- July 7, 2020
Research
- Congratulations to Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri and Professor Oded Nov, who were recently awarded a new $2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their research on “LEAP-HI: Understanding and Engineering the Ecosystem of Firearms: Prevalence, Safety, and Firearm-Related Harms.” The project will support fundamental research towards extending engineering methods to understand the firearm ecosystem in the US.
- Assistant Professor Andrea Silverman published a systematic review and meta-analysis of coronavirus disinfection rates in water and wastewater. Based on coronavirus decay rates identified in the systematic review, the research team found that, in the absence of disinfectants, coronavirus inactivation rates were similar to those of non-enveloped viruses (e.g., enteroviruses, adenoviruses, noroviruses), which are more often studied in water environment and are used to benchmark exposure risks.
- Congratulations to Assistant Professor Andrea Silverman, who has received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for work in partnership with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection to develop NYC’s wastewater surveillance program for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). The project will address dual challenges: implementation of best practices for sample collection, analysis, and interpretation, and speedy and appropriate translation and communication of results to public health decision-makers.
- Congratulations to Research Assistant Professor Graham Dove, Professor Oded Nov, and Assistant Professor Camillia Matuk (NYU Steinhardt) who have been awarded a new NSF grant for their research on “Learning Data Science Through Civic Engagement With Open Data.” The project will study the data science learning that takes place as members of the public explore and analyze open civic data related to their everyday lives.
- Congratulations to Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin, who- in partnership with Columbia University (lead) and University of Arizon- received a $2.1 million grant from ARPA-e to develop a next-generation, risk-aware tools for electricity markets.
- On Thursday, July 9 at 4pm, three startups from the NYU Summer Launchpad accelerator will pitch against three startups from Yale’s Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking Summer Fellowship in front of a panel of judges in a Shark Tank-style pitch competition. Veccnet, co-founded by Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Kim Mahler, is pitching! Veccnet offers ubiquitous, ultra-reliable, and low-latency connectivity, allowing drone service providers to reliably control their long-range delivery drones and benefit from fewer mission abortions and reduced costs compared to satellite links.
- Last month, NYU CUSP and The GovLab at co-hosted a webinar on “Solving Urban Challenges Using Data: Toward a Data Skills Toolkit for Public Employees to Shape the Future.” The online event, facilitated by Victoria Alsina, academic director at CUSP, and Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder and chief research development officer at The GovLab, asked participants to discuss their vision for a data skills toolkit for public employees. Read our takeawaysfrom the event or watch the full webinar online.
- On June 24, The GovLab announced the launch of the Data Assembly, an initiative with support from the Henry Luce Foundation to solicit diverse, actionable public input on data re-use for crisis response in the United States. You can read more in this press release.
- Earlier in the month at the beginning of the George Floyd protests, The GovLab published an article on “How Data Can Map and Make Racial Inequality More Visible (If Done Responsibly).” This piece was accompanied by a list of Data-Driven Efforts to Address Racial Inequality, that we encourage others to add to.
- Adjunct Assistant Professor Alexander Shermansong was the keynote speaker at an international Smart Cities trade mission to NYC. Organized by Future City, the mission included business and government leaders from six continents. The keynote presented a framework for inclusive innovation to achieve more equitable and sustainable cities.
Publications
- Vincent Lostanlen, Alice Cohen-Hadria, and Juan Pablo Bello. “One or Two Components? The Scattering Transform Answers.” Proceedings of the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2020. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.01037.
- Vinicius M. Netto, Edgardo Brigatti, and Caio Cacholas. “From form to information: Analysing built environments in different spatial cultures.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.13897 (2020).
- Andrea I. Silverman and Alexandria B. Boehm. 2020. “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Persistence and Disinfection of Human Coronaviruses and Their Viral Surrogates in Water and Wastewater.” Environmental Science & Technology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.
estlett.0c00313
- Rumi Chunara and Stephanie H. Cook. “Using Digital Data to Protect and Promote the Most Vulnerable in the Fight Against COVID-19.” Frontiers in Public Health, 12 June 2020. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00296
- Fan Zuo, Jingxing Wang, Jingqin Gao, Kaan Ozbay, Xuegang Jeff Ban, Yubin Shen, Hong Yang, and Shri Iyer. “An Interactive Data Visualization and Analytics Tool to Evaluate Mobility and Sociability Trends During COVID-19.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.14882 (2020).
