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Research and Practice: Scaling a Flood Sensor Network for a Resilient NYC
2022-05-24 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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.

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).

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.

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.

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: 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.

Smart Electric Vehicle Charging: Modeling Drivers’ Choices and Autonomous Vehicles’ Strategies
2022-12-02 13:00 - 14:00 | 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.

Transit Techies #13: Projects on Bike Safety & Infrastructure with NYU Tandon
2023-02-06 17:45 - 19:30 | 370 Jay Street, Room 1201, 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn, 11201
Transportation Techies is a group of technologists, urban planners, commuters and more who are interested in how technology can enable the future of mobility in metropolitan areas. This showcase will feature 2 projects on improving commuting experience for bikers in NYC. First, Ariel Kadouri will give an update on mapping bike and pedestrian infrastructure. He will be giving his State of the Map talk, and opening it up for Q&A.
Following this, C2SMART’s Suzana Duran Bernardes give a live demo of her mountable sensors to improve cyclist safety. She will deliver a Q&A afterwards.

A Framework for Modeling Human-vehicle Interactions with Increasingly Autonomous Systems
2023-02-14 10:30 - 11:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Dr. Linda Ng Boyle is a Professor of Industrial Systems Engineering & Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington

Roundtable on Traffic Safety Research featuring Dr. Tarek Sayed
2023-02-21 16:00 - 17:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
The increasing popularity of smart cities and recent developments in sensing, edge computing and vehicle technologies and the availability of “big data” combined with sophisticated AI techniques offer an opportunity to substantially advance and fundamentally transform the road safety profession—enabling continuous, real-time, proactive safety evaluation and optimization. The application of innovations that are both progressing and disrupting the status quo represents an opportunity for improved transportation safety. However, with the introduction of new modes of mobility and the complex interactions created by these different technologies within the transportation system, governments will need to rely on advanced research and analysis techniques to support policies towards the transition to these new forms of mobility and technologies. These issues are discussed and several methods and techniques developed in this area are described with example projects from several agencies worldwide.

Tarek Sayed is a distinguished professor and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair of Transportation Safety and Advanced Mobility at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on traffic operation and safety, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and the application of information technologies.

2nd NYU-TJU Urban Transportation Forum
2023-02-22 08:30 - 12:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
3On February 22, 2023, New York University and Tongji University are joining forces to host an online urban transportation forum. The topics to be covered in this virtual event include the future of transportation, sustainability and equity in transportation systems, travel behavior, and safety in urban transportation. This forum will provide a platform for experts and students to come together and discuss the pressing issues in the field, and offer new perspectives on shaping the future of urban transportation.
Agenda (click to expand)
20230222 NYU-TJU 2nd Urban Transportation Forum Agenda
Pre-registration via Zoom is required. Please click the Register button below.

Chatting with ChatGPT: Exploring the Advancements in AI Language Models
2023-03-10 11:00 - 12:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Fan Zuo, New York University
Schedule: Friday March 10, 11:00am-12:00pm
Description: In this course, you will learn about ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. You will gain an understanding of how ChatGPT works and how it can be used to generate human-like text, answer questions, and perform various natural language processing tasks. Through hands-on activities and live demos, you will also get to apply ChatGPT to real-world problems and understand its advantages as well as limitations. Whether you are a student, developer, or researcher, this course will provide you with a solid foundation in the exciting field of AI and natural language processing. (Yes, this is written by ChatGPT!)

Unlock the Power of Graph Neural Networks: Understanding the Fundamentals and Knowing When to Implement
2023-03-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Zilin Bian, New York University
Schedule: Friday March 24, 12:00pm-1:00pm
Description: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for analyzing and processing graph-structured data. This course covers the basics of GNNs, including graph convolutional networks, graph attention networks and graph wavelet networks, including how they work and how to implement them. The session aims to provide a solid understanding of GNN modeling for machine learning practitioners, data scientists, and anyone interested in AI advancements.

5th Women in Transportation Panel Discussion and Networking Event
2023-03-28 18:00 - 19:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
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, including 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.
This event is a one-hour evening event in a panel format with women from within the industry and agencies with professional experience in the engineering and planning field, to help engage the female students and empower them to pursue their career goals. They will discuss gender challenges in the engineering/ planning field, give advice for overcoming those challenges, and tips for future transportation engineers/planners. The event will conclude with a 10-minute Q&A and an opportunity for the students to network with the panelists. Pizza and refreshments will be provided.
PLEASE NOTE: this will be a hybrid event, and all attendees are welcome to come in-person. However, ALL attendees must register via Zoom, regardless of whether they are attending in person, in order to receive building access.
PANELISTS
Nadereh Moini is the Chief of Transportation at the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA) Formerly Known as New Jersey Meadowlands Commission. She has diverse scholar and field experiences in planning, design, safety, operation, maintenance, and assessment of multimodal transportation systems and the application of the state-of-the-art technologies in transportation. In her current capacity, she is managing more than 125 adaptive signalized intersections throughout the Meadowlands District. She is also responsible to develop “Meadowlands District Transportation Plan” and the first “Meadowlands Action Plan for Safety”, which is newly funded by USDOT.
She holds Ph.D. in Civil & Environment Engineering. She is a licensed Professional Engineer in the states of NY and NJ. She is also a registered Professional Traffic Operation Engineer (PTOE) and Professional Transportation Planner (PTP). Additionally, she has International Municipal Signal Association –IMSA Level I Certification.
Haley Hutson is a Traffic Engineer at AKRF, Inc. Haley started her career in Texas after graduating from the University of Texas and has spent the past two years working in New York. She specializes in adaptive traffic signal controls, traffic modeling, and roadway design. She is the Vice Chair for the ITE Urban Goods Committee and a co-chair of the ITE Met Section Young Member Committee. When her engineering hat isn’t on she is a Senior Disaster Responder volunteer for the Red Cross.
Mira Philipson is Senior Analyst for MTA’s Accessibility team in the Office of the Chair. In her four and a half years working to improve accessibility across the MTA, she has researched and piloted new solutions, technological and otherwise, for people with disabilities and all customers. She has managed pilot projects including the Accessible Station Lab and Transit Innovation Partnership’s Transit Tech Lab Accessibility Challenge to discover smartphone wayfinding applications and other physical wayfinding solutions in subway stations and along bus routes. She also collaborates internally to ensure all MTA content, public-facing and employee-facing, is accessible. Her role also includes maintaining relationships and conducting outreach with members of the disability community in New York, as well as collaboration with accessibility professionals at public transportation agencies across the country and world to information and experience-share.
Mira graduated from Barnard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Urban Planning with a Concentration in Sociology. She completed her senior thesis on the history of the Second Avenue Subway after spending time studying European urban transportation in Copenhagen, Denmark. She is passionate about making cities, and specifically transportation infrastructure, more accessible to underserved populations.

Unleash Your Creativity with Unity 3D Simulation and Transportation Network Modeling
2023-03-31 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Instructor: Lukelo Thadei Luoga, New York University Abu Dhabi
Schedule: Friday March 31, 1:00-2:00pm
Description: In this hands-on course, you’ll learn how to use Unity 3D to build 3D models of road networks. You’ll start with the basics of Unity 3D, including its interface, GameObjects, components, and scripting. From there, you’ll dive into building 3D models of road networks, covering elements such as roads, buildings, and terrain.
