Background & Motivation
Smart cities are dynamic, interconnected systems shaped by both technology and people. They bring together transportation, energy, buildings, and water infrastructure. The mission of this colloquium is to foster interdisciplinary cross-university conversations and collaboration across universities.
Both Columbia University and NYU are located in one of the world’s busiest regions – New York City, which faces a lot of urban challenges nowadays, including growing road congestion, pollution, and faltering infrastructure. The two institutes already have a large number of researchers working to tackle transportation and urban challenges in NYC. In particular, Columbia’s Data Science Institute (DSI) aims to advance data and AI to tackle urgent challenges, improve lives, and empower future innovators, which provides a multi-disciplinary platform to facilitate collaboration across Engineering, GSAPP, SIPA, Business, Climate and Law School. Connected Cities with Smart Mobility Transportation (C2SMART), NYU Tandon’s Transportation Center, uses cities as living laboratories to study challenging transportation problems and find solutions from the unprecedented recent advances in communication and smart technologies.
Academic collaboration has already been happening across campuses, such as the collaboration to establish the COSMOS testbed for wireless communication. We hope to further this collaboration with a more formal colloquium series featuring keynote speakers from academia, industry, and agencies.
Colloquium Framework
The series will be hosted approximately 4 times a year, alternating between NYU C2SMART and Columbia’s DSI. It will be hosted on a Thursday afternoon, with talks starting at 4pm, followed by a reception attended by faculty members from both institutions. The kick-off series will happen on January 22, 2026. For the first few series, we hope to invite academic speakers from within and outside institutes, and then expand our speaker selection to experts from industry (e.g., Waymo, Google, Tesla) and agencies (i.e., DOT, MTA, Mayor’s Office).
It will be in a hybrid format, with faculty members attending in person, and students can join on zoom. We encourage all the faculty members to join in person, for more fruitful discussions.
This colloquium series will be a wonderful opportunity to further broaden the work of both institutes in smart cities and transportation. We hope to ultimately enhance urban infrastructure through AI and technology solutions.
Personnel
Kaan Ozbay
Professor, NYU
Kaan Ozbay
Director, C2SMART
Professor, NYU
