What's Happening at CUSP: August 2020

Research

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hénaff wrote an oped for the new publication Biodesigned on “What Biodesign Means to Me.”

Congratulations to the Urban Flooding team, who were awarded a grant from NYS Empire State Development for their work to create a real-time flood monitoring dashboard. The team- including Assistant Professor Elizabeth Henaff, Assistant Professor Andrea Silverman, Industry Assistant Professor Tega Brain (NYU Tandon), Smart Cities Postdoctoral Research Associate Junaid Ahmed Khan, and Research Assistant Professor Charlie Mydlarz– will develop an online data dashboard for residents and researchers to access collected flood data, increase understanding of flood events, protect local communities, and improve resiliency.

Visiting Scholar Chaogui Kang has a new book chapter in press. The chapter, titled “Methods of Social Sensing in Urban Studies,” is part of the upcoming book “Urban Remote Sensing: Monitoring, Synthesis and Modeling in the Urban Environment (Second Edition)” by John Wiley & Sons. Authors include Yu Liu, Song Gao, Yihong Yuan, Fan Zhang, Chaogui Kang, Yuhao Kang, and Keli Wang. This chapter summarizes a number of analytical methods for big geo-data in social sensing studies, such as temporal signature analysis, text analysis, and image analysis.

Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin wrote an op-ed at IEEE Spectrum on Trump’s Executive Order seeking to improve power grid cybersecurity.

IEEE Spectrum also examined a new Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) project that aims to develop a risk dashboard for handling more complex power grid scenarios. The project- led by PI Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin and researchers from Columbia University and the University of Arizona- could begin to help grid operators deal with both near-term and long-term challenges for the U.S. power grid, such as the strain on energy consumption due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Han Han and Vincent Lostanlen. “wav2shape: Hearing the Shape of a Drum Machine.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.10299 (2020).

Carmine Emanuele Cella, Daniele Ghisi, Vincent Lostanlen, Fabien Lévy, Joshua Fineberg, Yan Maresz. “OrchideaSOL: a dataset of extended instrumental techniques for computer-aided orchestration.” Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2020.

Yury Dvorkin, Miguel A. Modestino, and Andrea I. Silverman. “Engineering an Interdisciplinary Connection: Bridging Gaps between Chemical, Electrical, and Environmental Engineers.” iScience 23, 101337, July 24, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101337

Gromit Yeuk-Yin Chan, Enrico Bertini, Luis Gustavo Nonato, Brian Barr, and Claudio T. Silva. “Melody: Generating and Visualizing Machine Learning Model Summary to Understand Data and Classifiers Together.” arXiv e-prints (2020): arXiv-2007.

Brian Barr, Ke Xu, Claudio Silva, Enrico Bertini, Robert Reilly, C. Bayan Bruss, and Jason D. Wittenbach. “Towards Ground Truth Explainability on Tabular Data.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.10532 (2020).

Yixuan Zhang, Yifan Sun, Sumit Barua, Enrico Bertini, and Andrea Parker. “Mapping the Landscape of COVID-19 Crisis Visualizations.” 2020.

CUSP’s Capstone program brings together student teams with government agencies, industry, or other research partners to address real-world urban challenges through data. This year featured 14 unique projects, exploring urban issues from mapping economic change in NYC’s telecom industry to understanding the real-time prediction of city planning proposals’ environmental impact. All of our capstone projects are available here.