CV

Civil engineering researcher in transportation science and urban mobility.

Basics

Name Watcharapong Wongkaew
Label Civil Engineering Researcher · Transportation & Urban Mobility
Email 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

  • 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
  • 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)
  • 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
  • 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)
  • 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

  • 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
  • Chumphon, Thailand

    Academic Tutor (Volunteer)
    Police Border Patrol School, Chumphon
    Volunteer academic tutor for students at a remote border-patrol school.

Education

  • 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)
  • 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
  • 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

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
Causal Inference
Columbia University 2024
Mathematics for Machine Learning
Imperial College London 2024
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
DeepLearning.AI 2024
Sustainable Neighborhoods
Johns Hopkins University 2023
The Data Scientist's Toolbox
Johns Hopkins University 2023
Geographical Information Systems
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) 2023

Publications

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