Students from BUILT lab (Assel, Nick, Jinkai, Brian, Christian) presented their work alongside other students involved in C2SMART research at the research expo on April 27th.
Author Archives: Joseph Chow
Susan Xu to be a DiDi-IEEE Graduate Fellow
Susan Jia Xu has been accepted into Didi Chuxing‘s DiDi-IEEE Joint Graduate Program. She will be working out of the Beijing office over the next few months. Congratulations! For more information about DiDi’s program:
https://outreach.didichuxing.com/talent/graduate/
Heba Omholt awarded Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship
Heba Omholt, a student in the MS in Transportation Planning & Engineering program and a recent C2SMART-funded research assistant in the BUILT lab, has been awarded a Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship. The award is the amount of $5000 and an additional $1500 travel expenditure to attend TRB Annual Meeting in 2018. Heba joined NYU in Fall 2017, after just completing her B.S. in Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning from University of California, Davis.
Congratulations to Heba, NYU’s newest Eisenhower Fellow!
BUILT presentations at INFORMS 2017 in Houston
We have four presentations at INFORMS Annual Meeting being presented at the Convention Center in Houston. They will all be in rm 361C at the Convention Center except for the presentation from Mehdi Nourinejad (which will be in Rm 332B):
Calls for papers for two journal special issues
Prof. Chow is co-editing special issues for two top journals in the transportation field.
The first is in IEEE ITS Magazine (recent impact factor of 3.654), with Xiaopeng Li at USF, Monica Menendez at ETHZ, Sean Qian at CMU, and Xiaobo Qu at UT Sydney. The issue focuses more on the technological advances in emerging mobility systems:
The second is in TR Part C (recent impact factor 3.805), with Feixiong Liao and Harry Timmermans at Eindhoven, and Song Gao at UM Amherst. This issue focuses more on user and operator behavior and decision-making:
Research on smart repositioning of idle vehicles published in TR Part E
One of the biggest challenges in operating on-demand mobility services is the need to dynamically reposition idle vehicles, whether they are taxis, shared vehicles/bikes, or empty shuttles. This latest research with Dr. Hamid R. Sayarshad at Cornell University proposes new models and algorithms to anticipate future demand for the problem by approximating future opportunity costs with queue delay. In addition, we formulated a lower bound of the queueing-based location model from Marianov & Serra that can be solved much more computationally efficiently. Simulation tests in a controlled study area with NYC taxi data suggests the feasibility of nearly 30% improvement over myopic positioning techniques that do not use data to look ahead.
This work was initially undertaken when Hamid was a PhD student with funding support from the Canada Research Chairs program. Resources from C2SMART are also acknowledged.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554517300121
Gisselle Barrera awarded WTS scholarship
Gisselle, one of undergraduate summer researchers at BUILT, is the recipient of the Susan Kupferman Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship from WTS. She will receive the award at the WTS Gala at the Battery Park Garden on October 4th. Congrats!
Prof. Chow interviewed for MIT Technology Review article
In the latest MIT Technology Review article, “The Startup Behind NYC’s Plan to Replace Phone Booths with 7,500 Connected Kiosks“, Elizabeth Woyke interviews Prof. Chow about the role that public kiosks can play to relay information.
NSF-funded publication quantifies taxi sharing consumer benefits
Recently, TLC announced using Via’s software to enable yellow taxi sharing (https://lnkd.in/dxf-MU9) in favor of a taxi sharing policy. Our latest NSF-funded paper with researchers from NYU Tandon, CUSP, and Courant (Ziyi Ma, Matthew Urbanek, Maria Alejandra Pardo Baquero, Xuebo Lai), now in press, quantifies this benefit for riders that use taxi to access the airport (~10% improvement in consumer surplus) and demonstrate how different matching policies can significantly affect the spatial distribution of that benefit.
Ziyi Ma was supported by the NYU Undergraduate Summer Research Program. Joseph Chow was partially supported by National Science Foundation grant CMMI-1634973. The JFK airport taxi mode choice survey was shared by PANYNJ, which is gratefully acknowledged.
The open access paper can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2046043017300217.
NSF-funded paper accepted for presentation at IEEE ITSC 2017 in Yokohama
The latest paper, a joint effort between Yueshuai Brian He, Prof. Chow, and U. Toronto researcher Dr. Mehdi Nourinejad, has been accepted for presentation in the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference held in Yokohama in fall 2017. The paper topic, “A Privacy Design Problem for Sharing Transport Service Tour Data”, investigates a method to protect the privacy of a private transport operator’s tour data by anonymizing it under the constraint of providing sufficiently accurate user performance metrics for public use. This work should be increasingly important as public agencies and private operators like Via and Lyft seek out data sharing arrangements to support smart cities.
This research is supported by NSF CAREER grant CMMI-1652735.
A preprint of the paper can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318451988_A_Privacy_Design_Problem_for_Sharing_Transport_Service_Tour_Data