C2SMART Home

Smart Electric Vehicle Charging: Modeling Drivers’ Choices and Autonomous Vehicles’ Strategies
2022-12-02 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
As transportation is increasingly electrified, understanding travel and charging choices of electric vehicle drivers and users of shared electric mobility systems is crucial for service planning and operations. Ultimately, quantitative models of users’ behavior enable the estimation of local and regional demand impinging on transportation and electricity networks and the development of approaches to manage the demand so that such networks can operate efficiently. Developing realistic models of individual behavior to use as “users’ digital twins” in planning and operations is challenging enough, due to the inherent uncertainties of how individuals make everyday choices and their heterogeneity in approaching decisions. Even more challenging is to attempt to anticipate how users might respond to new technologies and changes in infrastructure or services. In this case choice data from systems’ operations or “revealed preference” users’ surveys may not exist, be available only from early adopters, or relate to the system before the change. In this case, often the only option available is to generate new data using choice experiments. In the first part of this seminar, Dr. Daina will present pioneering work adopting these techniques to model electric vehicles driver’s charging choices under smart charging. While in the near term e-mobility is and will be dominated by human drivers, on demand e-mobility services delivered by fleets of autonomous vehicles are on the horizon. Therefore, in the second part of this talk, he will present recent work on reinforcement learning approaches to smart charging management of shared autonomous electric vehicle fleets.
Dr. Nicolò Daina is a Research Scientist in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and a Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Using data science approaches, econometric techniques and experimentation Dr. Daina seeks to characterize and model the behavior of users of integrated transportation and energy systems. By developing realistic behavioral models and embedding them in systems’ simulation and optimization, Dr. Daina’s research aims to harness the flexibility and the cooperation of end users in both planning and operations of integrated transportation and energy systems as they transition to net-zero. Dr. Daina obtained his PhD in Transport from Imperial College London in 2014. Following his PhD, he worked at Imperial College London’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering first as a postdoctoral research associate then as a research fellow. Before moving to Columbia University, Dr. Daina was appointed as a faculty (Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer in Transport Policy) at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in the United Kingdom. Dr. Daina is currently an Honorary Lecturer in the School of Government and Public Policy of the University of Strathclyde. He is also a member of the US’ Transportation Research Board’s Standing Committee on Alternative Fuels and Technologies.

Student Learning Hub: How to develop a survey using Qualtrics: A step-by-step guide
2022-11-18 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Hella Alnajjar, New York University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Beginner level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Friday, November 18, 2022, 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Description: This course is for students who want to learn how to conduct, distribute, and analyze a survey-based study using Qualtrics, a powerful online survey tool, for research purposes. The lesson will include hands-on exercises on how to create sets of questions of various types, import data, set up a display or skip logic for a question, and how to effectively visualize, export and analyze the data collected.

Connected Vehicle Applications: Lessons Learned and Future Research & Deployment Roundtable
2022-11-16 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
The USDOT Connected Vehicle (CV) Pilot Program sought to test vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) applications to improve tranportation systems, mobility, and safety with real-world deployments in New York City, Tampa, and Wyoming.
This roundtable discussion will focus on these recently completed connected vehicle pilots and the lessons learned. Our panelists will feature practitioners, decision-makers, and researchers involved in CV deployments and leading the way for their wide-scale adoption.
This roundtable caps off C2SMART’s State of the Field: Connected Vehicle Applictions series, and there will be a synthesis of prior presentations and a discussion on future directions and applications for research, testing, and deployment.
We look forward to your participation!
Panelists:

Sisinnio Concas serves as Program Director at the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) and Research Associate Professor the University of South Florida (USF) College of Engineering. Dr. Concas has over 20 years of experience as a transportation economist conducting economic impact and benefit-cost analyses for public transportation, airport and roadway projects. Dr. Concas leads CUTR’s Autonomous & Connected Mobility Evaluation (ACME) Program. ACME focuses on producing quick-response solutions to better inform practitioners and policy maker in selecting and prioritizing cost-feasible innovative transportation alternatives. He has performed numerous research projects for the U.S. Federal Transit Administration, Federal Highway Administration, the Florida Department of Transportation, state and local transportation authorities. Dr. Concas leads the Performance Measurement Evaluation and Support of the Tampa CV Pilot Deployment.

Dr. Mohamad Talas is the Deputy Director of ITS System Engineering, New York City Department of Transportation. He brings long standing career experience in traffic engineering and continue with over 27 years in Traffic Engineering and Operation experience in New York City Department of Transportation. He currently serves as the Director for the NYC Department of Transportation ITS project Management, Research and Development where he supervises the Intelligent Transportation System projects and initiatives in New York City. These projects include the development and implementation of the New York City Traffic Computerization System at the Traffic Management Center modernizing and operating over 12,000 signals and the currently deployed Active Traffic Management System in in Manhattan(Midtown In Motion) and NYC Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment. He has earned his PhD in Transportation Planning and Engineering at NYU -Poly University, Master degrees in Transportation, Planning and Engineering and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Billy Chupp is a data analyst and engineer at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. Chupp supports a wide range of projects at the Volpe Center including cloud database and analysis system development and management for DOT’s Chief Data Officer, artificial intelligence and machine learning development initiatives for DOT’s ITS Joint Program Office, and air quality modeling and data analysis projects for the Federal Highway Administration. Mr. Chupp most recently served as the technical lead on Volpe’s independent safety evaluation effort for the three connected vehicle pilot programs in New York City, Tampa, and Wyoming, and continues to support the ITS JPO on data documentation and strategy efforts within the connected vehicle space and beyond.

