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Webinar: Prof. Morteza Bagheri, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST)
2024-08-16 11:30 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
Hosted by Morteza Bagheri, Associate Professor, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST)
Recently, the United States has faced several significant freight train derailments involving hazardous materials (HAZMAT), raising serious concerns about rail safety. This seminar investigates various approaches to mitigate the risks associated with HAZMAT transport by rail. Through this seminar, we aim to explain the critical importance of effective risk management in HAZMAT transportation and emphasize the necessity of collaboration among all stakeholders to ensure everyone’s safety.

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.

Transportation & Urban Systems Fall Welcome Event
2024-09-17 17:00 - 18:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Come meet your fellow students and faculty, learn about upcoming courses, programs, and research opportunities in transportation and urban systems, and eat snacks!

Mass Transit & Climate Change
2024-09-26 09:30 - 11:00 | Kimmel Center, Room 914, 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY, 10012, United States
Public transportation plays a critical role in the fight against climate change. Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for about 28% of the U.S. total. Of that, public transportation contributes little, but it plays a critical role in enabling mode shift. Reducing emissions and improving air quality in all modes, including transit, is also important to counter the effects of climate change. With excessive flooding and extreme heat on the rise, climate change is challenging our transportation networks. In response, the MTA recently published its Climate Resilience Roadmap, a comprehensive framework to fortify the transit system against the impacts of climate change. With increased funding, FTA is expanding public transportation’s role in mitigating climate effects, making a record investment in low- and no-emission technology, promoting more equitable transit-oriented development and fostering resiliency through grant programs. The NYU Rudin Center for Transportation presents an expert panel to discuss strategies that will enable our transit system to adapt and expand.
Panelists
Veronica Vanterpool, Acting Administrator, Federal Transportation Administration
Jamie Torres-Springer, President, MTA Construction & Development
Tom Prendergast, Executive Vice President & New York Metro Chief Executive, AECOM
Moderator: Sarah M. Kaufman, Director, NYU Rudin Center for Transportation
This event is sponsored by AECOM, with additional support from NYU C2SMARTER, a Tier 1 University Transportation Center, and the NYU Climate Change Initiative Seed Grant.

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.

NYC V2X & AI Symposium
2024-10-17 10:00 - 2024-10-18 17:00 | Pfizer Auditorium, 5 MetroTech, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States

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!

KAIST CEE x NYU CUE Research Seminar
2024-10-28 14:30 - 16:00

Webinar: Spatio-temporal Adaptive AI for Urban Mobility Modeling
2024-10-30 10:00 - 11:00
Abstract: Rapidly developing mobile and sensor networks are accumulating massive volumes of human mobility data in cities. Predictive modeling on these data is a fundamental problem in building decision support systems for various urban and transportation applications. In the real world, such spatio-temporal data show multifold heterogeneity over space and non-stationarity over time, which makes the prediction task especially challenging. My research focuses on developing adaptive AI algorithms (e.g., meta learning) to enhance the robustness of mobility prediction models. Making robust predictions across space and time lays a foundation for not only next generation mobility services, but also emergency response to adverse events, including traffic accidents, pandemic lockdown, and natural disasters.
Bio: Zhaonan Wang joined NYU Shanghai in Fall 2024 as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor jointly appointed by Urban Studies and Computer Science. Zhaonan obtained his PhD degree in 2022 from the University of Tokyo, advised by Ryosuke Shibasaki; during his PhD study, he also visited the research group led by Flora Salim, Cisco Chair at UNSW CSE. After graduation, Zhaonan did his postdoctoral research on Spatial AI under the supervision of Shaowen Wang and Jiawei Han at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (CyberGIS Center & NSF I-GUIDE). Zhaonan’s research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area between urban & AI, and he’s been published in top-tier AI and data science venues, including AAAI, KDD, WWW, CIKM, ICDE, AIJ, TKDE. He’s also been invited to serve as a Program Committee member and awarded travel grants for multiple times. During his PhD, Zhaonan won a MEXT (Japanese government) scholarship in Top Global University Initiative, Top-10 candidates in KDD Cup 2019 Humanity RL Track, and best resource paper runner-up at ACM CIKM 2021. He also had close collaboration with industry, including the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST in Japan)’s AI Research Center, Yahoo Japan, and Toyota.

