What's Happening at CUSP: October 2019

October 2, 2019

People

The New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering invites applications for a cluster of tenure-track faculty positions to start in Fall 2020 at the rank of Assistant Professor. The focus of these positions is urban science and engineering, with each position a joint appointment between two of the following units: the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), Civil and Urban Engineering (CUE), Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Technology, Culture and Society (TCS). We seek candidates interested in fostering a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative environment for teaching and research, who can contribute to methods and foundational knowledge in their disciplines with a strong focus on high-impact urban applications. Learn more & apply: https://apply.interfolio.com/68904

Education

On behalf of the Admissions Team at NYU CUSP, we are pleased to announce that the application for Fall 2020 entry is now live! For more information on our graduate programs in Applied Urban Science and Informatics or help applying, please visit our website. The first application deadline is December 15.

NYU CUSP is pleased to announce its 2020 call for Capstone Projects, open to city agencies, private sector companies, and academic organizations interested in co-supervising an applied urban analytics project with CUSP graduate students! The 6-month Capstone Program is the experiential learning focus of the MS program, teaching CUSP students to utilize urban data science techniques within the constraints of political, social, and financial considerations, as well as address issues of data privacy, validity, and transparency. Learn more about the 2020 Capstone Program and submit a project proposal here: https://cusp.nyu.edu/capstone-projects/

MS Student Yusu Qian recently gave a lightning talk at the 2019 West Coast NLP Summit at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California! Yusu discussed her research on “Gender Stereotypes Differ between Male and Female Writings,” a paper she wrote last semester for a project on Text as Data.

Research

Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin testified before the New York City Council during the hearings on Oversight – Consolidated Edison Summer 2019 Service Outages. During his testimony, Professor Dvorkin made the following recommendations: (1) Explicitly incentivize resiliency, (2) Enable supply/delivery competition, (3) Con Edison must reach out to local communities, (4) Keep Con Edison accountable/transparent. The written testimony is available here.

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Miguel Modestino (NYU Tandon), Alstadt Lord Mark Professor Eray Aydil (NYU Tandon), and Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin, whose proposal “Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for the Electrification of the Chemical Industry (CECI)” has been accepted for NSF funding. The grant is led by Professors Modestino and Aydil and envisions transforming the present-day chemical industry from an enterprise that relies on fossil-fuel-derived heat as power source to one that is based on renewable electricity. Plans for initiating the formation of an Engineering Research Center for Electrification of the Chemical Industry (CECI) are also proposed.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hénaff is presenting her work this month at the 2019 Okayama Art Summit biennale exhibition! Held in Okayama City once every three years, the Okayama Art Summit is an international exhibition of contemporary art. The event offers visitors the opportunity not only to see exciting exhibits but also to experience the thought processes of the artists, enabling a unique interaction with art that transcends time and space from the historic city of Okayama.

The year 2018 marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of mathematician Joseph Fourier, who is best known for his study of heat conduction, vibrations, and the “greenhouse effect”. On this occasion, the French National Academy of Sciences ran a special issue of its proceedings, entitled “Fourier and the science of today”, and gathering contributions from various perspectives. Postdoctoral Researcher Vincent Lostanlen, alongside colleagues from Flatiron Institute and CNRS, was invited to write a review paper on the legacy of Joseph Fourier in computer music.

On October 25th and 26th, NYU Tandon will host the fourth international workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). Director Juan Bello, Research Scientist Mark Cartwright, and Postdoctoral Researcher Vincent Lostanlen are among the organizers of this workshop. Confirmed keynote speakers are Catherine Guastavino (McGill University) and Jessie Barry (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). The full scientific program can be found here: http://dcase.community/workshop2019/technical-program

Publications

Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Sheng Wang recently had a paper “Fast Large-Scale Trajectory Clustering” published in VLDB. VLDB is a competitive flagship conference in database area.

This paper studies the problem of large-scale trajectory data clustering, k-paths, which aims to efficiently identify k “representative” paths in a road network. It can be used for visual exploration in applications such as traffic monitoring, public transit planning, and site selection.

Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Junaid Ahmed Khan had a paper titled “Reversing the Meaning of Node Connectivity for Content Placement in Networks of Caches” accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2020) http://www.conf-icnc.org/2020/) to be held in Big Island, Hawaii, USA, during February 17-20, 2020. This work is collaboration with Prof. J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Cedric Westphal from Futurewei (Huawei) Technologies and Yacine Ghamri-Doudane from the University of La Rochelle, France.

It is a widely accepted heuristic in content caching to place the most popular content at the nodes that are the best connected. The other common heuristic is somewhat contradictory, as it places the most popular content at the edge, at the caching nodes nearest the users. We contend that neither policy is best suited for caching content in a network and propose a simple alternative that places the most popular content at the least connected node. Namely, we populate content first at the nodes that have the lowest graph centrality over the network topology. Here, we provide an analytical study of this policy over some simple topologies that are tractable, namely regular grids and trees. Our mathematical result demonstrate that placing popular content at the least connected nodes outperforms the aforementioned alternatives in typical conditions.

Chenglu Jin, Zheng Yang, Marten van Dijk, and Jianying Zhou. 2019. Proof of Aliveness. In 2019 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC ’19), December 9–13, 2019, San Juan, PR, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359789.3359827

This paper introduces a new cryptographic concept that allows an edge device in cyber-physical systems to prove over an open network to a remote server that it is still “alive” and running. The proposed proof of aliveness methods consist of one-way function chain structures and a pseudorandom number generator chain, such that it can automatically replenish proofs when they are about to run out. Thus, the edge device can prove its aliveness to the server forever without interruptions. This is very much demanded in the critical infrastructures in smart cities, as they are supposed to run for decades.

Vincent Lostanlen, Joakim Andén, Mathieu Lagrange. 2019. Fourier at the heart of computer music: From harmonic sounds to texture. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crhy.2019.07.005

Beyond the scope of thermal conduction, Joseph Fourier’s treatise on the Analytical Theory of Heat (1822) profoundly altered our understanding of acoustic waves. It posits that any function of unit period can be decomposed into a sum of sinusoids, whose respective contributions represent some essential property of the underlying periodic phenomenon. In acoustics, such a decomposition reveals the resonant modes of a freely vibrating string. The introduction of Fourier series thus opened new research avenues on the modeling of musical timbre—a topic that was to become of crucial importance in the 1960s with the advent of computer-generated sounds. This article proposes to revisit the scientific legacy of Joseph Fourier through the lens of computer music research. We first discuss how the Fourier series marked a paradigm shift in our understanding of acoustics, supplanting the theory of consonance of harmonics in the Pythagorean monochord. Then, we highlight the utility of Fourier’s paradigm via three practical problems in analysis–synthesis: the imitation of musical instruments, frequency transposition, and the generation of audio textures. Interestingly, each of these problems involves a different perspective on time–frequency duality, and stimulates a multidisciplinary interplay between research and creation that is still ongoing.