Student Learning Hub: Essentials of Data Acquisition for Transportation Analysis
2023-11-10 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Instructor: Vivian Otieno, Texas Southern University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Beginner level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Friday November 10th, 12-1pm

Description: Essentials of Data Acquisition for Transportation Analysis involves the collection, processing, and analysis of data about traffic patterns, vehicle movements, and other factors that can be useful in the transportation industry. This course will cover types of data acquisition systems, the technologies used in data acquisition, the advantages and disadvantages of data collection systems, and how the collected data is used in the transportation industry to improve the system and make it better.

Student Learning Hub: Fireside Chat
2024-02-21 15:30 - 16:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Chris is a transportation planning professional with over 10 years of experience in the industry. He has led both regional and statewide transportation planning efforts, as well as managed several sub-area and corridor studies. In his role with AirSage, Chris advises public agency and consulting clients on how to leverage mobile device and connected vehicle data for more informed decision-making. With a diverse portfolio in developing cutting-edge decision-support tools and data-driven methodologies, he consistently champions innovative approaches to address complex transportation challenges. Chris holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and Economics, complemented by a Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Kansas.

Light refreshments will be provided! If you cannot attend in person, join via Zoom

SLH: Introduction to database systems and SQL
2024-03-28 12:00 - 13:00
Instructor: Ziyue Feng, New York University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Beginner level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Thursday, March 28th, 12:00 pm -1:00 pm ET
Description: Databases have become indispensable in our daily lives. In this one-hour session, we’ll cover the fundamental concepts of database systems and Structured Query Language (SQL). Additionally, we are going to have a hands-on session with SQL to help you become familiar with data extraction techniques.
RSVP Link: Here

SLH: Building Interactive Maps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
2024-04-18 12:00 - 13:00
Instructor: Hannah Bonestroo, New York University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Beginner level: No prior experience required. Basic website development knowledge is preferred.
Schedule: Thursday, April 18th, 12:00 pm -1:00 pm ET
Description: In this one-hour course, you will learn how to create a basic interactive online map using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. These essential web development tools will allow you to showcase your research findings to a wider, non-technical audience. While this course will only cover the very basics, we will discuss how further mastering these tools can open up a world of opportunity for data visualization.
RSVP Link: Here

SLH: Analyzing scope and limitations of using GeoAI Toolbox available in ArcGIS Pro/Online
2024-04-25 12:00 - 13:00
Instructor: Komal Gulati, North Carolina A&T State University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Beginner level: Basic GIS and AI knowledge is preferred.
Schedule: Thursday, April 25th, 1:00 pm -2:00 pm ET
Description: Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) offer transformative capabilities for handling and analyzing geospatial data. This course will introduce you to the essentials of GeoAI, including its significance and range of applications, followed by a detailed walkthrough of the ArcGIS Pro environment and the GeoAI Toolbox. You’ll gain hands-on experience in leveraging deep learning for geospatial analysis, from preparing training datasets to executing model inferencing, culminating in a practical exercise aimed at detecting infrastructure vulnerable to landslides in the island of Grenada.
RSVP Link: Here

CUE Minors Info Session
2024-09-17 12:30 - 14:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
The Civil and Urban Engineering Department is hosting a Minor Preview event on Tuesday, September 17th from 1230-2pm. This is a great opportunity for you to learn about the minors offered in our department that are available to all of you, no matter what your major is!
Registration is required, see link below.

Student Learning Hub: Comprehensive Urban Data Collection Using Drones: From Licensing to Advanced Sensor Applications
2024-10-11 13:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Tu Lan & Vivaldi Rinaldi, New York University
Beginner level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Friday, October 11, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET
Description: Drones are becoming an invaluable tool for urban data collection, offering a wide range of applications from traffic monitoring to environmental analysis. This course introduces participants to the full scope of using drones for traffic data collection, starting with the necessary FAA licensing and airspace regulations, followed by practical guidance on drone operation and control. We’ll explore the different sensors and gimbals that can be equipped on drones, such as cameras, thermal imaging, and LiDAR, and their respective applications in collecting urban data. This session provides a comprehensive understanding of how drones can be utilized for diverse data-driven urban analyses.

