Winter in NYC Photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash
Winter in NYC Photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash

People

  • Deadline extended to 2/15: NYU CUSP is currently accepting applications for Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associates, with a tentative start date of September 1, 2020. We seek applicants with a strong record of interdisciplinary work in developing and applying concepts and methods from science, technology, computing, engineering and applied mathematics in the service of urban communities across the globe. Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associates are full-time, non-tenured positions for two years, with annual appointments renewed based on satisfactory performance. The positions will be based at CUSP’s state of the art facility in Brooklyn. A doctoral degree in an applicable field is required. NYU values equity, diversity, and inclusion and especially encourages candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.

Research

  • Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Chenglu Jin and Professor Ramesh Karri have partnered with Pi Radio and received funding supports from US Army STTR program on “Millimeter Waveforms for Tactical Networking.” The project is dedicated to designing and building a secure millimeter-wave communication system when the backbone infrastructures are not available.
  • Visiting Scholar & Postdoctoral Researcher Vincent Lostanlen and NYU Tandon Integrated Digital Media Master’s Student Han Han will present their research on “wave2shape: Hearing the shape of a drum machine” at the North East Music Information Special Interest Group (NEMISIG) 2020 conference. In this project, Lostanlen and Han work on retrieving physical properties of percussive sounds, where the sounds are synthesized from a 2D rectangular drum parametric physical model. They examine scattering transform as a way to separate phase and amplitude information of transient sounds and try to form a closed loop from shapes to sounds and back. The paper abstract has also been accepted by Forum Acusticum 2020 in Lyon France in April.
  • A team of 4 Masters students from NYU Center for Data Science (Shreyas Chandrakaladharan, Ravi Choudhary, Jatin Khilnani, and B V Nithish Addepalli), advised by Visiting Scholar & Postdoctoral Researcher Vincent Lostanlen and NYU Steinhardt Assistant Professor Brian McFee, worked on “Self-Supervised Machine Listening” as part of their Capstone Project. Their research uses state of the art Self Supervision techniques to reduce the amount of annotated music needed for tasks such as Instrument Recognition. This is a novel effort in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). The team will present their work at NEMISIG, a yearly informal meeting for MIR researchers who work at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and music.
  • Professor Paul Torrens participated in a National Science Foundation sponsored Capitol Hill briefing on natural disaster resiliency. Torrens’ research focuses on computer modeling & simulation tools to help understand human behavior in extraordinary circumstances.
  • On February 8th, Assistant Professor Quanyan Zhu will give a keynote at the AAAI-2020 Workshop on AI for Cyber Security.
  • IBM recorded a Think Leaders podcast on Smart Cities governance and ethics with Martin O’Malley (former presidential candidate, Maryland governor, and Baltimore mayor) and CUSP faculty member Alexander Shermansong. They discuss the opportunities for improved operations and citizen services, and the ethics and oversight challenges. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Soundcloud. 
  • The Governance Lab released their third article in a series on training 21st century public sector leaders. Read the original article on Apolitical here and the repost on The GovLab blog here.
  • Subscribe to the GovLab Digest: Brought to you by The Living Library, the Digest is a weekly curation of findings and knowledge at the intersection of technology, governance, and innovation. You can read the latest digest here and subscribe here.

Publications

  • Jalil Hasanyan, Lorenzo Zino, Daniel Alberto Burbano Lombana, Alessandro Rizzo and Maurizio Porfiri. “Leader–follower consensus on activity-driven networks.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Volume 476, Issue 2233. 2020.

Press

  • Equal Access: Open Data and Equity: A new article by Data-Smart City Solutions features a capstone project by NYU CUSP’s Class of 2016 on “Reducing Data Poverty in NYC: Achieving Open Data for All” (via Data-Smart City Solutions, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School).
  • The Ears Have It: Research Assistant Professors Mark Cartwright and Charlie Mydlarz discuss the Sounds of New York City (SONYC) project, which aims to understand and address noise pollution in New York and beyond (via Big Picture Science).

Education

  • MS Students: Save the date for the NYU Tandon & Courant CS Grad Spring 2020 Career Fair on February 27, 2020 from 9am-12:00pm (morning session) and 12:30pm-3:00pm (afternoon session) at City Point, Brooklyn. Students may register for one session only. Registration for the fair will open on Friday, February 7, 2020 at 12:00pm on a first-come, first-serve basis. See a preview of attending employers here.

February Events

NYU is launching the new Alliance for Public Interest Technology, a dynamic and multidisciplinary group of faculty who are experts on the responsible and ethical creation, use and governance of technology in society. The opening event on Thursday, February 6th will include presentations, panels, and discussions by several CUSP faculty members, including:

  • Julia Lane: Making Data Great Again
  • Victoria Alsina: Collaborative Governance and Civic Engagement
  • Julia Stoyanovich, Ludovic Righetti: Responsible Data Science, Responsible Robotics

Learn more and RSVP here!

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