- April 12, 2021
Research
- The Urban Modeling Group, led by Professor Debra Laefer, is welcoming 4 Tandon undergraduate students for the 2021 NYU Summer Undergraduate Research Program! Michelle Ren will be undertaking new data integration schemes for subsurface documentation in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Jiajun Luo will be investigating COVID-19 PAUSE order impacts on handicap accessibility to essential services and business survivability, and Winnie Zheng and Kevin Joseph (NYUAD) will be combining remote sensing and machine learning to develop new quality control mechanism for COVID-19 related cleaning.
- Professor Debra Laefer is co-chairing the international conference 3D Geoinfo 2021, to be held virtually October 11-14. This conference offers a forum for leading international decision-makers and prominent voices in the field of 3D Geoinformation across the academic, commercial, and public sectors. The conference will take place online in conjunction with the FIG 3D Cadastres workshop and will be launched with an opening keynote address by Nobel Laureate and NYU professor Dr. Paul Romer. The conference will cover digital twins, 3DGIS, large-scale remote sensing including hyperpsectral imagery and bathymetry, indoor mapping, AI in remote sensing and much more.
- Professor Debra Laefer and Wagner Prof. Emeritus Rae Zimmerman have joined forces with Alan Leidner and Wendy Dorf of GISMO, a GIS working group based in NYC, along with Josh Lieberman of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Terri Matthews of New York City’s Town and Gown program and Starling Childs of Gingko to tackle the long standing issue of having complete and interoperable documentation of underground utilities. To date, the team has interviewed dozens of stakeholders related to their two study sites. These sites are Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Midtown East, Manhattan. Each faces its own unique challenges related to sea-level rise, aging infrastructure, and real estate development. The project is designed to use the input of community groups, city officials, and state agencies to promote interoperable data sharing, which would facilitate more resilient infrastructure, reduced infrastructure costs, and faster response times to utility disruptions.
- Professor Debra Laefer and Global Public Health Prof. Chris Dickey have partnered with the American University of Beirut and the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in an international data collection effort to study destination, transportation choice, mask-wearing, and touching behavior around health care facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic outside of healthcare facilities. To date nearly 7,000 records have been collected by 16 NYU students and their foreign counterparts at a dozen and a half sites around the world This data set hopes to capture how different areas of the world are responding to the pandemic 1 year after the first wave. The data are being collected individually by students using Google’s MyMaps and later aggregated into a publicly-accessible, interactive GIS platform, which will be launched in late Spring.
- Assistant Professor S. Farokh Atashzar is co-organizing the ICASSP 2021 PROGRESS Workshop(PROGRESS: PROmotinG DiveRsity in Signal ProcESSing). PROGRESS is designed to provide information and support for women and under-represented minorities in pursuing academic careers in Signal Processing.
- Assistant Professor S. Farokh Atashzar is co-editing a Special Issue on “Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and AI for Nonurgent/Nonemergent Healthcare Delivery During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic” in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. The issue includes 22 accepted articles, and 1,750 article downloads. Another Special Issue on “NeuroHaptics: From Human Touch to Neuroscience” (Frontiers in Neuroscience) is now accepting papers.
- Assistant Professor S. Farokh Atashzar is the publication chair for the 2021 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR2021). Papers may be submitted by May 1st, 2021. He will also serve as the Technical Program vice-chair at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Systems; submissions for Special Tracks will run until April 25th, 2021.
- Congratulations to Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate John R. Pamplin II, whose project (where he is serving as a co-investigator) was just awarded a 1-yr pilot grant from the NYU Center for Opioid Epidemiology & Policy, Pilot Grant Program! “Pathways to racial disparities in the effects of Good Samaritan Laws: A mixed methods study” received a $7,000 award to interview people who use Illicit opioids (PWUIO) in NYC to explore potential racialized barriers to the effectiveness of overdose Good Samaritan laws.
- Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate John R. Pamplin II was a featured guest on the podcast, “Epidemiology Counts”, produced by the Society for Epidemiologic Research. The episode, “Episode 25 – Racialized Policing” discusses the historical and structural causes of racialized policing, its effect on health, and debunked some of the “myths” used to justify it.