Student Learning Hub: Where Are All the Robots, and Why Aren't There More of Them?
2024-10-23 13:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Irving Fang, New York University
Beginner level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Wednesday, Oct 23th, 2024 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Description: In the talk, we will discuss some of the latest progress in robotic applications over the last few years and the technology behind them. We will also discuss the current obstacles to an even wider spread of robots and the technical details involved.

TransportationCamp NYC 2024
2024-10-26 09:30 - 17:00 | 370 Jay Street
TransportationCamp NYC will be held on Saturday, October 26th at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering in Downtown Brooklyn. Join us to discuss all things transportation and connect with professionals, students, and enthusiasts alike!
TransportationCamp is an unconference – every session is planned, proposed, and led by attendees like you. It’s the perfect opportunity to share your transportation passion with a diverse gathering of individuals from our multidisciplinary industry.
TransportationCamp welcomes all attendees, whether you’re a planner, software developer, engineer, student, transportation professional, community member, policymaker, or just excited about mobility!

STEM Day 2024!
2024-11-08 10:00 - 15:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201

Student Learning Hub: Online Optimization Meets Urban Transportation
2024-11-08 13:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Tao Li, New York University
Beginner level: No prior experience required. Basic optimization knowledge would be helpful but not required.
Description: Urban transportation networks are complex and dynamic, and as a result, offline planning alone may not ensure effective real-time management. Therefore, this course introduces online optimization methods with a focus on transportation applications. We’ll start with gradient descent in conventional convex optimization, move to online gradient descent, and briefly explore multi-agent online learning and associated equilibrium convergence. We’ll also discuss challenges in deploying online optimization in urban transportation.

Student Learning Hub: Causal Inference – Difference in Differences Regression and Its Application in Transportation Research
2024-11-15 13:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Yanchao Li, New York University
Beginner level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Friday, Nov 15th, 2024 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Description: In this course, we will discuss the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method, a causal inference tool widely used across various research fields to estimate the impact of policy changes or other interventions while controlling for confounding factors. You will learn about its application in transportation research, with a recent study evaluating the effectiveness of congestion policies as an example.

The Story of the BQE
2024-12-05 18:00 - 20:00 | El Puente, 211 S 4th Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11211, United States
You are cordially invited to El Puente for a gathering to listen together to oral histories from elders and youth in communities across Brooklyn and Queens. Oral history facilitators Mitra Bonshahi and Adriana Gallardo will present audio excerpts from conversations between friends, neighbors, and family members about the impact of the BQE on their lives. Participants will be invited to share their experiences and hopes for the future of their neighborhoods. Space is limited and registration is required. This event is jointly organized by El Puente and the Institute for Public Architecture.

Ikos x C2SMARTER: The Future of Railways
2024-12-11 17:00 - 20:00 | Kimmel Center, Room 914, 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY, 10012, United States
This engaging event will take place on December 11th at 5pm, concluding with a cocktail reception, where you can connect with industry leaders and peers. During the conference, we’ll explore the innovations and challenges shaping the future of the railway sector.
Join top experts as they share insights on sustainable practices, emerging technologies, and what lies ahead for the industry. Seats are limited, save yours today to be part of these forward-thinking discussions and exchange ideas with top professionals in the field.

SLH: Understanding Travel Demand through Passively-generated Mobile Data: a Python-based Mobility Analysis Workshop
2025-03-07 13:00 - 14:00
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.

