What's Happening at CUSP: April 2019

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Contributors to the CUSP-housed SONYC project have recently released a new dataset, SONYC Urban Sound Tagging (SONYC-UST): a multilabel dataset from an urban acoustic sensor network. SONYC-UST contains 10-second audio clips from the SONYC acoustic sensor network along with annotations indicating the presence or absence of 23 different sources of noise pollution, annotated by citizen scientist volunteers as part of SONYC’s Zooniverse annotation campaign. The dataset is released as part of a corresponding task in the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 Challenge task “Urban Sound Tagging“. The goal of this task is that participants develop systems that successfully predict presence or absence of the noise pollution sources of interest in the audio recorded by the SONYC acoustic sensor network.

The SONYC Zooniverse annotation campaign is still ongoing. SONYC has collected over 23,000 annotations by over 2000 volunteers thus far.

The Stanford Open Policing Project, of which Assistant Professor Ravi Shroff is a member, just released a large set of data (including almost 200 million cleaned and standardized traffic stop records from various states and cities around the country) and a corresponding technical report. The project was featured on Huffington Post and CNN, as well as Steinhardt’s internal blog.

Congratulations to Ravi Shroff, who is part of a large team that got a grant from Arnold Ventures to examine their Public Safety Assessment (PSA) and devise ways to adapt and improve it for local jurisdictions (the current PSA is a single tool that is used nationally). The team involves many awardees, but Ravi is the only PI on this project from NYU. This award was announced last week by Arnold; they are also listed on their projects page (under the ‘Advancing Pretrial Policy & Research (Evaluation)’ heading).

Professor Debra Laefer was awarded the University of Illinois CEEAA Distinguished Alumni Award for pioneering research and development of the collection, processing and storage of remote sensing data that has radically advanced the civil engineering community’s ability to do city-scale computational modeling above and below ground; for excellence in educational instruction in civil engineering in the United States and abroad; and for globally recognized expertise in the acquisition and management of remote sensing data in dense urban environments.

A new paper in collaboration with the SONYC team at Ohio State was accepted:
- Kumari, S., Roy, D., Cartwright, M., Bello, J.P., Arora, A. EdgeL3: Compressing L3-Net for Mote Scale Urban Noise Monitoring. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Parallel AI and Systems for the Edge (PAISE), 2019.

Mydlarz, C.; Sharma, M.; Lockerman, Y.; Steers, B.; Silva, C.; Bello, J.P. The Life of a New York City Noise Sensor Network. Sensors 2019, 19, 1415. This paper covers the design, implementation, deployment and upkeep of the current SONYC sensor network with a focus on the analysis of its uptime and approaches to maximize this.