- Congratulations to Assistant Professor Anna Choromanska, who received a 2021 NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, more widely known as a CAREER Award, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. The award includes a five-year, $532,892 grant that will support a project that focuses on new, more efficient ways of training DL models, a process that typically consumes resources, time, and money, compromising the progress of public and private sectors that rely on DL, and limiting its deployment in new applications.
- The GovLab has launched a national online citizen engagement as part of ReinventED: Your Education, Your Voice, a campaign to engage students, parents and caregivers and educators in identifying challenges with today’s education system. Results will be openly published and developed into recommendations targeted at policymakers and philanthropic leaders working in the education space.
- Public voting for the “Disinformation” domain of the GovLab’s 100 Questions Initiative is currently underway. Visit https://disinformation.the100questions.org/ to “vote” on the top questions we’ve identified surrounding disinformation that can and should be answered using data and data science. “Votes” simply signify perceived priority of the questions. The 100 Questions Initiative seeks to map the world’s 100 most pressing, high-impact questions that could be answered if relevant datasets were leveraged in a responsible manner.
- On May 6 at 5pm, please join the GovLab and the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge for a Future of Democracy event on “What Americans Want from Reform,” featuring Dr. Paul C. Light of NYU Wagner.
Press
- City Gone Silent: How the sounds of New York City changed in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic – features research from the Sounds of New York City (SONYC) project (Scholastic Magazine).
- Low-Cost Drones Learn Precise Control Over Suspended Loads – features research by Giuseppe Loianno, Assistant Professor and Director of the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab (IEEE Spectrum).
- An Unparalleled Advancement – Isha Chaturvedi’s Direction-Based Navigation App for Smart Glass Wearers Published in ACM ICI 2019 – features CUSP alum Isha Chaturvedi, MS 2018 (Latestly).
- Rumi Chunara & Michael Ralph: Beyond Bias – blog post by Assistant Professor Rumi Chunara (NYU Center for Data Science).
- Voices of biotech research – Assistant Professor Elizabeth Henaff speaks on the future of biotechnology (Nature Biotechnology).
Publications
- Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate John R. Pamplin II recently published a study interrogating the Environmental Affordances model: a frequently cited mechanism to explain the paradoxical lack of increased prevalence of Major Depression among Black people (relative to white people) despite Black people’s increased average exposure to socioeconomic deprivation and other manifestations of racism. Despite the model’s popularity in the literature, the study failed to find empirical support for the model at multiple levels, and suggests the need to develop new hypotheses to explain the paradoxical racial pattern of depression.
- Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate John R. Pamplin II recently co-authored a commentary discussing a study that reported racial disparities in influenza vaccinations that remain even after accounting for common explanations such as vaccine hesitancy and distrust in medical institutions. We discuss how these findings point towards the importance of studying structural factors such as biased prescribing practices and inadequate pharmacy capacity in the production of inequitable vaccination rates.
- Boyeong Hong, Bartosz J. Bonczak, Arpit Gupta, Lorna E. Thorpe, and Constantine E. Kontokosta. “Exposure density and neighborhood disparities in COVID-19 infection risk.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (March 2021), 118 (13) e2021258118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2021258118.
- Constantine E. Kontokosta, Lance Freeman, and Yuan Lai. “Up-and-Coming or Down-and-Out? Social Media Popularity as an Indicator of Neighborhood Change.” Journal of Planning Education and Research (March 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X21998445.
- Boyeong Hong, Bartosz J. Bonczak, Arpit Gupta, and Constantine E. Kontokosta. “Measuring inequality in community resilience to natural disasters using large-scale mobility data.” Nature Communications, 12, 1870 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22160-w
- Farah, Imed, Abdelouahab Rezaiguia, Ahcene Mouassa, Laefer Debra, and Salah Guenfoud. “Free vibration analysis of multi-span orthotropic bridge deck with rubber bearings.” Diagnostyka 22 (2021).
- Laefer, Debra F., Thomas Kirchner, Darlene Cheong, Aseah Khan, Weiyi Qiu, Nikki Tai, Tiffany Truong, and Maimunah Virk. “Data Resource Profile: Egress Behavior from Select NYC COVID-19 Exposed Health Facilities March-May 2020.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.10079 (2021).
