What’s Happening at CUSP: October 2017

People

Welcome to Ashley Joyner, our Cristo Rey Brooklyn High School work study student.

Welcome to Nicolas Jeanrenaud, who will start as an Associate Research Scientist with the Data Facility.

Three of our Master’s students – Jack Lundquist, Emily Hansen, and Unisse Chua – will be working with Constantine Konkosta in the Urban Intelligence Lab.

Congratulations to Debra Laefer, who received a “Connecting Geotechnical Engineering Faculty – Networked and Thriving Award” which will enable the development of an on-line database for the community and the general public to identify women with expertise in Geotechnical engineering similar to “Women Also Know Stuff” as maintained by the political science community.

Congratulations to Julia Lane for awards totaling $695,000 from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the German Bundesbank. The Kauffman grant supports Julia’s work with agencies in Kansas City and the state of Missouri to develop city capacity in business data, starting with data on job creation and economic development. The Gates grant is to develop a blueprint for the structure of the organization required to implement the foundation’s National Data Initiative.

Congratulations to Federica Bianco, Greg Dobler and the rest of the UO team. They have been awarded a $500k ARPA-E IDEAS grant titled “Grid Dynamics and Energy Consumption Patterns through Remote Observations of City Light.”

Julia’s Advanced Data Research Facility is going through FedRAMP assessment, a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services; the team had a successful meeting with auditors last week. They will be starting up CUSP data facility newsletter again for more transparency with wider CUSP group.

Soilán, M., Truong-Hong, L., Riveiro, B., Laefer, D.F. (2017) Automatic extraction of road features in urban environments using dense ALS data. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 64, 226–236, doi:10.1016/j.jag.2017.09.010. The paper develops a methodology that extracts semantics from data acquired with aerial laser scanner, compares road marking detection between aerial and terrestrial laser scanners, and uses dense 3D aerial data for the detection of small urban features.

Bello, Juan Pablo, Charlie Mydlarz, and Justin Salamon. “Sound Analysis in Smart Cities.” In Computational Analysis of Sound Scenes and Events, pp. 373-397. Springer, Cham, 2018.

Wang, Lingjing, Cheng Qian, Constantine Kontokosta, and Stanislav Sobolevsky. “Structure of 311 Service Requests as a Signature of Urban Location.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.06660(2016). The paper demonstrates that 311 Service Requests data can be used to monitor and predict socioeconomic performance of urban neighborhoods, allowing urban stakeholders to quantify the impacts of their interventions.

Huy Vo and Tim Savage will be heading to Seattle in November to the Inaugural Tech Conference of the National Association of Business Economists. Their poster and paper, Deep Learning and Finance: Here We Go Again, shows that deep learning is no better using two workhorse models in empirical finance than much simpler approaches. But deep learning comes at considerable computational cost, even with the most sophisticated architectures available. A link to the paper will be available after the conference.