- Guanze Peng, Juntao Chen and Quanyan Zhu. “Distributed Stabilization of Two Interdependent Markov Jump Linear Systems with Partial Information,” in IEEE Control Systems Letters, doi: 10.1109/LCSYS.2020.3004649.
- Ding Wang, Brian Yueshuai He, Jingqin Gao, Joseph YJ Chow, Kaan Ozbay, and Shri Iyer. “Impact of COVID-19 Behavioral Inertia on Reopening Strategies for New York City Transit.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.13368 (2020).
- Theodoros P. Pantelidis, Joseph YJ Chow, and Oded Cats. “Mobility operator resource-pooling contract design to hedge against network disruptions.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.14518 (2020).
- Johann Gaebler, William Cai, Guillaume Basse, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel, and Jennifer Hill. “Deconstructing Claims of Post-Treatment Bias in Observational Studies of Discrimination.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.12460 (2020).
- Muhammad Junaid Farooq and Quanyan Zhu. “Based Revenue Maximizing Dynamic Resource Allocation and Pricing for Fog-Enabled Mission-Critical IoT Applications,” in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, doi: 10.1109/TMC.2020.2999895.
- Konstantin Klemmer and Daniel B. Neill. “SXL: Spatially explicit learning of geographic processes with auxiliary tasks.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.10461 (2020).
- Matt Roveto, Robert Mieth and Yury Dvorkin. “Co-Optimization of VaR and CVaR for Data-Driven Stochastic Demand Response Auction,” in IEEE Control Systems Letters, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 940-945, Oct. 2020, doi: 10.1109/LCSYS.2020.2997259.
- Sripathi Sridhar, Vincent Lostanlen, Brian McFee, Andrew Farnsworth, and Juan Pablo Bello published a paper at the (virtual) IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing conducted in May 2020 on “Learning the helix topology of musical pitch.”
Press
- Tracking behavior to predict virus transmission – a new National Science Foundation (NSF) podcast examines Professor Debra Laefer’s research on using geospatial data to pioneer a more accurate and effective tool for the COVID-19 pandemic: 3D virus mapping. Learn more about Professor Laefer’s research with NYU School of Global Public Health Assistant Professor Thomas Kirchner here.
- Coronavirus Expected to Transform New York City’s Summer Power Usage – Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the city’s summer preparations and cooling needs.
- Rising energy loads from fewer COVID-19 limits, warming weather spark utility readiness concerns – Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin spoke to Utility Dive about how utility companies may not be well-prepared to deal with the challenges imposed by COVID-19.
- We’re Headed for a Hot, Dark Summer – Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin is quoted in an article by New York Magazine.
Education
- Save the date for CUSP’s 2020 Capstone Program! On Thursday, July 23rd, 2020, join us online for the final capstone presentations of our talented graduate students. NYU CUSP’s Capstone Program brings together student research teams with government agencies, industry, or other research partners to address real-world urban challenges through data. The capstone presentations are the culmination of their six-month projects and mark the final presentation of the students’ work during their studies at CUSP. Learn more about the 2020 projects here.
- We spoke to several of this year’s capstone teams to understand more about their research, and how their projects could help improve urban life, both in New York City and other cities around the world. Learn more:
- Urban Dynamics of Bird Migration by Martha Norrick, Mei Guan, Max Brueckner-Humphreys, and Xin Yu
- Mapping Sustainable Mobility in NYC Nightlife Culture by Nicholas LiCalzi, Kaifu Ren, Yingyuan Zhang, and Yutong Zhu
- Economic Impacts of New York City’s Investment in Water Supply by Asnat Ghebremedhin, Angelia Lau, Ross MacWhinney, and Pratik Watwani
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