2025 Women in Transportation Panel & Networking
2025-03-12 18:00 - 19:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
This year’s panelists are Dr. Semiha Ergan, Professor at NYU; Geline Canayon, Senior Project Manager at Aimsun & Vice President of ITE MET Section; and Alia Kasem, Senior Data Scientist at NYC DOT & Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter College. The discussion will be moderated by NYU PhD Candidate Zerun Liu.

Light refreshments will be provided! Register for the Zoom here.

SLH: An Introduction to Multi-agent Driving Simulation with GPUDrive
2025-03-14 12:00 - 13:00
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 at https://github.com/Emerge-Lab/gpudrive/tree/main

SLH: Discrete Choice Modeling for Travel Behavior Analysis: From Multinomial Logit to More Advanced Forms
2025-04-11 12:00 - 13:00
Abstract: 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.

Fireside Chat with David Hammer, co-founder of Popwheels
2025-04-23 14:00 - 15:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
This student-moderated 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!

Summer Programs Welcome Lunch!
2025-07-01 12:30 - 13:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201

Seminar: Improving the Quality of Urban Public Transport: Lessons Learned from a Novel Use of GPS Data
2025-07-08 13:00 - 14:00
In Italy, public transport is typically operated by private companies under service contracts including penalties for non-compliance. Therefore, detecting anomalous traffic days is key to fairly assigning delay responsibility for buses operating in mixed traffic: operators should not be penalized on days of exceptional traffic conditions. To address this, harmonic average speeds of vehicles are used to cluster hours of the day exhibiting similar traffic patterns. For any of such traffic states, a Generalized Additive Model is fit to the available speed percentiles in order to detect anomalous days. A case study relying on GPS data is presented for the city of Trieste.

Presented by Andrea Mecchina, PhD candidate, University of Trieste, Italy

New York Reinforcement Learning Workshop (NYRL)
2025-09-12
Join leading researchers from academia and industry for the inaugural NYRL Workshop. Connect, collaborate, and explore the latest advances in reinforcement learning with the vibrant New York metropolitan RL community.
Co-organized by Amazon, Columbia Business School (CBS), and NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

2025 Sustainable Cities Summit: Day 2
2025-09-25 08:00 - 18:00 | Kimmel Center, Room 914, 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY, 10012, United States
We are proud to support the second annual Sustainable Cities Summit in partnership with Climate Group and NYC Climate Week. This event brings together various experts from multiple organizations to discuss climate-forward cities and mainstream climate action for a sustainable future.
Discover how design, data, and collaboration are reshaping New York’s future—and inspiring cities around the world. As part of #ClimateWeekNYC, Sidara companies are joining forces with NYU to host a full-day summit focused on implementable solutions for healthier, more sustainable urban living. The event feature leading experts from TYLin, Introba, Perkins & Will, and Currie & Brown, alongside thought leaders from NYU, MIT, C40 Cities, the City of New York, and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator.

Fall 2025 Kickoff!
2025-10-09 16:30 - 18:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201

NYU Tandon and Verizon present: AI and You
2025-10-10 08:00 - 12:00 | Pfizer Auditorium, 5 MetroTech, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Join NYU Tandon and Verizon at an event to learn about AI and how it is involved in your everyday lives. Speakers include: Emily Black, Joseph Chow, Rumi Chunara, Emilia David, Ashley Greenspan, Shri Iyer, Stacy Matlen, Shema Mbyirukira, Maurizio Porfiri!

Author Talk: A Conversation with Michael M. Greenburg
2025-10-16 18:00 - 19:00 | Dibner Library, 5 MetroTech, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
This Thursday is the NYU Press Author Talk with Mr. Michael Greenburg. The book focuses on William LeMessurier, the structural engineer who discovered a fatal flaw in his building’s design and his decision to blow the whistle on himself. Please make sure you register for the event here if you plan to attend.
Food & refreshments provided.