Dr. Karl Wunderlich holds a joint appointment at Noblis in Washington, DC., serving as both is the Director of the Surface Transportation Division and the Director of the Noblis Autonomous Systems Research Center. He is a key contributor to both research and development projects and technology deployment programs sponsored by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Dr. Wunderlich is an expert in the use of simulation techniques to evaluate the potential impact of emerging technologies to improve traveler mobility or system productivity – including vehicle connectivity, autonomy, and blockchain. He is a published author and patent-holder in orchestrated autonomy, which leverages blockchain to create efficient and collision-free path planning among heterogenous, unfamiliar, and autonomous machines. Dr. Wunderlich holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Kaan Ozbay is a Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, and Director of C2SMART Center, a Tier 1 USDOT University Transportation Center. Dr. Ozbay served as Principal Investigator (PI) of the NYU/C2SMART team as part of the NYCDOT-led New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot, under USDOT’s Connected Vehicle Pilot Program. He joined NYU’s Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in August 2013, and is also Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering, NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and Global Network Professor of Engineering and Computer Science, NYU Shanghai (NYUSH).
Moderated by:
Jingqin (Jannie) Gao completed her Ph.D. in Transportation Planning and Engineering at NYU Tandon, where she works with C2SMART Director Kaan Ozbay. She studied Science and Technology of Optical Information and received her B.S. from Tongji University in China and her M.S in Transportation Planning and Engineering from New York University. Her research interests lie in offline and real-time simulation modeling, big data and machine learning approach for transportation, and transportation economics. She also worked for the New York City Department of Transportation on modeling and data analysis to support the agency’s internal planning, technical review processes and coordinated with external agencies on regional projects since 2012. Jingqin is the former president of NYU’s joint Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS) Student Chapter during 2018-2019, through which she organized various company visits, tech talks, women in transportation events and the 2019 ITE Northeastern District Traffic Bowl.

Student Learning Hub: Machine learning and Deep learning approaches in bridge degradation modeling and forecasting
2022-11-11 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Zhanhang Li, Rutgers University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Wednesday, November 11, 2022, 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Description: This course will provide students with a foundational understanding of machine learning models and degradation processes. With the bridge degradation modeling case study, students will learn about different types of neural networks, their strengths, and context of application. Case studies and live demos will be provided using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) (Multilayer Perceptron [MLP]) and Convolutional neural network (CNN) for bridge rebar degradation modeling.

Workshop: Defining Flood Risk Metrics to Place FloodNet Sensors in New York City
2022-11-10 09:00 - 13:00 | 370 Jay Street, Room 1201, 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn, 11201
Inland and coastal floods caused by severe weather events have always been a threat for New York City (NYC). Only last year, Hurricane Ida brought massive precipitation to the city, shattering historical records for single-hour rainfall. Hurricane Ida’s precipitation exceeded the stormwater network’s capacity, ultimately flooding streets, subways, and homes, and tragically taking the lives of 13 New Yorkers.
The NYU Disaster Risk Analysis Lab, FloodNet Team, and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice are working together to identify NYC’s areas with the highest flood risk to help NYC place FloodNet sensors. NYC FloodNet is a flood data collection program for real-time street-level flood information to city agencies, residents, emergency response teams, and researchers. The city has already installed 29 FloodNet sensors and will install another 500 in priority areas citywide over the next five years.
This workshop will bring together multiple stakeholders to help the city prioritize the areas for deploying NYC FloodNet sensors. To prioritize these areas, we invite emergency responders, city officers, researchers, and disaster risk specialists to propose, discuss, and assess comprehensive risk metrics with a thorough consideration of equity for our communities. By combining multiple stakeholders’ perspectives, we will create a wider picture of flood impacts on the city, assigning a scale of importance to the different risk and equity metrics. The workshop will also be an opportunity to explore how FloodNet sensors can help support many other uses for flood risk management and mitigation to build a more resilient and equitable NYC.
This workshop is sponsored by the NYU Connected Cities with Smart Transportation (C2SMART) Center.
Workshop Schedule
9:00 – 10:00 Presentations
● Welcome
● Overview of Flood Risk in New York City
● Overview of FloodNet Initiative
● Stormwater Resiliency Plan
10:00 – 10:15 Icebreaker activity
A brief activity for self introduction and familiarization among the participants.
10:15 – 11:45 Brainstorming and moderated discussion on three main topics:
● Quantitative risk assessment for floods in New York City
● Equity and environmental justice
● FloodNet data collection and usage
11:50 – 12:30 Quantitative Exercise: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
Individual ranking exercise of available quantitative metrics to assess flood risk in New York City.

Simulation-Based Safety Evaluation Framework for Connected Vehicle Applications for Safety And Operational Measures
2022-11-09 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Proper calibration process is key for traffic safety evaluations using simulation models. Allowing for a with and without comparison under controlled environment that is not directly testable in the field, microsimulation-based approach has drawn considerable attention for the performance evaluation of emerging technologies, including connected vehicle (CV) safety applications. Different from the traditional approaches to evaluate mobility impacts, safety evaluations of such applications demand the simulation models to be well calibrated to match real-world safety conditions. This seminar will present a novel calibration framework which combines traffic conflict techniques and multi-objective stochastic optimization to calibrate the operational and safety measures simultaneously. The conflict distribution of different severity levels categorized by time-to-collision (TTC) is applied as the safety performance measure. Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) algorithm, which can efficiently approximate the gradient of the multi-objective stochastic loss function, is used for model parameters optimization that minimizes the total simulation error of both operational and safety performance measures. A case study will be demonstrated by calibrating a microscopic simulation model to evaluate CV safety applications as a part of the NYC Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program.
Speaker:
Dr. Kaan Ozbay is a Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, and Director of C2SMART Center, a Tier 1 USDOT University Transportation Center. Dr. Ozbay served as Principal Investigator (PI) of the NYU/C2SMART team as part of the NYCDOT-led New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot, under USDOT’s Connected Vehicle Pilot Program. He joined NYU’s Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in August 2013, and is also Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering, NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and Global Network Professor of Engineering and Computer Science, NYU Shanghai (NYUSH).

Student Learning Hub: Everything you need to know about digital twins: Building a campus model
2022-11-04 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Talha Azfar, Ph.D Candidate at UTEP
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Friday, November 4, 2022, 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Description: Realistic digital geographical models of real-world locations are a necessary starting point for digital twin applications, especially for simulation and visualization. This presentation will cover efficient and convenient procedures to create a 3D digital model of the UTEP campus along with the road network on the Unreal Engine project for CARLA, a driving simulator. This can enable applications like computer vision, traffic simulation, and autonomous driving experimentation. It can serve as a testbed for connected sensors and synchronized databases towards a complete digital twin.