- Shemshadian, M.E., Schultz, A.E., Le, J.L., Labbane, R., Laefer, D.F., Al-Sabah, S., Truong-Hong, L., Huynh, M.P., McGetrick, P., Martin, T. and Matis, P., 2021. “Amass: Advanced manufacturing for the assembly of structural steel.” Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction, 26(1), p.04020052.
- M.H. Stanley and D.F. Laefer, “Metrics for aerial, urban LiDAR point clouds,” ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2021.01.010
- Jacob G. Holland, Shinnosuke Nakayama, Maurizio Porfiri, Oded Nov, and Guy Bloch. “Body Size and Behavioural Plasticity Interact to Influence the Performance of Free-Foraging Bumble Bee Colonies.” Insects2021, 12, 236.
- Roni Barak Ventura, Oded Nov, Manuel Ruiz Marin, Preeti Raghavan, and Maurizio Porfiri. “A low-cost telerehabilitation paradigm for bimanual training,” in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, doi: 10.1109/TMECH.2021.3064930.
- Alain Boldini, Xinda Ma, John-Ross Rizzo, and Maurizio Porfiri. “A virtual reality interface to test wearable electronic travel aids for the visually impaired.” Proc. SPIE 11590, Nano-, Bio-, Info-Tech Sensors and Wearable Systems, 115900Q (22 March 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2581441
- Mohammad E. Shemshadian, Arturo E. Schultz, Jia-Liang Le, Debra F. Laefer, Salam Al-Sabah, and Patrick McGetrick. “Structural mechanics characterization of steel intermeshed connection using nonlinear finite element analysis.” Engineering Structures, Volume 238, 2021, 112264, ISSN 0141-0296, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2021.112264.
- Piazentin Ono, J. Freire and C. T. Silva. “Interactive Data Visualization in Jupyter Notebooks.” in Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 99-106, 1 March-April 2021, doi: 10.1109/MCSE.2021.3052619.
- Yiming Li, Congcong Wen, Felix Juefei-Xu, and Chen Feng. “Fooling LiDAR Perception via Adversarial Trajectory Perturbation.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.15326 (2021).
- Meike Zehlike, Ke Yang, and Julia Stoyanovich. “Fairness in Ranking: A Survey.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.14000 (2021).
- Alain Boldini, Youngsu Cha, and Maurizio Porfiri. “The role of cations on contactless actuation of perfluorinated ionomer membranes in salt solution.” Proc. SPIE 11587, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) XXIII, 1158710 (22 March 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2581437
- Alain Boldini and Maurizio Porfiri. “Modeling water motion in ionic polymer metal composites.” Proc. SPIE 11587, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) XXIII, 115870Z (22 March 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2581436
- Samrat Acharya, Yury Dvorkin, and Ramesh Karri. “Causative Cyberattacks on Online Learning-based Automated Demand Response Systems,” in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, doi: 10.1109/TSG.2021.3067896.
- Ali Hassan, Deepjyoti Deka, and Yury Dvorkin. “Privacy-Aware Load Ensemble Control: A Linearly-Solvable MDP Approach.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.10828 (2021).
- Di Yang, Kun Xie, Kaan Ozbay, Zifeng Zhao, and Hong Yang. “Copula-based joint modeling of crash count and conflict risk measures with accommodation of mixed count-continuous margins.” Analytic Methods in Accident Research, Volume 31, 2021, 100162, ISSN 2213-6657.
Education
- NYU CUSP students are working with the Reimagine New York Commission and Schmidt Futures to help get affordable broadband for all, as part of the Action Plan for a Reimagined New York. To better understand geographic distribution of barriers to access, the Commission sponsored a capstone project at CUSP.
- NEW PROGRAM: NYU CUSP’s Online Advanced Certificate can be completed from anywhere in the world, personalized to your busy schedule, and is offered at a 50% tuition discount to qualified individuals, to help meet this critical urban moment.
- Learn more during our Prospective Student Webinar on Thursday April 22nd at 12:00pm
- Earn your Master’s in Applied Urban Science and Informatics! It’s not too late to apply for Fall 2021 – learn more about our programs in Urban Informatics on our website or start your application here.
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