Research

  • Congratulations to Professor Debra Laefer, who received 3 new grants from the National Science Foundation!
    • SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: UNUM: Unification for Underground Resilience Measures  – funded as part of the Smart and Connected Communities Program, this project proposes examining subsurface data development, integration and interoperability options in ways envisioned after the 9/11 New York City World Trade Center attack to identify urban threats, vulnerabilities, and effective mitigation strategies in the face of natural disasters.
    • Research Experience for Teachers (RET) FLUD – Flood (awareness education) and Learning in Urban Developments – this grant will supplement previous risk communication tool development under the “US-Ireland Partnership Program: Urban ARK: Assessment, Risk Management, and Knowledge for Flood Management in Urban Areas” grant.
    • COVID-19 RAPID: Decision Making Outside of Medical Facilities During Pandemic – this grant will use on-the-ground observers to capture perishable data at 11 domestic and 5 international locations for 2 months related to street-level behavior of individuals leaving COVID-19 medical facilities.
  • On Thursday January 21, 2021, from 2-5PM ET, Assistant Professor Joseph Chow will present a talk on “COVID Modeling Lessons Learned from NYC: From Mode Choice Behavior to Transit Contact Networks” during the TRB 100th Annual Meeting Workshop 1018 “The Future of Travel in a Post-COVID-19 Pandemic World.” The talk will cover research done in collaboration with Professor Kaan Ozbay’s group, as well as Professor Oliver Gao at Cornell University.
  • Professor Debra Laefer will lead a new Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) at NYU Tandon on “Spatio-temporal COVID-19: touching, transportation, and trade.” This project-based course will form student research teams that analyze spatio-temporal behavior of individuals exiting medical facilities and affiliated socio-economic data. The project is open to both undergraduate and graduate NYU students; learn more and apply here.

Press

Publications

  • A paper by Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Eric Corbett on “Designing Civic Technology with Trust” has been selected for presentation at the 2021 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’21). He is currently applying the theoretical framework discussed in the paper to his work at NYU on public engagement with AI.
    • As the role technology plays in interactions between people and their governments continues to grow, developing a better understanding of designing these technologies with trust is urgent work for human computer-interaction researchers. This paper reports on our efforts to design with trust through a two-year design-ethnography with the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. We developed a sociotechnical system—Code Enforcer—to help this office guide immigrant residents through successfully engaging the City’s Code Enforcement process. To inform our design process, we adapted our framework of trust and distance. While the framework was instrumental for integrating issues of trust throughout our design process, it also introduced tensions between how and by whom trust was enacted and interpreted. By reflecting on these tensions, we tease out the political and moral elements of designing with trust vital for HCI to navigate moving forward.
  • A new C2SMART-funded paper with authors Assistant Professor Joseph Chow and Professor Kaan Ozbay summarizes the calibration and validation effort for the first NYC-wide multi-agent simulation of the transportation systems. The research has been used to evaluate the recent congestion pricing plans and has further been applied the model to examine the Brooklyn bus network redesign, the BQX, the Citi Bike expansion, COVID-19 impacts, and more. Learn more in a blog post here.
  • Congratulations to Assistant Professor Joseph Chow, whose paper on “A bike count forecast model with multimodal network connectivity measures” has been awarded the Highest Overall Score Award from the TRB ACH20 Bike Transportation Committee. This paper- written with co-authors Divya Bade and Bingqing Liu- is part of a C2SMART project that uses bike count data from NYCDOT. It is currently under revision with the Transportation Research Record and will be presented at the 100th TRB Annual Meeting.

Education

Events

People

  • A huge welcome to our newest faculty members Assistant Professors Luis Ceferino and Qi Sun, who joined CUSP at the beginning of January 2021!
  • Congratulations to NYU Tandon Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri, who will become a core faculty member of CUSP, with a joint appointment between the center, as well as the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and Biomedical Engineering (BME) departments. Furthermore, Professor Porfiri will become our inaugural Director of Doctoral Studies, which will contribute to growing the doctoral student body of CUSP and Tandon in the coming years and seizing intellectual leadership in urban-related research.
  • NYU CUSP is currently accepting applications for Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associates, with a tentative start date of September 1, 2021. 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.

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