Deluge Data, Data Deluge
2022-11-02 16:00 - 17:00 | 370 Jay Street, Room 825, 370 Jay Street, Room 1201, New York City, NY, 11201, United States
Virtual Sessions: October 19th, 26th and November 2nd, 2022
In person symposium @ Tandon School of Engineering, NYU (Brooklyn Campus): November 4th, 2022
Register for all sessions here

The FloodNet Consortium is pleased to host Deluge Data, Data Deluge, an online talk series and in-person symposium that brings critical perspectives from the humanities and arts into dialogue with engineering and data practitioners engaged in flood sensing. The online talks will be held over three weeks, culminating in an in-person day-long symposium held at New York University’s Brooklyn campus in fall of 2022.
Climate change in New York City means a future of flooding. With sea level rise and increasingly intense rainstorms, flooding is expected to have an outsized influence on public health, infrastructure, and mobility in urban areas. One response to this growing challenge is improving the city’s data collection capacities through the construction of a city wide flood sensor network, capable of providing real time, hyperlocal flood data. In this symposium we consider flooding as a signal of a rapidly changing environment to ask, what does it mean for flooding to become digitally sensed? We aim to explore the following questions:

What does data do? What are the potentials and limitations of data-driven technologies and practices in climate change response, adaptation and resilience? How does the way it is produced, presented and shared shape how cities manage present day and coming environmental change?
What role can data play to engage different publics with issues of flooding and climate emergency responsiveness? How are different publics already engaging with these technologies and data? How can data catalyze public engagement in new ways? How are data-driven technologies reshaping issues of equity and justice in flood response?
How can we bring critical perspectives from the humanities and arts into dialogue with engineering and data practitioners? This event aims to catalyze a dialogue between theory and practice
What are principles and pathways for building public engagement with flood data?

Sponsors
This event is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Department of Integrated Design and Media, New York University and the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York.

Organizing Team

Tega Brain is an artist, researcher and environmental engineer. She investigates implications of emerging computational technologies on how the environment is understood and imagined. She is an Industry Associate Professor in the department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist and an artist investigating the way living beings interact with their environment, with a focus on the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. She is an Assistant Professor in the department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Kendra Krueger is an intersectional scientist, educator, artist and woman of color on many edges. She is the STEM Outreach and Education Manager at CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center, where she has also founded The Community Sensor Lab as a space for DIY community science and advocacy.

Hannah Eisler Burnett is an anthropologist who studies water and the people who live and work alongside its shifting boundaries. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the FloodNet Project in the department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Student Learning Hub: Diving into open data - What is available and how to use them for transportation research
2022-10-26 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Hector Landes, New York University
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: Wednesday October 26, 2022, 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Description: This course will be a general introduction to how to use open data for transportation projects. It will start with a short lecture to introduce open-data sources and software to use for data engineering with a focus on demographic, traffic, economic, and safety data. The second part will be a tutorial on how to retrieve data from these sources, how to clean them, manipulate them, and finally visualize them. Finally, this course will also cover how to troubleshoot during data pre-processing and how to overcome an error in either the code or the data. Hands-on exercises on how to use Excel, Tableau, Jupyter Notebook, and QGIS to process the data will be presented.

Assisting Pedestrians with Vision Disabilities in Navigating Urban Streets – Lessons Learned from the NYC Connected Vehicle Pilot Mobile Accessible Pedestrian Signal System
2022-10-25 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
New York City is piloting connected vehicle (CV) technology to support the Vision Zero initiative and help eliminate injuries and fatalities caused by crashes. In Manhattan, 73% of all crash fatalities involve pedestrians while this figure is only 14% nationwide. As a part of the USDOT CV Pilot Deployment Program, two pedestrian oriented applications are deployed: 1) a generalized warning to vehicles of pedestrians in the roadway based on thermal imaging detection and 2) a Mobile Accessible Pedestrian Signal System (PED-SIG) application to assist pedestrians with vision disabilities. The PED-SIG application supports cellular communications to receive localized Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) and MAP messages broadcast by the local Roadside Unit (RSU) to provides audio alerts and haptic prompts to assist pedestrians with vision disabilities in safely crossing streets at instrumented intersections. Volunteer participants with vision disabilities were recruited to participate in the field tests where Personal Information Devices (PIDs) were given to participants. This seminar will present how the pedestrian application was designed, deployed and tested along with several valuable lessons learned throughout the deployment.
Speaker:
Dr. Jingqin (Jannie) Gao is currently working as a senior research associate at C2SMART University Transportation Center funded by the US Department of Transportation. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Transportation Planning and Engineering from New York University, and her B.S. in Science and Technology of Optical Information from Tongji University. Her research interests lie in emerging technologies with emphasis on connected and automated vehicles, accessible transportation, big data and artificial intelligence solutions for transportation, traffic simulation modeling, and parking management. She was one of the lead researchers in evaluating the performance of the New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot Deploymentand and testing the mobile accessible pedestrian application. Before joining NYU, she worked for the New York City Department of Transportation on modeling and data analysis to support the agency’s internal planning and technical review processes. Jingqin plays a leadership role both within her research group and for the larger NYU Tandon community, serving as the past president of the student chapters of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Intelligent Transportation Society.

Emerging Leaders in Transportation
2022-10-19 - 2022-10-21 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
The Emerging Leaders in Transportation fellowship program aims to enhance the toolkit of early-career employees to make transportation more efficient, effective and people-oriented.
In this competitive fellowship program, participants will learn from top transportation and management professionals to enhance leadership skills, communication techniques and policy work to bring innovative ideas into practice.
The 2022 program will take place on October 19, 20 and 21 *in person* at New York University’s C2SMART Center, and will include one off-site facility tour.
The agenda includes:

Leadership sessions, where emerging leaders will collaborate on long-term leadership goals and developing innovative projects and ideas within an organization
A behind-the-scenes visit to a major transportation facility for hands-on learning about industry goals and challenges
A networking reception with Emerging Leaders alumni

Discussion topics will include: leadership, innovation, communications, building support for innovation, and practical applications. Sessions will include talks from and with esteemed professionals and group discussions and exercises. Participants will develop plans to introduce innovative solutions or concepts within their workplaces.
View 2019’s Emerging Leaders here, and a program recap here.

