) — abstract
Workshop abstract on the GWR analysis of land use and ridership for Bangkok's MRT Blue Line.
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2024 Integrating Digital Surface Model for Flood Risk Assessment of Railway Networks in Thailand
International Conference of Rail Transportation (ICRT 2024) — proceedings
Uses digital surface models to assess flood risk to Thailand's railway networks.
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2023 Risk Assessment of Railway Tracks in Floodplain Areas using Digital Surface Model
International Conference on Civil and Building Engineering Informatics (ICCBEI 2023) — proceedings
Digital-surface-model-based flood-risk assessment for railway tracks in floodplain areas.
Skills
| Transportation Engineering | |
| Four-step sequential modeling | |
| Modal split modeling | |
| Discrete choice modeling | |
| Travel behavior survey & analysis | |
| Data collection |
| Transportation & Urban Planning | |
| Urban planning | |
| Policy planning | |
| Equity analysis | |
| Public transportation planning |
| Railway Engineering | |
| Railway defect detection | |
| Infrastructure management & life-cycle design |
| Data, Statistics & Machine Learning | |
| Forecasting & time-series analysis | |
| Statistical modeling & simulation | |
| Traditional statistical modeling | |
| Deep learning & neural networks |
| Programming | |
| Python | |
| R |
| Geography & Project Management | |
| Qualitative fieldwork | |
| Human geography | |
| Geographic Information Systems (GIS) | |
| Stakeholder engagement | |
| Project planning & coordination |
Languages
| Thai | |
| Native speaker |
| English | |
| Fluent |
| Japanese | |
| Conversational |
| German | |
| Conversational |
Interests
| Research Interests | |
| Transportation Science | |
| Travel Behavior | |
| Geography | |
| Urban Big Data | |
| Transport Spatial Planning | |
| Artificial Intelligence |
| Current Research Threads | |
| Predicting travel-behavior change after urban-development projects with ML | |
| Real-time transit information & individual mode choice | |
| Land-use diversity & neighborhood travel behavior |
References
| Asst. Prof. Dr. Pongsun Bunditsakulchai | |
| Research supervisor for the time-specific 4-step sequential travel-behavior model in Nakhon Ratchasima. Contact and additional articles available upon request. |
| Prof. Saksith Chalermpong | |
| Advised work on the Bangkok travel-demand survey, including machine-learning approaches to mode-choice prediction. |
Projects
- 2025.10 - Present
Generative Urban Foundation Model
Sekimoto Lab (IIS, CSIS), The University of Tokyo — generating realistic human-mobility trajectories across global cities from real data with a decoder-only transformer; exploring world models and diffusion methods.
- Foundation models
- Human mobility
- Decoder-only transformer
- Diffusion methods
- 2024.10 - Present
Pseudo-PFLOW: Synthetic Mobility Simulation
Nationwide agent-based simulation of business vehicles generating 4.5M daily trips for 1.5M+ truck and taxi agents across 106 zones, with calibration and cross-verification against source statistics.
- Agent-based modeling
- Synthetic population
- Nationwide simulation
- Calibration & validation
- 2024.01 - Present
AI for Railway Infrastructure (Book Chapter)
Author of a chapter in Elsevier's “Artificial Intelligence for Railway Infrastructure” on railway-track management under extreme events using machine learning — a case study in Thailand's tropical-climate regions.
- Book chapter
- Railway resilience
- Machine learning
- Tropical climate
- 2024.06 - Present
Land Use & Public-Transport Ridership Analysis
Combining traditional models and machine learning to analyze how land use relates to public-transport ridership.
- Geographically weighted regression
- Land use
- Ridership
- Machine learning
- 2023.09 - 2024.12
Tuk-Tuk Safety Program
Motor-tricycle (Tuk-tuk) safety study for the Department of Land Transport: law review, safety statistics, focus groups, and data analysis.
- Transportation policy
- Safety analysis
- Focus groups
- 2023.04 - 2023.09
Don Mueang Airport Egress Mode-Choice Modeling
Airport access/egress survey and mode-choice modeling for Don Mueang Airport (Airports of Thailand).
- Public transit
- Transportation planning
- Mode-choice analysis
- Travel behavior