What’s Happening at CUSP: September 2020

• September 2, 2020

Research

• Congratulations to Assistant Professor Chen Feng, who recently received 3 National Science Foundation (NSF) Awards, all based at CUSP:
  • Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier Program: Improving the Future of Retail and Warehouse Workers with Upper Limb Disabilities via Perceptive and Adaptive Soft Wearable Robots
    • Project Amount/Duration: $900K/4-yrs
    • PI: Chen Feng, Co-PIs: Ludovic Righetti, Vikram Kapila.
    • This project focuses on modeling, perception, and control of soft wearable robots to provide physical assistance and skill training for older workers and workers with physical disabilities in jobs involving picking, placing, and assembly tasks. If successful, the project will enhance their employment, inclusion, and integration in work that is relevant to retail, warehouse, and manufacturing. This is a collaborative project with CCNY and Rutgers University.
  • National Robotics Initiative 2.0 Program: DeepSoRo: High-dimensional Proprioceptive and Tactile Sensing and Modeling for Soft Grippers
    • Project Amount/Duration: $400K/3-yrs
    • PI: Chen Feng
    • This project focuses on the fundamental research on fast, high-dimensional, and scalable sensing and modeling methods for soft grippers. The research will create soft grippers with significantly improved ability to handle objects in complicated environments. The active soft grippers arising from this project will find applications in fields such as food industries, agriculture, assisted living for senior citizens or people with disabilities, increasing productivity, and improving the quality of human life.
  • Future of Manufacturing Program: ARM4MOD: AI-powered and Robot-assisted Manufacturing for Modular Construction
    • Project Amount/Duration: $500K/2-yrs
    • PI: Semiha Ergan, Co-PI: Chen Feng
    • This project is a unique attempt in studying modular construction within the context of Future Manufacturing (FM). It exploits opportunities at the intersection of AI/robotics/building information modeling and manufacturing, with the potential to increase the scalability of modular construction. While the evaluations of technologies will focus on the modular construction, the proposed technologies will improve the competitiveness of manufacturing industries, particularly heavy manufacturing industries that share similar challenges such as agricultural, mining, and shipbuilding.

• Professor Debra Laefer has been named a founding member of the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Technical working group “Model for Underground Data Definition and Integration” (MUDDI), which is working towards the integration of subsurface data.

• Professor Debra Laefer has been named to the advisory board for the Location Power’s workshop, Nov 9-13, 2020, which is organized by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

• Professor Debra Laefer is giving an invited talk on “Preservation through Advanced Remote Sensing Capabilities” on September 17^th at 6:30 pm at Columbia University as part of their Historic Preservation Lecture Series.

• Professor Debra Laefer is giving an invited talk “Buried Trolley Lines, Abandoned Foundations, and Forgotten Streams – NYC’s Subsurface Data Integration Imperative” on September 24, 2020, 11:00 am as part of the 44th Annual Geo-Institute Seminar.

• Research Assistant Professor Graham Dove and Director of CUSP Juan Pablo Bello are collaborating with the Center for the Study of Asian American Health in the School of Medicine on a new project funded by AARP Livable Communities Challenge. SHUSH (Sound Health in UnderServed Neighborhoods) is a community focused project that aims to record and map the unique sounds of New York City’s Chinatown, and to raise awareness about the impact of noise pollution on the lives of the district’s residents, particularly those more senior in age.

• A new book by Professor Julia Lane, “Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto,” explains why public data is vital to public health and democracy in general, and encourages America to create a new framework for democratizing data. The book will be available beginning September 1, 2020 and is published by MIT Press.

• A new study applying a data science methodology of state-by-state data to infer causal relationships finds that the decision to purchase a gun is driven by stricter regulations on gun purchase and ownership more than by a desire to protect oneself after a mass shooting. The study, led by Maurizio Porfiri, Institute professor at NYU Tandon, is his second in a year to examine causative factors driving consumer firearm-purchase behavior.

• On August 6, Professor Neil Kleiman was a panelist in a webinar on “Improving Health and Equity in America’s Small and Midsize Cities.” The webinar examined how a new city health dashboard could be used to help city leaders drive health and equity in their communities.

Publications

• Pantelidis, T. P., Chow, J. Y. J., & Rasulkhani, S. (2020). “A many-to-many assignment game and stable outcome algorithm to evaluate collaborative mobility-as-a-service platforms.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 140, 79-100.
  • Funded by NSF CMMI-1634973 and presents a new modeling approach to evaluate Mobility-as-a-Service platforms.

• Caros, N. S., & Chow, J. Y. J. (2020). “Day-to-day market evaluation of modular autonomous vehicle fleet operations with en-route transfers.” Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, 1-25.
  • A market evaluation of modular autonomous vehicle operation done by one of Professor Chow’s MS students for his thesis in collaboration with Next Future Transportation.