NYCDOT Smart Routing Hackathon
2022-10-15 - 2022-10-23 | CUNY School of Law, 2 Ct Square W, Queens, NY, 11101, United States
Currently in NYC, truckers and trucking companies are reliant on a static map to know where they should and should not go. When events like construction or a road accident require rerouting, truck drivers are at a loss because existing navigation tools do not include truck route priorities, elevation restrictions, or turn restrictions, truck tolls, or other details specific to their needs. From Saturday, October 15 through Sunday, October 23, C2SMART, in partnership with NYCDOT, will host a Hackathon to invite students to design a 3D visualizer which helps drivers understand where they are in their route, and helps them navigate the complexities of the city.
The event is open to all graduate and undergraduate students in New York City. Folks in New York City are welcome to attend Opening Ceremonies in person through our partnership with Transportation Camp; all participants are welcome to participate virtually during the work period. Final submissions will be presented at 3:00pm on October 23, followed by an hour of networking opportunities for students, industry professionals, and agencies.
Prizes will be awarded to the top three submissions, and the winner’s design may be adopted by NYCDOT — allowing the winner to directly impact transportation in New York City.
Register for TransportationCamp here.
Register for the closing ceremony Zoom here.

Where are they now? A catch-up with recent transportation engineering graduates as they start their new careers in industry, government, and academia
2022-10-12 17:00 - 18:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
From preparing for the final stretch of your degree to choosing your next steps after graduating, navigating the job market and charting your career path can feel overwhelming. Join C2SMART alumni Diego Correa, Di Yang, and Srushti Rath, as they talk about their journey in engineering and transportation and will answer questions from students about life after matriculation.
Speakers
Dr. Di Yang is a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department of Transportation & Urban Infrastructure Studies at Morgan State University. His research focuses on developing novel statistical and data-driven methods at the intersection of transportation safety, connected and autonomous vehicles, human factors, policy analysis, and shared mobility. His research contributions have led to 27 publications in various journals and conferences, featuring 11 first-author papers, and recognized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Northeastern District Daniel B. Fambro Student Paper Award in 2021. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from New York University in 2022.
Dr. Srushti Rath is a research scientist at Amazon (in Amazon Transportation Services). She graduated from NYU Tandon School of Engineering in summer 2022 with a Ph.D. degree in Transportation Planning and Engineering. Her research was focused on developing data-driven decision support tools for large-scale strategic deployment of emerging mobility services. During her graduate studies at NYU, she interned at Amazon working on freight recommender systems and at Uber Elevate focusing on air taxi infrastructure location optimization. Prior to joining NYU for her MS studies in 2018, she worked as an assistant executive engineer in the housing and urban development department, Government of Odisha (India), contributing toward the India’s flagship smart city program. She is the recipient of the S. David Ali Memorial scholarship awarded by the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) Greater NY chapter for the year 2020. Her interest lies in leveraging operations research, machine-learning, and supply- demand modeling for designing sustainable, data-driven, and intelligent transportation solutions.
Dr. Diego Correa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology at the University of Azuay, and the General Director of Mobility of the City of Cuenca-Ecuador. His research focuses on emerging mobility services, travel demand modeling, and how big data, technology, and machine learning can address urban problems. Diego’s innovative approach to transport has been recognized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers ITE as the Dr. Louis J. Pignataro Memorial Transportation Education Awardee 2017, by the Intelligent Transportation Society of America ITS-NJ as the Outstanding Graduate Student Awardee 2016, by the National Operations Center of Excellence NOCoE, as the TSMO Student Champion 2018, by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at NYU, as an Emerging Leader in Transportation in 2018, and lastly, as part of the 2019 class of NYU’s Urban Doctoral Fellows.

Improving Safety Through Connected Vehicle Technology – NYC Connected Vehicle Pilot System Performance
2022-10-07 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
In this event series, C2SMART leverages its consortium of researchers and experts to share a vision of the future of mobility and transportation systems. They’ll share advances, opportunities, predictions, research bottlenecks, and what perspectives and skills are needed from researchers and the workforce of tomorrow towards tackling one area of today’s most pressing problems.
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), the Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment (CVPD) Program which piloted the technology in three sites, New York City (NYC), Wyoming, and Tampa, is a national effort to deploy, test, and operationalize cutting-edge in-vehicle, mobile and roadside technologies and enable multiple connected vehicle (CV) safety and mobility applications. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), speeding was a factor in more than one in four deaths and human factors were the critical cause in about 94% of all crashes. The NYC CVPD has undertaken connected vehicle technology as another tool that could be used to help further the city’s Vision Zero goals. The experimental design included equipping 3,000 vehicles with Aftermarket Safety Devices (ASD) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and pedestrian applications. This seminar will present the data cleaning, evaluation methodology, performance measurement, and safety evaluation results of the 12 CV safety applications that was conducted during the Phase 3 operational phase of the deployment.
Speaker
Dr. Di Yang is a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department of Transportation & Urban Infrastructure Studies at Morgan State University. His research focuses on developing novel statistical and data-driven methods at the intersection of transportation safety, connected and autonomous vehicles, human factors, policy analysis, and shared mobility. His research contributions have led to 27 publications in various journals and conferences, featuring 11 first-author papers, and recognized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Northeastern District Daniel B. Fambro Student Paper Award in 2021.

Verizon Panel Discussion and Networking Event
2022-10-06 17:00 - 19:00
Register now to meet Verizon’s technology leaders and learn about career opportunities and more, including:

The exciting 5G technologies that Verizon’s currently working on
How the company stays at the forefront of innovation
Staff career journeys for NYU alums
Why engineering students should consider Verizon as the premiere tech company to start their engineering careers

The panel discussion will be followed by the chance to talk to and network with Verizon’s Talent Acquisition Team.
Register to attend.

C2SMART Fall 2022 Transportation Student Welcome
2022-09-23 04:00 - 17:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
C2SMART is delighted to welcome new and returning transportation students back to campus with a classes kickoff at our offices at 6 MetroTech. Join us for snacks, drinks, and the chance to meet C2SMART faculty alongside your classmates and colleagues. Learn about the exciting research taking place at C2SMART and explore opportunities to get involved — whether it’s joining a research project, spearheading a student affinity group, or mentoring New York City teenagers through the NYU ARISE program.
We look forward to seeing you there!

Data & Driving: Mobileye on Urban Mobility
2022-09-12 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
SPEAKER

With over 25 years in deploying in deploying new technologies and innovative solutions with Fortune 500, government and academic research clients, Mark Davis currently leads Mobileye’s North American Data Services business.
Mark has led the introduction of several platform technologies in areas ranging from climate change research to commercial risk management to industrial process control solutions. With a long background in remote sensing and geospatial analytics — Mark draws from his experience to address some of the transportation sector’s biggest safety & operational challenges.
Mobileye is partnering with key DOTs, MTAs and transportation-sector service providers & researchers to help deliver a positive impact for society in terms of roadway planning, safety, mobility & equity.
Mark has held senior executive positions at top VC backed start-ups (Aeryon, Airware and Picarro) to multi-billion giants (Intel Corporation and Danaher). Mark holds a Master of Science, Management of Technology degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
STUDENT MODERATOR

Zilin Bian is a Ph.D candidate in Transportation Planning and Engineering in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University. He received a master’s degree from the University of Florida. He is currently working as a graduate research assistant at NYU while pursuing his doctoral degree. Bian’s research interests include applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence in traffic incident management, transportation data and mobility modeling / prediction.

