Brooklyn Bridge

People

  • We have two PhD students joining us for the month of August. Welcome to Tom Xi from Steinhardt, who will be working with Prof. Juan Bello, and Konstantin Klemmer from the University of Warwick, who will be working with Prof. Daniel Neill.
  • Welcome to Raviv Murciano-Goroff, Prof. Julia Lane’s new postdoc, who will be working on her UMETRICS projects. Raviv’s office will be 1217.
  • Farewell to Lauren Craft, who is leaving NYU to join the development staff at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
  • Farewell to visiting scholar Enwei Zhu.
  • Congratulations to Pat Bowers, who has accepted the assignment of Interim Senior Vice Dean for Finance and Administration for Tandon, effective August 15, 2018. She replaces Dennis Dintino whose retirement is effective August 14, 2018. Pat will ensure that Tandon’s business and administrative functions continue to be delivered effectively after Dennis leaves. Dean Jelena Kovačević sees Pat serving as a key link in welcoming CUSP to the Tandon family.

Research

  • Congratulations to Huy Vo, who has been awarded $250,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop an open-source framework for prototyping 3D scientific visualizations using game engines.
  • Debra Laefer will be speaking at DefCon on August 10th: Remote Sensing, Distributed Computing, BigData and 3D Epidemiology: Today’s Public Health Opportunity. Her group will also be collaborating with researchers at UW and OSU to conduct laser scanning out in the field in Alaska at the end of August.
  • Vincent Lostanien was interviewed for Scienceline, the online media for scientific journalism of NYU’s Arthur J. Carter Institute, about his work on the BirdVox project.
  • Several of Prof. Juan Bello’s and Prof. Debra Laefer’s summer students will present their work at the ARISE Colloquium on August, 17. For presentation times, locations, and to RSVP, go to http://engineering.nyu.edu/k12stem/arise/?page_id=3059.
    • Giordan Escalona, supervised by Mark Cartwright: Towards a database of events affecting noise pollution in NYC.
    • Elizabeth Mendoza, supervised by Vincent LostanlenSynthesizing training data for automatic detection and classification of bird songs.
    • Evolone Layne and Swan Yee Aung, supervised by Debra LaeferTree growth models for predicting incursion of vegetation into utility lines.

Publications

  • Zahiri, Z. Laefer, D.F., Gowen, A. (2018). The feasibility of short-wave infrared spectrometry in assessing water-to-cement ratio and density of hardened concrete. Construction and Building Materials, 185, 661-669. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2018.07.082
  • Laefer, D.F., Natanzi, A.S., Zolanvari, S.M.I. (2018). Impact of thermal transfer on hydration heat of a Soundless Chemical Demolition Agent. Construction and Building Materials, 187, 348-359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2018.07.168
  • McFee, B., Salamon, J., & Bello, J. P. (2018). Adaptive pooling operators for weakly labeled sound event detection. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.
    • They propose a new pooling operator, AutoPool, that can be used in deep learning architectures to train models for time-series classification in a multiple-instance-learning framework. As a concrete example, they show the operator can be used to train a model to locate the precise timing of sound events in continuous audio recordings using training data that is only labeled with the presence/absence of sound events without temporal information. [experiments][code release]