C2SMART Student Learning Hub

What is the Student Learning Hub?

In the fall of 2020, C2SMART launched the Student Learning Hub, free for all affiliated students. Students are able to access learning from a variety of course domains, including data science, computer science, and traffic simulation.

The Hub is designed to offer students hands-on experience to learn the tools and skills they will need as they advance their careers, whether in academia, industry, or within government agencies. 

Interested in presenting? Let us know.

To accomplish this, the Hub operates using four primary pillars of work:

Community

Skill Building

Applied Learning

Job Preparation

Last Semester’s Courses 

  • Instructors: Ekin Ugurel, UW
  • Beginner level: No prior experience required. 
  • Schedule: Friday, March 7th, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET
  • Description: The ubiquity of GPS-equipped mobile devices has enabled the collection of human mobility data with high spatiotemporal granularity. Indeed, there now exists an ecosystem of both data providers and consulting agencies centered around collecting, processing, and extracting insights from this type of data. Though much of the raw data cannot be made public due to privacy-preserving agreements, the academic community can still access geographically aggregated data. This workshop will cover the (Python-based) preprocessing and wrangling of aggregated mobility data in New York state provided by SafeGraph. It will highlight concepts including (but not limited to) origin-destination matrices, the four-step travel demand model, self-selection bias in passively-generated data, and demand prediction. It will also describe how to fuse such data with the American Community Survey (ACS) providing sociodemographic information at the census block group-level. Relevant packages that will be leveraged and explained include GeoPandas and scikit-Mobility. Intermediate familiarity with Python, data structures, and object-oriented programming is recommended.
  • Recording Link: Here.
  • Instructor: Daphne Cornilesse, NYU
  • Hands-on exercise: Yes
  • Beginner level: No prior experience required. 
  • Schedule: Friday, March 14th, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET
  • Description: In this seminar, I will introduce GPUDrive, a high-performance, data-driven driving simulator that operates at 1 million FPS. GPUDrive is built on the Madrona Game Engine and uses GPU acceleration to enable scalable multi-agent simulation. I will discuss how this simulator can be used to train reinforcement learning agents efficiently, drawing from a recent paper where we demonstrate its application to the Waymo Open Motion Dataset. Additionally, I will walk through tutorials on how to set up and use the simulator. The repository can be found here.
  • Recording Link: Here.
    • Instructor: Xiyuan Ren, NYU
    • Beginner level: No prior experience required.
    • Schedule: Friday, April 11th, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET
    • Description: In this course, we will discuss the decision theory of random utility maximization and discrete choice models (DCMs) including multinomial logit (MNL), nested logit (NL), mixed logit (MXL), and agent-based mixed logit (AMXL). You will learn about their applications in travel behavior analysis (e.g., travel mode choice, activity scheduling choice, etc.) and how to build DCMs with long-shape and wide-shape choice datasets in R and Python. A recent study on New York State travel mode choice will be introduced as an example.
    • Recording Link: Here 
    • Beginner level: No prior experience required. 
    • Schedule: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm ET
    • Location: C2SMART Lab, Rogers Hall Room 460
    • Description: This student-moderated hybrid Fireside Chat will feature David Hammer, co-founder of Popwheels, a cutting-edge e-bike battery swap network. David will discuss his career trajectory, the challenges of standing up urban-scale technology in NYC, and more!
    • Zoom Registration Link: Here 

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What have we done so far?

Since Fall 2020, the Student Learning Hub has offered a variety of courses, taught by a range of experts in the transportation field. Over the course of 4 years, we have offered 48 sessions and attracted 822 students, across 46 universities, from 11 countries internationally. We worked with agency and industry partners to deliver programs, provided our students with access to researchers and professionals to learn both professional and academic skills. To learn more about past programs, or to request recordings of past lectures, email us.

In addition to training and skill building, the Student Learning Hub provides our graduate students to explore career options and build a professional network through our What’s the Chatter? event series, which connects students directly to industry partners. 

In this series, C2SMART students interview important industry figures to discuss matters of innovation, research, design, and technological disruption in the transportation sphere.

data reflecting previous SLH topics

Past Programming

To view past Student Learning Hub programs, visit our archive here.

Student Hub Coordinators

Jingqin Gao

Jingqin Gao

Assistant Director

Lizzie Pohl

Research Project Manager