New Approaches and Paradigms in Traffic Flow Modeling and Control
2022-08-24 16:00 - 17:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
In this talk, Dr. Wen-Long Jin will present some of his recent results on new approaches and paradigms in traffic flow modeling and control. He will first discuss traffic flow models in three types of spaces: (1) provably safe driving models for both human-driven and autonomous vehicles in the absolute space on a road, (2) bathtub models for network trip flows in a relative space with respect to individual travelers’ remaining trip distances, and (3) day-to-day traffic flow models for departure time choice in an economic space with respect to the scheduling cost. Then he will present two studies on traffic system operations and control: (1) dynamic pricing schemes for high-occupancy-toll lanes with a single or multiple bottlenecks; and (2) fleet-size management for shared mobility systems with for-hire vehicles.
Dr.Wen-Long Jin (BS in Automatic Control, University of Science and Technology of China, 1998; PhD in Applied Mathematics, UC Davis, 2003) is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine. He’s interested in fundamental principles, concepts, models, and methods for analyzing, operating, and planning of transportation and mobility systems. Dr. Wen-Long Jin has systematically studied network traffic flow theory, capacity drop and lane-changing models, connected vehicle systems theory, and green driving strategies. He is an editorial board editor of Transportation Research Part Band Transportation Science and an Associate Editor of Transportmetrica B. He has published one textbook entitled “Introduction to Network Traffic Flow Theory” and numerous journal and conference articles.

Emerging Transportation Engineering Topics Using City as a Lab: A Roundtrip Story between Academia and Public Agency
2022-08-23 09:00 - 10:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Are you interested in studying how the urban environment can be used to impact the
daily lives of millions? Do you want to understand how policymakers bring academic research to
fruition? Or, perhaps, you have some nagging questions about your undergraduate studies and
navigating university to be successful? Come join us to learn and network about transportation
research and academia. This event will be jointly hosted by NYU’s C2SMART lab, IEEE Student
Branch and North South University, Women in Engineering Affinity Group at IEEE NSU, and the
NYU ITE/ITS student chapter. The event will consist of a seminar by C2SMART’s Dr. Jingqin
Gao about emerging transportation engineering topics and the urban environment as a sandbox
for transportation research, from both the agency and academic perspectives.
Dr. Jingqin (Jannie) Gao, completed her Ph.D. in Transportation Planning and
Engineering at NYU Tandon, and is currently working as a lead researcher at C2SMART
University Transportation Center funded by US Department of Transportation. She studied
Science and Technology of Optical Information and received her B.S. from Tongji University and
her M.S in Transportation Planning and Engineering from New York University. Her research
interests lie in big data and artificial intelligence solutions for transportation, emerging
technologies such as connected vehicles, traffic simulation modeling, parking management and
transportation economics. Before joining NYU, she worked for the New York City Department of
Transportation on modeling and data analysis to support the agency’s internal planning and
technical review processes. Jingqin plays a leadership role both within her research group and
for the larger NYU Tandon community, serving as the past president of the student chapters of
the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Intelligent Transportation Society.

Virtual reality and simulation as a tool to investigate the safety of future mobility scenarios: opportunities and limitations in applied research
2022-08-15 12:00 - 13:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Traffic accidents are among the leading causes of death for people aged 5–35 worldwide, causing transport externalities and thus unsustainability. At the same time, the introduction of almost fully connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) (levels 3–4 of SAE) is already a reality. Although CAVs go in the direction of smart mobility, their sustainability is still questionable because their deployment in open traffic introduces unexplored risks. Indeed, while technological progress is rapidly being pursued, there remain significant issues related to the development and integration of CAVs with physical and digital infrastructure and to their user acceptance on shared roads. The main reason is a general perception that they are not safe and thus may introduce inequality. In this context, neither the actual accident-based nor proactive methods for road safety analysis can be applied when CAVs interact with conventional users. This is primarily due to the lack of knowledge about the influence of the digital and physical infrastructure in the interactions among vehicles in mixed traffic conditions. In this framework, the use of simulation and virtual reality, combined with validation on real world scale, represents the only approach to provide the basis for new computational methods for infrastructure safety assessment in future mobility scenarios based on a rigorous scientific approach. The use of simulation at different levels combined with new Surrogate Measures of Safety (SMoS) can address the problem of the safety evaluation of the interaction between conventional vehicles and CAVs. The seminar will present how virtual reality and simulation are being used as a tool to replace naturalistic observations in the real-world and their pros and cons, in three different research projects on CAVs safety among which is a European Research Council Grant.

Dr. Carmelo D’Agostino, a Senior Lecturer of Transport Engineering at Lund University (Sweden), has consolidated and international recognized experience in modeling the relationship between safety and road characteristics, and in the development and application of these models for assessing the safety of roads and the safety effects of design and management decisions.Carmelo’s research interest is going towards how to evaluate safety in new mobility scenarios. On this topic, Carmelo has been recently awarded with a European Research Council Grant with a project proposal related to the development of new scientific method to evaluate the effects of infrastructure on the interaction of connected and automated vehicles and conventional road users.

Individual Path Recommendation Under Public Transit Service Disruptions Considering Behavior Uncertainty and Equity
2022-07-08 15:00 - 16:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
During a public transit service disruption, passengers usually need path recommendations to find alternative routes. In this webinar, MIT PhD Candidate Baichuan Mo will discuss his proposal for a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation to model the individual-based path (IPR) recommendation problem during PT service disruptions with the objective of minimizing system travel time and respecting passengers’ path choice preferences. Passengers’ behavior uncertainty in path choices given recommendations and their travel time equity are also considered. He models the behavior uncertainty based on passenger’s prior preferences and posterior path choice probability distribution with two new concepts: epsilon-feasibility and gamma-concentration, which control the mean and variance of path flows in the optimization problem. The IPR problem with behavior uncertainty is solved efficiently with Benders decomposition. A post-adjustment heuristic is used to address the equity requirement. The proposed approach is implemented in the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) system with a real-world urban rail disruption as the case study. Results show that the proposed IPR model significantly reduces the average travel times compared to the status quo and outperforms the capacity-based benchmark path recommendation strategy.

