Student Learning Hub: Introduction to Online Recommendation Systems: From Predict-Sort Architecture to Real-Time Feature Service
2025-11-07 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
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!

Seminar: Inverse Learning and Intervention of Transportation Network Equilibrium
2025-11-12 13:00 - 14:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Abstract:
By 2035, nearly half of all new vehicles in the United States will be connected, generating unprecedented volumes of mobility data. Leveraging emerging connected mobility data, this talk establishes an AI-enabled inverse learning framework to transform the transportation network equilibrium modeling paradigm, which has been the foundation of system planning and management for over seventy years.
Traditional transportation network equilibrium models are time-consuming and costly to calibrate. This talk presents the inverse learning of user equilibrium as a novel framework for constructing nonparametric, context-dependent network equilibrium models directly from empirical travel patterns. We compare nonparametric and parametric approaches, mathematically clarifying the trade-offs among behavioral realism, data availability, and computational cost. The proposed neural-network-based nonparametric framework can automatically discover any well-posed network equilibrium model given
sufficient data, without relying on predefined behavioral assumptions. In contrast, the semi-parametric approach is more computationally tractable, as it simplifies the inverse learning problem into a sequence of convex optimizations.
Finally, we apply the inverse learning framework to a long-term network design problem for the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Using real-world crowdsourced data, we learned a context-dependent equilibrium model and introduce a certified, auto-differentiation-accelerated algorithm to solve the resulting distributionally robust bi-level network design problem under contextual uncertainty.
Bio:
Dr. Zhichen Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Civil Engineering. Her research focuses on innovating next-generation modeling and computational tools for mobility and logistics systems, with an emphasis on connectivity, electrification, and automation. She received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and M.S. in Industrial and Operational Engineering from the University of Michigan, and previously served as a Visiting Scientist at General Motors. Dr. Liu is a recipient of the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and was honored as the sole global awardee of the prestigious Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship by the WTS International Foundation.

Student Learning Hub: Building a Scalable Multithreaded Processing System on AWS Cloud
2025-11-21 12:00 - 13:00
This lecture introduces the design and implementation of a serverless multithreaded processing system using AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3. The session covers how to orchestrate parallel tasks, manage state transitions, and scale processing pipelines efficiently on the AWS cloud platform. Emphasis will be placed on cloud-native scalability, fault tolerance, and cost optimization through automation and serverless architecture. Hosted by NYU’s Zhi Jie (Jeffrey) Wang!