Webinar: Tension Stiffening Related to Cracking and Deflection of Reinforced Concrete
2024-11-06 17:00 - 18:00
Hardy Cross once wrote that “strength is essential and otherwise unimportant” to emphasize it makes little difference what other attributes a structure has if it is not sufficiently strong. Looking at this from a different perspective one could say that “strength is essential and otherwise unimportant … when serviceability governs” to ensure the structure performs adequately under the day-to-day service conditions once we know the structure has adequate strength. In fact, certain types of structures such as elevated slabs and fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) reinforced concrete members are often stronger than needed once serviceability requirements are satisfied, and in these types of cases the structure is designed for serviceability first and then checked for strength. Hence, safety and serviceability related to cracking and deflection play an important role in the design of concrete structures.
This presentation is focused on deflection of reinforced concrete. The role of cracking, tension stiffening and shrinkage in understanding deflection behavior of reinforced concrete is explored. In particular, emphasis is placed on the pitfalls of ignoring the concrete shrinkage. Rationale and justification are provided for the recent adoption by most codes in North America of a new approach for the effective member stiffness used to calculate deflection. Work is presently underway with colleagues from Rutgers to extend this approach to prestressed concrete.
Presented by Peter H. Bischoff, Department of Civil Engineering, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada
Peter H. Bischoff is an Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, where he has contributed to teaching and research in reinforced and prestressed concrete. He is a fellow of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) and has served on numerous ACI Committees during his career. Dr. Bischoff is a recognized expert in serviceability of concrete structures related to deflection and has received several awards for work in this area. He has also been involved in development of a design code for fiber reinforced concrete (FRC) and UHPC that has been implemented into the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code S6.

Seminar: Alternative Fuel Vehicle Evacuation and Refueling Infrastructure Location Planning
2024-11-07 14:15 - 15:15 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Abstract: Climate change exacerbates the frequency and impacts of hazardous events, such as hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires. During emergencies that require preemptive evacuation, drivers using alternative fuel vehicles can be vulnerable under conventional evacuation routes that do not provide access to refueling and charging stations on their way to safety. In this talk, I will discuss a novel evacuation routing problem considering multiple fuel vehicle types. An evacuation tree problem with hop constraints that capture each vehicle fuel type & refueling/charging needs as they are routed to safety is introduced. Large-scale network numerical experiments in South Florida are conducted and planning insights are presented. Even though refueling and charging infrastructure is deployed to meet habitual travel demand, in the second part of my talk I will focus on the extension of the alt-fuel evacuation problem to decide the location of emergency refueling and/or charging infrastructure on the transportation network.
Bio: Dr. Kontou is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on planning sustainable transportation systems. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, focusing on transportation systems, from University of Florida, and holds a M.Sc. from Virginia Tech, and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in the same field. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Renewable Energy Lab and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Kontou is a 2023 NSF CAREER awardee, a 2023 CUTC-Cambridge Systematics New Faculty Award recipient, a 2022 Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Faculty Scholar, a 2021 US Frontiers of Engineering Invited Participant, and a Levenick Sustainability Teaching Fellow at the University of Illinois. She is a member of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Alternative Transportation Fuels and Technologies and an Associate Editor of the Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment journal.

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

Webinar: Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Infrastructure Safety with Robust Vibration-based Monitoring
2024-11-08 10:30 - 11:30
Abstract: The idea that the majority of bridges have reached the end of their service life has become widely accepted. The need for continuous monitoring of a large number of structures has become both a duty and a burden for administrations and operators. While technological advancements enable the acquisition of numerous structural parameters, effectively harnessing the vast amount of data generated is not a straightforward task. Therefore, an automated tool that can conduct end-to-end analysis with minimal effort and cost is crucial. The presented solution is applied to a monumental reinforced concrete arch bridge, and instrumented with tailored monitoring system, from sensors to the cloud-based dashboard. Modal parameters such as vibration modes, modal shapes, and damping are determined using the Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) algorithm, specifically 2 nd order blind identification, in an automated process. The analysis is performed through robust software for automatic modal identification, providing high quality results purified by any environmental effects. Finally, by enhancing the potential of the cloud for measurement data storage, the implementation of advanced data management tools is being considered as interesting emerging future prospects.
Bio: Giacomo Imposa is a structural engineer with a PhD in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) from Iuav University of Venice, Italy, specializing in dynamic identification of masonry structures and bridges. His academic pursuits have primarily unfolded in Italy, with a notable stint in Portugal, in Guimaraes, where he was hosted by Prof. Lourenco, the most important expert in the world regarding Heritage buildings. At Kistler, since January, Giacomo has been globally engaged in advancing new bridge-related applications concerning structural monitoring in his capacity as a business developer. His responsibilities encompass the entire measurement chain, spanning from sensors to data, encapsulated through bridge reporting.

STEM Day 2024!
2024-11-08 10:30 - 14:30
Details to come!

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.

NYU SPS Distinguished Speaker Series: Nicholas Lalla
2024-11-14 19:00 - 21:00
Nicholas Lalla is an urbanist, executive leader, and author working at the intersection of economic development and emerging technology. He partners with cities to build strategies and initiatives that catalyze inclusive growth. Lalla founded Tulsa Innovation Labs, an organization deploying more than $200 million to build northeast Oklahoma’s innovation economy. He previously led Cyber NYC for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a cybersecurity initiative the New York Times called “among the nation’s most ambitious.” Earlier in his career, at the Urban Land Institute, he launched a national resilience program for cities
combatting the effects of climate change. Lalla has written for Newsweek, Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Next City, among other outlets. His book Reinventing the Heartland is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He can be found online at nicholaslalla.com.