Baichuan Mo is a Ph.D. student in the transportation program at MIT. He completed his dual Master’s degree in Transportation and Computer Science at MIT in 2020. Prior to joining MIT, he got a B.E. degree from the Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, awarded with the Tsinghua Presidential Scholarship.
Baichuan’s main research interest is data-driven transportation modeling, demand modeling, and machine learning. His master thesis was on the network performance model for urban rail system monitoring. His current research focuses on unplanned incident analysis and management in urban rail systems, sponsored by Chicago Transit Authority (CTA).

Research and Practice: Scaling a Flood Sensor Network for a Resilient NYC
2022-05-24 12:00 - 13:00
The FloodSense project, first seeded by C2SMART in 2020, developed a publicly-accessible platform that provides real-time flood information through deployed sensors capable of detecting the presence of water. Designed to help cities respond to emergencies by providing real-time information on flood depth, frequency, and duration, the project has since grown into the NYC FloodNet consortium, a partnership with CUNY, the NYC Mayor’s Offices of Climate Resiliency, and of the CTO, Science and Resilience Institute, Jamaica Bay, and New York Sea Grant– and plans to scale sensor deployment all over New York City. The research team will share the development and impact of the project, and its role in the future of NYC’s emergency response and resiliency, detailing how FloodNet sensors were able to detect and generate warnings from flooding resulting from Hurricane Ida, the challenges and opportunities of scale, and the future of smart urban resilience.

Webinar: Collaborative and Adversarial 3D Perception for Autonomous Driving
2022-05-19 12:00 - 13:00
Robust and reliable perception systems serve as the “eyes” of autonomous vehicles. LiDAR is a widely applied perception sensor in autonomous vehicles for capturing 3D geometry information of the environment. However, LiDAR-based perception faces many challenges such as data sparsity, occlusions, and motion distortion. In this talk, I will show how we design novel 3D deep learning algorithms from two aspects, collaborative and adversarial, in order to improve the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D perception. For effective and efficient collaborative perception, we propose DiscoNet. It uses a dynamic directed graph with matrix-valued edge weight for an ego-vehicle to adaptively retrieve the most important complementary information from its neighboring vehicles, which could improve its own perception performance and robustness. Besides collaborative perception, we also study the adversarial robustness of LiDAR-based perception, and reveal an often-overlooked vulnerability that lies in the LiDAR motion correction process. We show that spoofing of a vehicle’s trajectory estimation with small adversarial perturbations can jeopardize LiDAR perception. We hope our collaborative and adversarial 3D perception research can help improve the robustness and safety of autonomous driving systems.

Speaker Biography: Yiming Li is a Ph.D. candidate in AI4CE Lab at New York University (NYU) with the Dean’s PhD Fellowship. His research interest primarily lies in robot vision and learning, with its applications in cyber-physical systems, autonomous driving, and human-robot interaction. More specifically, he is interested in collaborative and adversarial perception, egocentric vision, multi-modal perception, and embodied AI. His works have been published in top-tier conferences including NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, and IROS. During his first Ph.D. year, he visited MARS Lab in Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University, MediaBrain Group in School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), and Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) at Tsinghua University. He obtained a bachelor degree in mechatronics, manufacture, and automation from Tongji University at Shanghai with honors.

NYU Transportation Joint Campus Research Summit
2022-05-18 07:00 - 09:30 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
The 2022 NYU Transportation Joint Campus Research Summit seeks to bring together colleagues from New York City, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi to exchange information and ideas from their current research, and to determine ways in which the three campuses can collaborate on transportation and mobility problems related to smart cities. This hybrid event will take place synchronously, in-person on each campus, connected to one another through Zoom.

Agenda

Speakers

Kaan M.A. Özbay joined Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at NYU in August 2013. Since 2017, Ozbay has been the Founding Director of the C2SMART Center (Tier 1 UTC funded by USDOT). He is also Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering, NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and Global Network Professor of Engineering and Computer Science, NYU Shanghai (NYUSH). Ozbay was a tenured full Professor at the Rutgers University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He joined Rutgers University as a tenure track Assistant Professor in July, 1996. In 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) Department of Princeton University. Ozbay is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award.
Professor Ozbay served as the elected member of Board of Directors of the Intelligent Transportation Society of New Jersey in 2013. He has been an active member of national and international scientific and professional committees and organizations, including IEEE, ITE, ASCE, AASHTO and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the US National Academies. He also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the University Transportation Research Center (UTRC) at the City University of New York – USDOT’s Region 2 University Transportation Center.
Joseph Chow is an Institute Associate Professor in the Department of Civil & Urban Engineering and the Deputy Director at the C2SMART Tier-1 University Transportation Center at NYU, and heads BUILT@NYU: the Behavioral Urban Informatics, Logistics, and Transport Laboratory. Chow’s research expertise lies in transportation systems, with emphasis on multimodal networks, behavioral urban logistics, smart cities, and transport economics. He is an NSF CAREER award recipient, a former elected Chair of the Urban Transportation SIG and appointed TSL Cluster Chair at INFORMS Transportation Science & Logistics Society, chair of the TRB subcommittee on Route Choice and Spatiotemporal Behavior, and is an appointed Associate Editor for International Journal of Transportation Science & Technology and Transportation Research Record, the journal for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. At NYU Chow is an Associated Faculty at CUSP and Rudin Center.
Semiha Ergan is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy) at New York University, and an associated faculty at CUSP. With her background in civil engineering, data science, and building informatics, she works on improving buildings’ performance during design, construction, and operation phases. Ergan leads the Building Informatics and Visualization Lab (biLAB), where she actively seeks data-driven and model-based solutions to operational challenges associated with construction and operation of civil infrastructure systems, with an emphasis on buildings. Her work has been supported by DOE, NSF, DARPA, and private organizations. Ergan’s achievements have been recognized by a number of awards, including most recently the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015) and the Construction Industry Institute New Scholar Award (2015). She is the Vice Chair for ASCE TCCIT Visualization, Information Modeling and Simulation Committee, an Associate Editor of ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, and academic committee member of Construction Industry Institute.
Masoud Ghandehari serves on the Faculty of Civil and Urban Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and is an associate faculty at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress. Ghandehari is the author of Optical Phenomenology and Applications: Health Monitoring for Infrastructure Materials and the Environment, 2018, the founding investigator of the New York State Resiliency Institute for Storm Events, and founder of Chromosense LLC., which is supported by the National Institutes of Health for innovation in environmental sensing. His research in optical spectroscopy, sensing, imaging, and data analytics has led to the development of applications and technologies suitable for diverse environments and multiple scales; ranging from the molecular to the urban landscape.
Shri Iyer serves as the Managing Director for the C2SMART Center, overseeing the operations of the center as well as agency outreach and strategic planning of the center. Prior to joining C2SMART, Iyer worked at MTA New York City Transit on promoting data-driven policy and analysis within the agency. He is also experienced in working with other agencies in the New York area, and brings with him extensive knowledge of the regional transportation system. Iyer completed his MS in Civil (Transportation) Engineering at Rutgers University in 2009 and received his MPA for Public Service Leaders from the NYU Wagner School of Public Service in 2020.
Molly Seeley completed her MSc in Public Policy and Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2020 and received her B.A. in Anthropology and Comparative Literature from New York University in 2013. Prior to coming on board at C2SMART, Seeley spent six years at the Institute of Global Homelessness at DePaul University, working with a portfolio of thirteen cities across six countries to measurably and sustainably reduce homelessness. At C2SMART, Seeley is responsible for overseeing, tracking, and coordinating multiple parallel research efforts undertaken by Principal Investigators, staff, and students. She manages project stakeholders across multiple sectors and is responsible for the organization and facilitation of meetings, workshops, and training to ensure successful technology transfer.

