| |  |  | A New Tier 1 Center! | C2SMART’s proposal to form the Connected Communities for Smart Mobility Toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation for Equitably Reducing Congestion (C2SMARTER) Center was selected for funding by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). C2SMARTER is one of just twenty centers selected for Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) designation under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) by U.S. DOT. The awards, announced by U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, provide $435 million to form UTCs around the country.
The new $15 million center, led by New York University (NYU), continues the C2SMART consortium including Rutgers University, University of Washington, and University of Texas-El Paso, while welcoming new members CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, Texas Southern University, and North Carolina A&T University to the team. This adds two Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs), and brings the number of minority-serving institutions in the Center to four.
With $2 million in annual federal funding over the next 5 years and matching non-federal funding, C2SMARTER will embark on an ambitious research, education, training, and technology transfer program focused on the U.S. DOT priority area of Reducing Congestion. C2SMARTER will build on the foundation of big data, testbeds, and other tools developed as part of C2SMART to deploy congestion-reducing interventions adapted to local community contexts. Research will direct attention toward how solutions will interact with social, economic, and infrastructural inequities most often experienced by underserved communities. This includes an expansion of technology transfer to Rural, Isolated, Tribal, and Indigenous (RITI) communities, and repairing the impact of 20th century infrastructure construction on inner-city neighborhoods.
Read more about the Center’s plans for the future here.
| News | More Coverage of C2SMARTER’s Winning Proposal | New York State Senators Schumer and Gillibrand announce designation and funding for the new U.S. DOT University Transportation Centers led by New York universities NYU Tandon highlights some of C2SMARTER’s ambitious research, education, and technology transfer agenda aimed at Reducing Congestion in the Center's communities
| | NYU Team Hosts DOT Workshop and Mobility Events |  | C2SMART students were highlighted in an article citing NYU Tandon’s network of events which treat discussions of urban mobility, accessibility, and infrastructure planning. The highlight also called out C2SMART’s February workshop unveiling Data Driven Work Zone Impact & Conflict Estimation Platform (DWICE), a web-based tool to help coordinate work zones by cataloging multiple types of work zone events, across multiple projects, on one easy-to-read map, allowing users to predict and mitigate impediments to traffic flow and reduce system strain. The tool enables DOT staffers to better plan roadway closures ahead of time, saving motorists valuable time. Read more. | | Transportation Deserts get a Lift from Collaboration between NYU Tandon and Dollaride |  | Millions of New Yorkers live in “transit deserts” — areas in which public transportation is not easily accessed — but a major grant from New York State means Dollaride, in collaboration with Tandon’s C2SMART Center (the Connected Cities for Smart Mobility Toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation), will help fill that gap with environmentally-friendly electric vehicles.
The first electric fleets and EV charging stations are planned for delivery to Brooklyn and Queens in late 2023. The program will then expand to other NYC transit deserts in 2024 and 2025, with a long-term goal of expanding this highly scalable model of clean mobility to other cities in New York State and around the world.
“Our track record helping solve problems related to modern urban transportation challenges is excellent preparation for our Dollaride work,” said Joseph Chow, Associate Professor in the NYU Tandon Department of Civil & Urban Engineering and the Deputy Director at the C2SMART. “Our teams have long been focused on unearthing new ways that transportation can improve cities’ infrastructure and the lives of people who live there. We’re so pleased to continue that commitment through our Dollaride collaboration.” Read more. | | As Subway Ridership Rebounds, Some Women Are Reluctant to Return | | Sarah Kaufman was quoted in the New York Times last week discussing the impact of crime taking place on the subway and the slow rebound of female ridership. “It does limit economic she said. “We’re paying in time and/or money for our own safety.” She added that safety issues are particularly profound for women with disabilities, women of color and trans women, who have greater fear of being targeted. Read the article here. |
|
|
|
|
|
| | | C2SMART PI to Co-Lead New Earthquake Center with Support from National Science Foundation | | A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will spur The University of Texas at El Paso’s efforts to help underserved communities across the nation become more resilient to earthquakes. C2SMART PI Jeffrey Weidner will co-lead the Center for Collective Impact in Earthquake Science. With an emphasis on community engagement, a network of community members, organizations and institutions will contribute to the center’s collective impact model by developing a common agenda, centralized support, continuous communication, mutually reinforcing activities, and shared measurement. The center’s research will focus on responding to the needs of vulnerable populations that have been historically underserved by current earthquake science, engineering and public policy. Read more. |
|
|
|
|
|
| | | ICYMI: Awards at TRB | | C2SMART won multiple awards this year, including: Most Cited Paper Award for “Impact of COVID-19 behavioral inertia on reopening strategies for New York City transit” Professor Joseph Chow was honored with the Outstanding Associate Editor Award First place in the Long-Term Infrastructure Performance (LTIP) Student Data Analysis Contest Second place, TRB Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications Committee Best Dissertation
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| To see all the sessions, presentations, photos, and updates from C2SMART, click here. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | Recent Publications & Presentations | Mapping the walk: A scalable computer vision approach for generating sidewalk network datasets from aerial imagery, co-authored by Maryam Hosseini, Andres Sevtsuk, Fabio Miranda, Roberto M. Cesar Jr, and Claudio T. Silva, was published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. The paper explores solutions for the lack information about the location and connectivity of city sidewalks, which makes it difficult to implement research on pedestrian infrastructure. To address this gap, the authors designed and implemented an end-to-end open-source tool— Tile2Net —for extracting sidewalk, crosswalk, and footpath polygons from orthorectified aerial imagery using semantic segmentation.
| Upcoming Events |  | C2SMART’s Student Learning Hub is back for Spring 2023 with a new slate of classes. The SLH is a space designed for students, by students, to do deep dives on the topics they’re interested in and develop the skills they need. This spring, we’re covering everything from ChatGPT to 3D simulations. Students from consortium universities are invited your peers for networking, skill-building, and learning — free of charge. |  | Chatting with ChatGPT: Exploring the Advancements in AI Language ModelsFriday, March 10, 2023 | 11:00am ET
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 ImplementFriday, March 24, 2023 | 12:00pm ET
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. | | |  | Unlock the Power of Graph Neural Networks: Understanding the Fundamentals and Knowing When to ImplementFriday, March 31, 2023 | 1:00pm ET
This course covers the basics of graph neural networks (GNNs), including graph convolutional networks, graph attention networks and graph wavelet networks. The session aims to provide a solid understanding of GNN modeling for machine learning practitioners, data scientists, and anyone interested in AI advancements. | | Opportunities | IEEE Region 1 (Northeastern US) and University of Maine will be hosting the IEEE Joint Region 1 and 2 Student Paper Contest at the IEEE Student Conference on April 14 to 16, 2023 at the University of Maine, Orono Maine. The conference is also inviting students from Region 2 (Eastern US) to participate. The top 3 papers will get a complimentary registration to attend the 2023 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference in October 2023. Registration is Open and Deadline is March 15, 2023! Register for the conference here and submit your paper here.
| | | |
|
|
|
|
|
