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Dr. Bilal Farooq

Bilal Farooq
Associate Professor
BSc, MASc, PhD
CUI-337
416-979-5000 ext. 556456
https://www.bilalfarooq.com/

Areas of Academic Interest

Disruptive transportation technologies and services

Cyber-physical transportation systems

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Simulation

Behavioural modelling

Optimization

Active mobility

Education

Year University Degree
2011 University of Toronto PhD
2004 Lahore University of Management Sciences MASc
2001 University of Engineering and Technology BSc

Selected Courses

Course Code Course Title
CV8409 Urban Transport Systems
CV8410 Travel Demand Analysis
CVL910 Transportation Planning

Spotlight

Growing up in Pakistan, Bilal Farooq was always taking things apart. “I have some pretty remarkable engineers in my family,” he says. “One of them brought me a computer. I treated it like the TVs, telephones and cassette players I had come across, and opened it right up. I always wanted to know how things work internally.”

Farooq calls this approach “learning through curiosity,” and it still drives him today. After earning a master’s in computer science – a new field at the time – he pursued a doctorate in transportation engineering. He knew little about it, but he was intrigued by the overlap between computer and transportation networks.

Now a Canada Research Chair in disruptive transportation technologies and services, Farooq’s spirit of inquiry animates his work in traffic flow simulation and prediction, connected autonomous vehicles, and urban congestion.

“In Toronto, we have existing transportation problems and new ways to solve them,” he says. “For example, connected autonomous vehicles that tap into distributed routing systems are highly effective in reducing travel time without creating additional complications. That’s one among my many research interests in traffic modelling, congestion relief and greener travel.”

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Bilal Farooq

“A challenge in my work is offering new ways to address existing problems – without those solutions generating new headaches of their own.”

  • 2018 – Ontario Early Researcher Award
  • 2017 – Canada Research Chair in Disruptive Transportation Technologies and Services
  • 2016 – Winner of 2016 MassMotion Academic Pedestrian Modelling Project of the Year, Oasys Software
  • 2014 – Québec Early Researcher Award

  • Al Mallah, R., Quintero, A., Farooq, B. (2019). Cooperative Evaluation of the Cause of Urban Traffic Congestion via Connected Vehicles, external link, opens in new window. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
  • Sobhani, A., Farooq, B., (2018) “Impact of Smartphone Distraction on Pedestrians’ Crossing Behaviour: An Application of Head-Mounted Immersive Virtual Reality,” Journal of Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, Accepted: 17-06-2018.
  • Saadi, I., Farooq, B., Mustafa, A., Teller, J., Cools, M. (2018) “An Efficient Hierarchical Model for Multi-Source Information Fusion” Expert Systems With Applications. ESWA-D-17-05375.
  • Farooq, B., Cherchi, E., Sobhani, A., (2018) “Virtual Immersive Reality for Stated Preference Travel Behaviour Experiments: A Case study of Autonomous Vehicles on Urban Roads,” PDF file18-02075, external link, Journal of Transportation Research Record.
  • Poucin, G., Farooq, B., Patterson, Z. (2018) “Activity Patterns Mining in Wi-Fi Access Point Logs,” Computer Environment and Urban Systems. 67: 55-67. doi:10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2017.09.004

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