Monica Menendez is the Associate Dean of Engineering for Graduate Affairs and a Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi, as well as a Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering in New York University. She is also the Director and Lead PI of the NYUAD Research Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES); and the recipient of the NYUAD Distinguished Research Award for 2021. Between 2010 and 2017, Menendez was the Director of the research group Traffic Engineering at ETH Zurich. Prior to that, she was a management consultant at Bain & Company. She joined Bain after receiving a PhD and a MSc in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2006. During her studies there, Menendez received, among other awards, an NSF Fellowship and the Gordon F. Newell Award. In total, she is the recipient of more than 20 scholarships and awards from well-known and prestigious organizations, professional societies, and universities. Menendez also holds a dual degree in Civil Engineering and Architectural Engineering from the University of Miami, from where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2002.

Samer Madanat, Dean of New York University Abu Dhabi’s Engineering Division, is the Xenel Distinguished Professor of Engineering, former Chair of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and former Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He received a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Jordan in 1986, and a MS and PhD in Transportation Systems from MIT in 1988 and 1991, respectively. From 2001 to 2011, Madanat served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems. He is currently Editor of Transport Policy, Associate Editor of the European Journal of Transportation and Logistics, and an editorial board member of Transportation Research D, and Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Systems. Madanat serves on several advisory committees, including for the National Research Council, and has served as an external reviewer of Civil Engineering departments at MIT, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and Tongji University.

Saif Jabari an Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi and Global Network Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Prior to joining NYUAD, Jabari was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Mathematical Sciences and Analytics Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Jabari received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2012. His doctoral dissertation received the 2012 Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award for best dissertation in Science and Technology.
Ali Diabat received his B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan in 1999, M.Sc. degree in Operations Research from North Carolina State University, USA in 2003, and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, USA in 2008. In June 2008, Diabat joined Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi as an Assistant Professor of Engineering Systems and Management, and due to his exceptional performance, he was promoted to Associate Professor in June 2012, and to Full Professor in June 2016. Right after completing nine years at Masdar Institute, Diabat joined New York University Abu Dhabi as a Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering.

Zhibin Chen is an Assistant Professor of Engineering, NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU. Prior to this appointment, he was a research fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Chen’s research goal is to identify, develop, and implement emerging technologies to achieve a safer, more efficient, and environment-friendly transportation system. Chen was the recipient of the Stella Dafermos Best Paper Award and the Ryuichi Kitamura Paper Award at the 95th TRB Annual Meeting.
ChengHe Guan is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Policy at NYU Shanghai. He also serves as a research consultant at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford and as a senior visiting researcher at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Guan is the co-director of the International Urban Innovation Research Center, a nonprofit organization. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University. Guan has published more than 30 papers in internationally renowned journals indexed in the Science/Social Science Citation Index. Guan has taught courses at both NYU Shanghai and Harvard University.

Women in TransitTech: Solutions to the Pink Tax on Transportation
2022-05-05 13:30 - 14:30
“The Pink Tax” has emerged as a term used to describe the higher prices women pay for equivalent products and services: the classic example is that a pink “ladies’” razor costs more than a blue “men’s” one. But how pervasive is this “tax,” and how does it impact services that seem at first glance more difficult to gender, like transportation? The NYC subway charges the same fare to every adult, regardless of gender — but how do social factors, like more frequent exposure to harassment or heightened caregiving responsibilities, affect how women incur transportation costs?
Dive into a discussion on “The Pink Tax on Transportation: Women’s Challenges in Mobility,” a recent study by the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, moderated by one of its authors, Sarah Kaufman (Associate Director at NYU Rudin). Kaufman will lead a conversation with three transit experts on the paper’s findings, its implications for equitable transit strategy and planning, and the solutions panelists have explored to minimize women’s additional transportation costs.
Speakers

Meghna Khanna
Senior Director at Mobility Corridors
LA Metro
Meghna Khanna is a Senior Director with the Mobility Corridors Department at LA Metro. She manages and oversees environmental clearance and design of various Light Rail Transit Projects including West Santa Ana Branch. As a previous member of the LA Metro’s Women and Girl Governing Council, she led the Understanding How Women Travel Study- first of its kind by a transit agency in the United States – and is currently managing the Gender Action Plan.

Sarah Meyer
Chief Customer Officer
Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Sarah Meyer is the Chief Customer Officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She is charged with rebuilding and enhancing the customer experience for New York City’s subway, bus, and paratransit riders, and for those using MetroNorth and Long Island Rail Road services. From trip-planning, to purchasing fare media, to on-board experiences, she is responsible for the customer journey end-to-end. She is currently focused on COVID response and bringing New York City back to life, making it easier for customers to get from A to B, quickly and easily. Her team recently won a Cannes Gold Lion for their groundbreaking work on map.mta.info.Prior to her work at Transit, Sarah was a communications and business transformation consultant with 15 years of experience. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in art history, and she currently lives in New York City with her husband and two young daughters.