• A new paper by Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate Junaid Ahmed Khan with co-authors Muktadir Chowdhury and Lan Wang on “Leveraging Content Connectivity and Location Awareness for Adaptive Forwarding in NDN-based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks” was accepted in the 7th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking, Montreal, Canada, Sep. 28–30, 2020 (ICN 2020).

• Rumi Chunara, Yuan Zhao, Ji Chen, Katharine Lawrence, Paul A Testa, Oded Nov, and Devin M Mann. “Telemedicine and Healthcare Disparities: A cohort study in a large healthcare system in New York City during COVID-19.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2020.

• Oded Nov, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, Yvonne W. Lui, Devin Mann, Maurizio Porfiri, Mark Riedl, John-Ross Rizzo, and Batia Wiesenfeld. “The Transformation of Patient-Clinician Relationships With AI-Based Medical Advice: A ‘Bring Your Own Algorithm’ Era in Healthcare.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.05855 (2020).

• Graham Dove, Martina Balestra, Devin Mann, and Oded Nov. “Good for the Many or Best for the Few? A Dilemma in the Design of Algorithmic Advice.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.12147 (2020).

• Maurizio Porfiri, Roni Barak-Ventura, and Manuel Ruiz Marín. “Self-Protection versus Fear of Stricter Firearm Regulations: Examining the Drivers of Firearm Acquisitions in the Aftermath of a Mass Shooting.” Patterns (2020).

• Simone Macrì, Mert Karakaya, Chiara Spinello, and Maurizio Porfiri. “Zebrafish exhibit associative learning for an aversive robotic stimulus.” Lab Anim 49, 259–264 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41684-020-0599-9.

• Song Fang and Quanyan Zhu. “Channel Leakage and Fundamental Limits of Privacy Leakage for Streaming Data.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.04893 (2020).

• Zhili Zhang and Quanyan Zhu. “Deceptive Kernel Function on Observations of Discrete POMDP.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.05585 (2020).

• Qian Ye, Xiaohong Chen, Kaan Ozbay, and Yonggang Wang. “How People View and Respond to Special Events in Shared Mobility: Case Study of Two Didi Safety Incidents via Sina Weibo.” CICTP 2020: Advanced Transportation Technologies and Development-Enhancing Connections.

• Yu Wang, Justin Salamon, Mark Cartwright, Nicholas J. Bryan, and Juan Pablo Bello. “Few-Shot Drum Transcription in Polyphonic Music.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.02791 (2020).

• Boyeong Hong, Bartosz Bonczak, Arpit Gupta, Lorna Thorpe, and Constantine E. Kontokosta. “Exposure Density and Neighborhood Disparities in COVID-19 Infection Risk: Using Large-scale Geolocation Data to Understand Burdens on Vulnerable Communities.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.01650 (2020).

• Haoran Su, Kejian Shi, Li Jin, and Joseph YJ Chow. “V2I Connectivity-Based Dynamic Queue-Jump Lane for Emergency Vehicles: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.00335 (2020).

• Enrico Bertini, Michael Correll, and Steven Franconeri. “Why Shouldn’t All Charts Be Scatter Plots? Beyond Precision-Driven Visualizations.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.11310 (2020).

• Vo, A V; Laefer, D F; Trifkovic, M; Hewage, C N L; Bertolotto, M; et al. “A Highly Scalable Data Management System for Point Cloud and Full Waveform Lidar Data.” The International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences; Gottingen (2020).

• Fangqiang Ding, Changhong Fu, Yiming Li, Jin Jin, and Chen Feng. “Automatic Failure Recovery and Re-Initialization for Online UAV Tracking with Joint Scale and Aspect Ratio Optimization.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03915 (2020).

• Changhong Fu, Fangqiang Ding, Yiming Li, Jin Jin, and Chen Feng. “DR^ 2Track: Towards Real-Time Visual Tracking for UAV via Distractor Repressed Dynamic Regression.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03912 (2020).

Press

• Fear of Stricter Regulations Spurs Gun Sales after Mass Shootings: Study (Homeland Security News Wire) – a new article examines the recent study by Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri on mass shootings and firearm purchases.

• People Watching Provides Pandemic Insights (SIGNAL) – Professor Debra Laefer discusses her RAPID NSF Award that studies people’s behavior as they leave healthcare facilities to see how they physically interact with their immediate surroundings.

People

• A warm welcome to the newest members of the CUSP community!
  • Danny Y. Huang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.
  • John R. Pamplin II, Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate & Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
  • Eric Corbett, Smart Cities Postdoctoral Associate & Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow

• Welcome to the Class of 2021! Our newest cohort of graduate students began their studies at CUSP this week. The Class of 2021 represents 13 countries from around the world.

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