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.

Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Henry Liu
2024-11-19 11:30 - 12:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Earning public trust in highly automated vehicles, and greater understanding of how they operate, is paramount as automakers and their suppliers push to put cars and trucks on the road that can safely operate without a driver. While complex automated vehicle safety testing programs are being implemented across industry, they are generally proprietary, and their structure remains hidden from public view. To fill in this gap, we developed the Mcity Safety Assessment Program, a two-part protocol for testing the behavior competence of automated vehicles before their widespread use on public roads. The first part of the assessment is a “Driver’s License Test” that measures the basic behavioral competency of an automated vehicle through random scenario generation. The second part is a “Driving Intelligence Test” that challenges AI-based algorithms with a diverse set of scenarios representing those that most often result in crashes, injuries and fatalities. Mcity believes the Mcity Safety Assessment Program could serve as the blueprint for a publicly inspectable behavioral safety framework, helping industry bring automated vehicle technology to market in a manner that truly benefits society. In this talk, we will also highlight Mcity 2.0, a facility funded by the National Science Foundation, that aims to build a digital infrastructure providing researchers remote access to the Mcity mixed reality testing environment for highly automated vehicles.

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.

Seminar: Positive Feedback in Transportation Systems
2024-12-10 12:30 - 13:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
This talk will present tractable models of road traffic and transit which feature positive feedback, whereby my travel choice (e.g., whether to travel, what mode to take, etc.) leads others to make the same choice. Positive feedback amplifies policy impacts and can lead surprising results, such as a toll that raises traffic demand and a road expansion that cuts it. Overall, the talk will demonstrate the insights possible from incorporating economic thinking into detailed engineering models. I will also show my group’s AI chatbot that answers questions about transit systems.
Since 2018, Lewis Lehe has been an assistant professor in the transportation systems group at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the economics and measurement of travel in cities. He holds an MA in Transport Economics of University of Leeds, and MS and PhD degrees in civil engineering from UC Berkeley. He serves on TRB’s Economics and Finance Committee, as the Treasurer of Findings Press and as Communications Officer of the International Transportation Economics Association.

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.

Digital Twins Workshop @ TRB 104th Annual Meeting
2025-01-05 13:30 - 16:30
Digital Twins as a Highly Responsive Decision Support tool for Management and Planning of Transportation Systems Operating Under Stochastic Demand and Supply Conditions This workshop will focus on the development of digital twins as a decision support tool for varying applications with time scales ranging from the near real-time operations and management to long-term planning of complex transportation systems. Moreover, the role of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning that will be required to be incorporated into the digital-twin applications to make them operationally feasible and effective will also be discussed.
The ultimate goal of this workshop is to bring together experts from transportation agencies, academia, as well as the industry to have a highly interactive discussion of the most important research and implementation opportunities and challenges to improve the safety and efficiency of complex transportation systems.

8th NYUAD Transportation Symposium
2025-01-10 08:00 - 17:00 | 19 Washington Square North, 19 Washington Square North, NY, NY
The main theme of the 8th NYUAD Transportation Symposium is Transportation and AI: Opportunities and Challenges. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the transportation industry, by increasing efficiency and accessibility, but it also presents several challenges that need to be addressed, including safety and ethical constraints. The 8th NYUAD Transportation Symposium, held at 19 Washington Square in New York City, will be a forum for the exchange of ideas among scholars who are active in these areas of research.

Seminar: Klaus Bogenberger/C2SMARTER Research Exchange
2025-01-10 15:00 - 17:30
The MobilityCoin is a new currency for paying for all your daily trips within a metropolitan area. At the beginning of each year, the MobilityCoin Agency allocates a specific number of coins to each person. The price of a trip depends on the mode, traffic state, occupancy, and trip length or dura@on. If you make a trip with a vehicle or public transport you pay a dynamic price with MobilityCoins. The use of environmentally friendly modes like biking or walking is incentivized by earning MobilityCoins. All users are allowed to buy and sell MobilityCoins in the MobilityCoin Market, which is regulated by the MobilityCoin Agency. It controls the market volume and price limits, it limits the number of coins a person can buy or sell and defines a transaction fee. The MobilityCoin system is an all-in-one approach, uniting different traffic management measures – it simultaneously optimizes supply and demand of the transportation system to accomplish environmental, social, and economic objectives, e.g., emission reduction, livability of urban space, public participation, and infrastructure funding. The system influences infrastructure supply, mobility tool ownership, and mode choice. It is open to all types of technology, enables the fair financing of new infrastructure, and provides an adjustable, market-based and reliable pricing mechanism for mobility in limited urban space. The MobilityCoin system creates a transparent decision-making process and gradually re-allocates mobility space by enabling public participation. It also accounts for social acceptance and fairness by allocating a mobility budget to each person according to their mobility needs rather than their income or wealth.

