Research

  • Congratulations to NYU Tandon School of Engineering Assistant Professor Anna Choromanska, who was named to the 2020 cohort of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellows for her work in computer science! Professor Choromanska will join 126 early-career scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada.
  • Research Assistant Professor Graham Dove and NYU Tandon Associate Professor Anne-Laure Fayard will be hosting a workshop session on “Hunting for monsters in open data” at the NYC School of Data on Saturday March 7th at CUNY Law School in Long Island City. In this workshop, Graham and Anne-Laure will use the metaphorical figure of the monster to help participants question potentially dangerous assumptions about the provenance and validity of data, and identify areas of potential future concern caused by uncertainty and ambiguity.
  • Congratulations to Professor Debra Laefer, who- along with co-authors Harith Aljumaily (University Carlos III de Madrid) and Dolores Cuadra (King Juan Carlos University)- has been awarded third place for the ASPRS Esri Award for Best Scientific Paper in GIS for research on ”Integration of Lidar Data and GIS Data for Point Cloud Semantic Enrichment at the Point Level.” Professor Laefer will be honored during the ASPRS 2020 Annual Conference and International Lidar Mapping Forum March 23-25 in Washington, DC.
  • The AI4CE Lab’s paper “Real-time Soft Body 3D Proprioception via Deep Vision-based Sensing” is accepted for presentation at the top-tier international robotics conference ICRA’20 in Paris, and is accepted for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) for publication. Their method is the very first in the world that enables accurate real-time proprioceptive (meaning with only internal sensors) 3D shape estimation for deformable surfaces with high resolution and high speed, which is very useful for soft robotics, human computer interaction, and so on. The team even modified a Baymax doll to show how cool this method is! Learn more:
  • Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Chenglu Jin was invited to give a presentation on “Proof of Aliveness in Cyber-Physical Systems” at New England Security Day at Harvard University.
  • The Sounds of New York City (SONYC) team is organizing the Urban Sound Tagging with Spatiotemporal Context challenge task, which is part of the 2020 IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events. This task aims to investigate how spatiotemporal metadata can aid in the prediction of urban sound tags for 10s recordings from an urban acoustic sensor network for which we know when and where the recordings were taken. This task is motivated by the real-world problem of building machine listening tools to aid in the monitoring, analysis, and mitigation of urban noise pollution. As part of this challenge, SONYC is also releasing version 2.1 of their SONYC-UST dataset. This version of the dataset has almost 15000 more annotated recordings in it than the previous dataset and also includes coarse spatiotemporal context information for each recording.
  • Designing The 100 Questions NYC — Open Data Week 2020 event. This free event co-organized by The GovLab and Reaktor will begin with a panel of leaders from different sectors reflecting on the need for more question-driven open data delivery. Then participants will collectively ideate and co-design a question-sourcing effort that can benefit all New Yorkers: The 100 Questions NYC.
  • Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV), a new interdisciplinary open access ACM journal co-edited by The GovLab’s Beth Simone Noveck and Soon Ae Chun on the impact of technology on governance and public institutions. DGOV presents applied and empirical research from academics, practitioners, designers and technologists, using political, policy, social, computer and data science methodologies. You can read the full journal here and learn more in this press release.
  • The GovLab and the Bertelsmann Foundation launch the 100 Questions “Future of Work” domain, an effort to identify the most important societal questions, as they relate to the future of work, for which greater access to data and data science methods could find the answers.
  • On February 6, The GovLab’s director Beth Simone Noveck provided testimony during a hearing before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee on astroturfing and federal rulemaking. In her testimony, she offered learnings from The GovLab’s CrowdLaw for Congress initiative, which officially launched that same morning. You can watch the full hearing here, visit  https://congress.crowd.law for more on the initiative, and read about how the two are connected in this press release.

Publications

  • Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Junaid Ahmed Khan had a paper titled “LoCHiP: A Distributed Collaborative Cache Management Scheme at the Network Edge“ accepted to the 32nd IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2020 Conference to be held in Budapest, Hungary in April 2020.
    • The paper targeted the distributed cache management problem at the network edge. A centrality-based content placement policy, LoCHiP, is proposed for caching content at the nodes near end-users in the network. Counter the common intuition of caching content at high centrality nodes, LoCHiP starts placing popular content at low centrality nodes since their caching resource needs to be well utilized to compensate for the poor connectivity. Additionally, low centrality nodes are often at the edge of the network, and therefore closer to the users. We evaluated LoCHiP using large scale topologies from realistic mobility trace containing 2, 986 nodes. It yielded up to 73% cache hit-rate.
  • Research Assistant Professor Graham Dove, Associate Professor Oded Nov, and NYU Tandon PhD Student Ayanna Seals had an extended abstract accepted at CHI 2020 conference, “Socially-Informed Sorting for Guiding Personal Finance Choices.”
  • Visiting Scholar Chaogui Kang recently had a new paper accepted in Acta Geographica Sinica, a prestigious geographical journal in China:
    • Yu Liu, Xin Yao, Yongxi Gong, Chaogui Kang, Xun Shi, Fahui Wang, Jiao’e Wang, Yi Zhang, Pengfei Zhao, Di Zhu, Xinyan Zhu. “Methods and Applications of Spatial Interactions Extracted from Big Geo-Data.” Acta Geographica Sinica (2020).
    • Spatial interaction is a critical basis of understanding human processes on the land surface. Together with spatial dependency, it embodies the uniqueness, relatedness of geographical space, as well as the impact on the embedded geographical distribution patterns. Spatial interaction also has distinctive space-time attributes, and thus is significant to geographical research. Big data bring new opportunities for the studies of spatial interaction, which enables us to sense and observe spatial interaction patterns at different spatial scales, and simulate and predict their dynamic evolution. This provides great support for the research of regional spatial structures and human activity regularities. In this article, we first demonstrated the relationship between spatial interaction and geospatial patterns, and introduced how to sense spatial interaction with big geodata. Then, we generalized the progress of relevant models and analytical methods, and introduced the corresponding applications in the field of transportation, urban planning, public health and tourism. Some key issues were also discussed. Our article will provide guidance for the studies of spatial interaction supported by big data.

Education

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