Welcome to eMERGE

Welcome, everyone! I’m thrilled to launch eMERGE — a new seminar series at Berkeley — a moment we’ve been preparing for for quite some time. We envision eMERGE to create a dedicated platform for early-career researchers pursuing academic careers.

We invite top final-year PhDs and postdocs to present their research and visions; we invite newly hired assistant professors in top programs to workshop their job talks and reflect candidly on their trajectories; in addition, we invite the most creative, critical, and passionate minds to sit together to support and inspire each other. We believe deeply in academic excellence — and equally in community building.

eMERGE stands for early-career Mobility & Energy Researchers’ Group Exchange — a name that captures our core components:

First, we are supporting early-career researchers. This is what most clearly distinguishes eMERGE from many other excellent seminars you may want to attend. We provide final-year PhD candidates and postdocs a dedicated place to practice and sharpen their job talks. We also open the backstage: students like me get to observe and learn up close from top peers. As I earlier wrote on LinkedIn, I’ve always been curious about how one can stand out on the academic job market — We’ve seen too many talents; rarely do we witness how they grow before they stand out, from which we could learn the most.

Second, eMERGE encourages interdisciplinary research across energy, mobility, or more broadly, sustainability-related topics. At the same time, the seminar emphasizes mathematical modeling, data sciences, and computational innovations, including cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and its applications. Our upcoming speakers’ expertise spans energy and transportation: some develop rigorous methodological foundations for sustainable societal systems, while others tackle real-world challenges with careful attention to all sorts of contextual complexity.

In this series, you’ll hear about evolving multimodal language models into world models for urban management; how a modest penetration of autonomous vehicles can smooth traffic on even the busiest corridors; and how data, information, and algorithms can jointly enable efficient, interpretable, trustworthy, and equitable system design and operations — among other exciting topics.

We don’t expect anyone to become a domain expert in every topic (and we continuously remind our speakers to keep this in their minds). Instead, we hope you’ll appreciate the diversity of this ecosystem, recognize shared patterns in how research pushes the frontier, and translate those insights back to your own work and to the broader community.

To be honest, sometimes I myself forget what the acronym eMERGE stands for – we just call it eMERGE. I should admit that it was ChatGPT who proposed this name, and I picked and loved it at my first look. However, only later did I appreciate its double meaning: e + Merge, that we are merging, or gathering together; and EMERGE as one word.

EMERGE, EMERGING, EMERGENCE.

My own work is in societal-systems simulation — broadly, complex systems. Emergence is a key concept (though somewhat mysterious) in this field: properties appear at the system level that no individual part has alone, arising from interactions in the whole (think P. W. Anderson’s famous ‘More is Different’). Consider deep neural networks: each unit could be as simple as piecewise-linear, but when you have billions of these neurons organized in a particular way, it becomes ChatGPT or other unbelievably capable intelligent machines. The same is true of biological neurons relative to the brain and thought.

That’s the spirit of eMERGE: when we sit together, engage in the talk, and continue the conversation afterward, we, collectively, become more than the sum of our parts — and the connections we forge will endure.

Initializing such a seminar is challenging, but I’m more and more aware that the secret of success is actually quite simple: we identify and invite the best speakers, and we convince them that we have the best audience. Then the best audience attracts more great speakers. It’s a virtuous cycle — a chemistry reaction we don’t want to stop. It’s a fusion of energy. And with each talk, each question, and each connection, that energy grows stronger. I’m excited to see where this journey takes us, together.

Thank you!

Yi Ju. August 27, 2025