Seminar: Self-driving Vehicles as Transit in US Settings: Complementing Buses and Trains with Demand-responsive SAVs
2025-10-21 12:30 - 13:30
ABSTRACT: Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) can deliver door-to-door (D2D), first-mile last-mile (FMLM) and dynamic ride-sharing (DRS or pooled-ride) services in many cities today. This 3-part presentation explores potential improvements in US travel and transit systems by simulating interactions between fixed-route and on-demand SAV services across the Chicago and Austin regions. The first study microsimulates SAVs providing fixed-route, fixed-stop service alongside private automobiles. System costs for each traveler type are computed across different demand profiles, SAV sizes (seat counts), and other dimensions; and smaller SAVs reduce corridor costs across most scenarios.
The second uses POLARIS to mesoscopically simulate D2D plus FMLM and autonomous-bus services across the 20-county Chicago region’s hundreds of train stations, thousands of bus stops, and millions of travelers. Assuming fares of $0.50 per passenger-mile and 1 SAV for every 40 residents, this mode is predicted to attract 15% of person-trips and lower household vehicle ownership by 40%. Adding FMLM service raises the region’s traditional transit (bus + train) split from 5.4% to 6.3%, with each SAV serving 12% more trip requests per day. Automating the bus system (and halving headways, with half the seats per bus) does little to mode splits. The third study simulates a full replacement of buses with autonomous services across the 6-county Austin region. Using the region’s bus stops as pickup and drop-off points, the transit fleet size falls by 10% or more, thanks to coordination in trip services. Subsidizing SAV fleet managers to serve current bus demand emerges as the region’s most cost-effective and welfare-improving transit option.
BIO: Kara Kockelman is a registered professional engineer and holds a PhD, MS, and BS in civil engineering, a master’s in city planning, and a minor in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Kockelman has been a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin for 27 years, and is Associate Site Director of the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Efficient Vehicles and Sustainable Transportation Systems and an MIT Mobility Fellow. She has authored over 240 journal articles (and two books), and her primary research interests include planning for shared and autonomous vehicle systems, the statistical modeling of urban systems, energy and climate issues, the economic impacts of transport policy, and crash occurrence and consequences. Her and her students’ work can be found at www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman. They hope you will join them each year in our world’s carbon-free, cost-free Bridging Transportation Researchers conference: https://bridgingtransport.org/.

transportationcamp 2025
2025-10-25 09:00 - 18:00

Student Learning Hub: Introduction to Online Recommendation Systems: From Predict-Sort Architecture to Real-Time Feature Service
2025-11-07 12:00 - 13:00
This session introduces how modern online recommendation systems, like TikTok shop, deliver personalized content in real time. I’ll walk through the overall system architecture and then focus on the predict-sort stage, explaining how BFS (Bytedance Feature Service) and UDA (User Data Accessor) enable large-scale feature computation using a DAG-based (Directed Acyclic Graph) operator framework and a domain-specific language (DSL). Participants will gain insight into how these components work together to achieve millisecond-level predictions. Hosted by NYU’s Hongdao Meng!

Urban Tech Summit 2025 - Adaptive Intelligence: Activating Urban AI
2025-11-11 - 2025-11-12 | Verizon Executive Education Center, 2 West Loop Road, NYC, NY, 10044
Hear from leading experts on how urban tech can help cities do more with less as they deal with uncertainty and prepare for future shocks.

Cornell Tech’s Urban Tech Summit returns on November 11-12, 2025, focusing on the theme of “Adaptive Intelligence: Activating Urban AI.” Organized by the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, this year’s Summit will explore quick wins and ways cities can begin to assess, test, and amplify innovations in artificial intelligence for rapid impact.

NYU Prof. Sarah Kaufman will be featured on a panel: New York City has long been shaped by automation. Traffic signals organize the streets and telephone switches connect our boroughs. As autonomous vehicles begin piloting on city roads, a new wave of systems is posed to transform urban life. This session will examine how NYC is navigating this shift through policy, pilot programs, and planning, while also considering broader trends in urban robotics that will define the next generation of automation in cities.