Leni Schwendinger
Urban Lighting Designer
Leni Schwendinger Light Projects

Leni Schwendinger is a published, award-winning authority on issues of city lighting, with more than 20 years of worldwide experience creating illuminated environments. Her innovative interdisciplinary practice, nighttime design urbanism, focuses on city districts’ darkened hours and includes fresh community involvement methodologies such as “NightSeeing™, Navigate Your Luminous City” program. Leni is a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, a Design Trust for Public Space Fellow (NYC).

Sarah Kaufman
Associate Director
NYU Rudin Center for Transportation

Sarah M. Kaufman is the Associate Director of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, where she researches, advocates for and educates about cutting-edge technologies in transportation. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Planning, teaching Intelligent Cities and Advanced Projects in Urban Planning.

ITS America Webinar: Creating Access Through Equity in Transportation
2022-05-04 14:00 - 15:00
We all rely on some form of transportation to access employment, education, health care, and other services. But not everyone has equal access to high-quality, reliable, and safe transportation. Even with a growing variety of transportation options available, many residents find themselves limited in their choices due to physical accessibility limitations, safety concerns, or other impediments to safe and efficient travel.
By leveraging and utilizing new and emerging technologies, we can build a more affordable and inclusive transportation system for more of our communities, particularly for those who have traditionally been underserved or overlooked in transportation policy development. In this webinar, leaders from top US research institutions will discuss how new developments and innovations in Transportation Equity can help make our system safer and more equitable for all users.
Speaker:
• Dr. Robert Hampshire – Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology and Chief Science Officer, U.S. DOT
Panelists:
• Dr. Mansoureh Jeihani – Director of the Urban Mobility & Equity Center (UMEC) and Professor, Morgan State University
• Dr. Kaan Ozbay – Director of the Connected Cities with Smart Transportation (C2SMART) Center and Professor, New York University
• Tia Boyd – Research Associate with the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR), University of South Florida
• Dr. Hilary Nixon, Deputy Executive Director, Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) at San José State University (SJSU) (moderator)

2022 Tandon Research Excellence Exhibit
2022-04-29 13:00 - 16:00 | Brooklyn Commons, 5 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Research Excellence Exhibit 2022 is an annual public event that features exhibits that illustrate the scope of engineering and the applied sciences, and their potential for improving the world. This year’s Exhibit will celebrate the incredible academic contributions of the NYU community and the ways in which they connect to Tandon’s seven areas of research excellence.
Stop by the Tandon Research Excellence Exhibit to view and experience incredible projects, and also enjoy free Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, popcorn, and Tandon t-shirt giveaways!
The Exhibit is free and open to the public. In the event of inclement weather, the Exhibit will be moved inside the Brooklyn Athletic Facility Gym. Due to NYU’s current COVID-19 guidelines regarding indoor visitors, if the Exhibit is moved indoors, it will only be open to the NYU community.
RSVP to receive updates about the Exhibit location.

4th Women in Transportation Panel Discussion and Networking
2022-04-28 18:30 - 19:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Note: This is a hybrid event. Non-NYU attendees can join the event via Zoom and NYU students are encouraged to attend in person at 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201. Due to current NYU health protocols, in-person attendance for non-NYU guests is not feasible at this time.
The C2SMART Center and the NYU chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) are excited to host our annual Women in Transportation Panel Discussion, followed by an opportunity for attendees to network and socialize. This year’s panel boasts three amazing women working in the transportation industry who will share their perspectives and experiences.
The panel provides a space for attendees to discuss challenging issues facing the transportation field, opportunities for growth, and ways in which current and future transportation professionals can work together to create a more equitable workspace. All students, regardless of self-identification, are encouraged to attend.

Getting Started with Android Development
2022-04-22 13:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Matthew Maggio, Software Engineer
Hands-on exercise: Yes
Level: No prior experience required.
Schedule: April 22, 2022 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
Mobile development can seem overwhelming at first, however Google’s Android platform offers a learning experience tutored toward beginners as well as a plethora of examples to get started. In this course, we will look at the basics of Android Studio and review the fundamentals of the Android environment to create a simple Android application.
RSVP here.

State-of-the-Field: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) Application to Bridge Projects: Experience from Louisiana
2022-04-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
In the State-of-the-Field event series, C2SMART leverages its consortium of researchers and experts to share a vision of the future of mobility and transportation systems. They’ll share advances, opportunities, predictions, research bottlenecks, and what perspectives and skills are needed from researchers and the workforce of tomorrow towards tackling one area of today’s most pressing problems.
Professor Ayman M. Okeil, LSU will share his experience applying structural health monitoring (SHM) methods to three Louisiana projects, employed to assist the Louisiana DOTD in updating their standard continuity detail between simply supported prestressed concrete girders, and to address load rating of cast-in-place (CIP) reinforced concrete (RC) box culverts with low fill heights. He’ll share the impact this applied research made on the Louisiana Bridge Design and Evaluation Manual, and recommendations for future load ratings. Professor Okeil will also share his efforts to develop the transportation workforce of tomorrow by introducing SHM to civil engineering curriculum, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
Presenter

Dr. Ayman M. Okeil is Roy P. Daniels Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Louisiana State University. Dr. Okeil’s experience in the field of bridge engineering includes strengthening of concrete girders using composite materials, behavior of box girder bridges, structural health monitoring and reliability calibration of LRFD codes. Dr. Okeil is a voting member / associate member in several national committees (ACI 440 and 444, TRB AKB10 AND AKB30, ASCE-ACI 343) and serves as Associate Editor for the ASCE J. of Composites for Construction. He is the recipient of several awards in recognition of his teaching and research contributions including “Michael R. Mangham Memorial Undergraduate Teaching Award” from LSU Tiger Athletic Foundation, the “Outstanding Teaching Award” at NCSU, the “Outstanding Achievement Award” at LSU (twice), and the “Educator of the Year Award” from the Baton Rouge Branch of ASCE (twice). He has also consulted on various projects related to both buildings and bridges. His PhD dissertation investigated seismic design of secondary systems in nuclear power plants.
