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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SLH: Understanding Travel Demand through Passively-generated Mobile Data: a Python-based Mobility Analysis Workshop
2025-03-07 13:00 - 14:00
The ubiquity of GPS-equipped mobile devices has enabled the collection of human mobility data with high spatiotemporal granularity. Indeed, there now exists an ecosystem of both data providers and consulting agencies centered around collecting, processing, and extracting insights from this type of data. Though much of the raw data cannot be made public due to privacy-preserving agreements, the academic community can still access geographically aggregated data. This workshop will cover the (Python-based) preprocessing and wrangling of aggregated mobility data in New York state provided by SafeGraph. It will highlight concepts including (but not limited to) origin-destination matrices, the four-step travel demand model, self-selection bias in passively-generated data, and demand prediction. It will also describe how to fuse such data with the American Community Survey (ACS) providing sociodemographic information at the census block group-level. Relevant packages that will be leveraged and explained include GeoPandas and scikit-Mobility. Intermediate familiarity with Python, data structures, and object-oriented programming is recommended.

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

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

SLH: An Introduction to Multi-agent Driving Simulation with GPUDrive
2025-03-14 12:00 - 13:00
In this seminar, I will introduce GPUDrive, a high-performance, data-driven driving simulator that operates at 1 million FPS. GPUDrive is built on the Madrona Game Engine and uses GPU acceleration to enable scalable multi-agent simulation. I will discuss how this simulator can be used to train reinforcement learning agents efficiently, drawing from a recent paper where we demonstrate its application to the Waymo Open Motion Dataset. Additionally, I will walk through tutorials on how to set up and use the simulator.
The repository can be found at https://github.com/Emerge-Lab/gpudrive/tree/main

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

SLH: Discrete Choice Modeling for Travel Behavior Analysis: From Multinomial Logit to More Advanced Forms
2025-04-11 12:00 - 13:00
Abstract: In this course, we will discuss the decision theory of random utility maximization and discrete choice models (DCMs) including multinomial logit (MNL), nested logit (NL), mixed logit (MXL), and agent-based mixed logit (AMXL). You will learn about their applications in travel behavior analysis (e.g., travel mode choice, activity scheduling choice, etc.) and how to build DCMs with long-shape and wide-shape choice datasets in R and Python. A recent study on New York State travel mode choice will be introduced as an example.

Seminar: Investigating Vulnerabilities in Autonomous Vehicle Perception Algorithms
2025-04-16 13:00 - 14:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) for critical tasks such as environment perception—identifying traffic signs, pedestrians, and lane markings—and executing control decisions like braking, acceleration, and lane changing. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, including structured perturbations to inputs and misleading training samples that can degrade performance. This presentation begins with an overview of adversarial training, emphasizing the impact of input sizes on DNNs’ vulnerability to cyberattacks. Subsequently, I will share our recent findings that explore the hypothesis that DNNs learn piecewise linear relationships between inputs and outputs. This conjecture is crucial for developing both adversarial attacks and defense strategies in machine learning security. The last part of the presentation will focus on recent work on using error-correcting codes to safeguard DNN-based classifiers.
Dr. Saif Jabari is an Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and a Global Network Associate Professor at the Tandon School of Engineering at NYU in Brooklyn, NY. At NYUAD, he is co-PI of the Center for Integrated Urban Networks (CITIES) and the Center for Stability, Instability, and Turbulence (SITE). He is an Associate Editor for Transportation Science and Area Editor with the new Elsevier journal Artificial Intelligence for Transportation. His research focuses on developing advanced computational methods and theoretical guarantees of performance for urban traffic management problems. The techniques integrate traffic data, typically in high resolution, with principles of traffic physics to address the rapidly evolving needs of the field. His current research focuses on understanding and addressing vulnerabilities in deep neural networks, specifically as they relate to environment perception in autonomous vehicles.

AI: Forging the Future of the AEC Industry
2025-04-22 17:30 - 19:00 | 5 metro, 5 MetroTech, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry by driving innovation across planning, design, construction, and operations. At the core of this transformation is the ability to collect, process, and act on vast amounts of data in ways that were previously unimaginable.
To explore these groundbreaking developments, New York University and Professional Women in Construction of New York have assembled a panel of visionary leaders who will assess AI alternatives and discuss how they are shaping the future of the AEC industry.
This event will provide an invaluable opportunity to gain insights into how AI is redefining workflows and creating new possibilities for professionals in this field.

Event Details:
Date: Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Time: 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM (EDT)
Location: Pfizer Auditorium, 5 Metrotech, Brooklyn, NY

Panelists:
Semiha Ergan, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Civil and Urban Engineering Department
KiSeok Jeon, STV
Melissa Forstell McAneny. Trunk Tools
Monica Nelson, Gilbane Building Company

Moderator:
Mohamad Awada, NYU Tandon School of Engineering,Civil and Urban Engineering Department

Fireside Chat with David Hammer, co-founder of Popwheels
2025-04-23 14:00 - 15:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
This student-moderated Fireside Chat will feature David Hammer, co-founder of Popwheels, a cutting-edge e-bike battery swap network. David will discuss his career trajectory, the challenges of standing up urban-scale technology in NYC, and more!

Prof. Vinitsky Seminar: Robust Self-driving Emerges from Self-play
2025-05-07 13:00 - 14:00 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201
Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic driving emerges entirely from self-play in simulation at unprecedented scale — 1.6~billion~km of driving. This is enabled by Gigaflow, a batched simulator that can synthesize and train on 42 years of subjective driving experience per hour on a single 8-GPU node. The resulting policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on three independent autonomous driving benchmarks. The policy outperforms the prior state of the art when tested on recorded real-world scenarios, amidst human drivers, without ever seeing human data during training. The policy is realistic when assessed against human references and achieves unprecedented robustness, averaging 17.5 years of continuous driving between incidents in simulation.

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

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

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

CUE Distinguished Speaker Series: Katus Watson, Jacobs
2025-09-10 12:30 - 13:30 | C2SMART Center Viz Lab, 6 Metrotech Center, Room 460, Brooklyn, 11201

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

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

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

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