Seminar: Gittins Indices for Cost-aware and Freeze-thaw Bayesian Optimization
2025-02-18 14:00 - 15:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Presented by Qian Xie, Cornell
Hyperparameter optimization is crucial in real-world applications such as machine learning model training, robotics control, material design, and plasma physics. In transportation, hyperparameter optimization plays a significant role in applications like traffic flow prediction, dynamic pricing, route planning, and public transportation scheduling, where complex models need to be fine-tuned to achieve optimal performance. These scenarios are often modeled as black-box functions, which take hyperparameters as inputs and output performance metrics. Bayesian optimization is a powerful framework for efficiently optimizing such black-box functions, especially when evaluations are time-consuming or expensive. However, practical factors such as varying function evaluation costs and observable partial feedback during function evaluation remain under-explored in this framework. My research leverages Gittins indices, which are inherently cost-aware and feedback-aware, by drawing connections to Pandora’s Box problems and Markovian/Bayesian bandits, where Gittins indices are Bayesian optimal.
In the first half of my talk, I will present my published work, which adapts Gittins indices into a cost-aware acquisition function class for Bayesian optimization, demonstrating competitive empirical performance, particularly in medium-to-high dimensions. In the second half, I will discuss my ongoing work on developing Gittins indices for freeze-thaw Bayesian optimization involving decisions on early stopping and switching of hyperparameter tests based on partial feedback.

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

Seminar: Spatiotemporal Drought Analysis and Prediction: From Pattern Tracking to Impact Assessment
2025-04-11 09:30 - 10:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
The increasing frequency and severity of drought events worldwide demand innovative approaches that can effectively characterize, track, predict, and assess impacts of the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of water scarcity. This presentation explores how integrated spatiotemporal methodologies enhance drought monitoring, forecasting, and impact assessment across diverse global regions.
Our research demonstrates a logical progression from fundamental spatiotemporal drought tracking to advanced prediction methodologies and practical impact assessment. Beginning with approaches to construct drought tracks through space and time in India, we identify key drought characteristics including onset location, pathway, duration, severity, and rotation. These spatial patterns reveal critical information about drought migration and evolution that provide insights into underlying climate and land surface drivers.
Building on this foundation of spatiotemporal drought characterization, we apply machine learning techniques to predict drought occurrence and intensity across Kazakhstan’s diverse climate zones. By utilizing non-contiguous drought analysis for feature extraction, machine learning models achieve remarkable prediction accuracy at lead times of up to six months in these arid and semi-arid regions. Additionally, deep learning techniques enhanced with ensemble empirical mode decomposition substantially improve soil moisture anomaly forecasting in China’s Huai River basin by better capturing the complex non-stationary time series characteristics of drought evolution.
Beyond monitoring and forecasting, we extend our approach to predict drought impacts on agriculture in Northeast India using spatiotemporal drought patterns as input for crop yield forecasting. This methodology integrates polynomial regression and artificial neural network models, where the spatial extent and temporal evolution of drought areas serve as key predictive features. The results demonstrate that changes in drought area and its temporal aggregation provide an important pre-processing alternative for implementing machine learning models for drought impact prediction.
These integrated approaches, spanning regions from Central Asia to South and East Asia, contribute to a more robust understanding of drought dynamics by revealing how drought moves and evolves in space and time, enabling more effective early warning systems and supporting agricultural decision-making in increasingly water-stressed environments. Across all applications and geographical contexts, the spatiotemporal properties of drought emerge as key features that significantly enhance the performance of machine learning prediction models.
Bio: Dr. Gerald A. Corzo is an Associate Professor of Hydroinformatics at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, where he leads cutting-edge research that uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to address critical challenges in climate adaptation and water resource management. His research on hydrometeorological extremes has helped us better understand, predict, and respond to floods and droughts across the globe. As Principal Investigator on significant EU-funded projects like EU-WATCH, Climate Intelligent (EU-CLINT) and EU-NAIADES, Dr. Corzo has developed cutting-edge AI-driven tools that enhance decision-making in water management and climate resilience. He currently serves as an Editor of the Journal of Hydrology (Elsevier) and was recognized with the prestigious IAHS Tison Award for his contributions to hydrological sciences in 2012. Dr. Corzo’s interdisciplinary approach integrates environmental science with advanced computational technologies to create practical solutions aligned with sustainable development goals, particularly for enhancing ecosystem resilience in vulnerable communities worldwide.
