What's Happening at CUSP: June 2018

People

Congratulations to Christine Battaglia, Federica Bianco, Foued Aouchette, Kim Reed, and Kim Alfred on their 5-year anniversaries with NYU.

Congratulations to Daniel Neill who will be staying at CUSP as a tenured faculty member after his visiting appointment ends this month. Next month he will start as Associate Professor of Urban Analytics at CUSP, and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Public Service, jointly appointed in NYU’s Courant Institute Department of Computer Science and Wagner School of Public Service.

Welcome to Professor Lina Bjerke from Jönköping International Business School and Dave Leather, a PhD student at the UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School, both of who are working with Prof. Konkostas.

Welcome to Dhrubojyoti (Dhrubo) Roy, a PhD student from Ohio State University, and Kendra Oudyk (ow-dike), a Master’s student from the University of Jyvaskyla, both of whom will be working with Prof. Bello.

Welcome to Bixing Xie, Lingxuan Gao, and Brianna Migliaccio – Tandon Undergrad Summer Research Students – and Jasmine Wu, a Civil Engineering student from SUNY Stonybrook and an I Have a Dream Summer Intern, all of whom will be working with Prof Laefer.

Congratulations to Daniel Neill and his CMU doctoral student Mallory Nobles who were named the runner-up in the Department of Homeland Security’s Hidden Signals Challenge (https://www.hiddensignalschallenge.com), a nationwide system design competition which focuses on detecting emerging bio-threats in real time. Daniel and Mallory received a total of $70K in prize money from DHS for their winning entry, “Pre-Syndromic Surveillance”. Their system will integrate free-text Emergency Department chief complaints with data from health clinics and social media in order to identify and investigate newly emerging disease outbreaks and previously unseen bio-threats that other systems would fail to detect.

At the US-Russia International Symposium on Geotechnical Engineering in St. Petersburg May 17 – 18^th, Professor Debra Laefer spoke on Vertical Data Integration for Tunneling and met with leaders in geotechnology from both the US and Russia.

Vu Vo is participating in the 107th Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC Technical Committee) in Denver this month.

Bello, Juan Pablo, Claudio Silva, Oded Nov, R. Luke DuBois, Anish Arora, Justin Salamon, Charles Mydlarz, and Harish Doraiswamy. SONYC: A System for the Monitoring, Analysis and Mitigation of Urban Noise Pollution, Communications of the ACM, In press, 2018. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.00889.
- This is SONYC’s first overview paper describing the project and its goal and will appear in the high visibility journal Communications of the ACM. It will be the go-to paper for anyone, including people at CUSP, wanting to learn about the project’s specific goals and research agendas.

J. Fitzpatrick, W. L. Gorr, and D. B. Neill. Keeping score: predictive analytics in policing. Annual Review of Criminology, 2019, in press.

Somanchi, Sriram, and Daniel B. Neill. Discovering anomalous patterns in large digital pathology images. (2013).
- The paper describes a novel pattern detection method that exploits the hierarchical structure inherent in data produced through virtual microscopy to accurately and quickly identify regions of interest for pathologists to review.
de Arteaga, W. Herlands, D. B. Neill, and A. Dubrawski. Machine learning for the developing world. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 2018, in press.

Herlands, E. McFowland III, A. G. Wilson, and D. B. Neill. Automated local regression discontinuity design discovery. Proc. 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2018, in press.

Herlands, E. McFowland III, A. G. Wilson, and D. B. Neill. Gaussian process subset scanning for anomalous pattern detection in non-iid data. Proc. 21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 84: 425-434, 2018. arXiv:1804.01466.