Prof. Debra Laefer and Prof. Esteban Tabak from NYU’s Courant Institute were awarded seed funding from the Moore-Sloan Foundation to pursue “Development of a Sample-based Modulated Wasserstein Distance for Heterogeneous Datasets of Unknown Distributions for Small Feature Change Detection”. The grant supports a graduate student to work with the two professors on the development of this research project. To learn more about this work, please see the project page here.
Guest Speaker: Evangelina (Eva) Ieronymaki
Members of both CUSP and NYU Tandon turned out to hear Manhattan College Assistant Professor Evangelina (Eva) Ieronymaki speak about the interpretation of ground movements due to the construction of the Crossrail tunnels in London, UK on May 11th, 2017.
Abstract
Construction of large diameter tunnels is frequently accomplished by closed face tunnel boring machines (TBM), using a combination of face pressure and grouting around the precast lining in order to limit ground movements and potential damage to overlying structures. In practice, urban tunneling projects require extensive monitoring of ground and structure response to the tunneling operations. Although these data are primarily used to address liability issues, they are crucial for the calibration and evaluation of predictive methods. This talk focussed on analyses of ground movements monitoring data caused by the construction of the Crossrail tunnels in London Clay. Crossrail is currently the largest infrastructure project in Europe and one of the most well-instrumented projects in the world. It consists of twin tunnels, constructed by Earth Pressure Balance (EPB) and Mixed Shield TBM, that pass under existing underground tunnels, sewers, and building foundations. Free-field measurements of surface and subsurface ground movements were interpreted using 2D finite element analyses with different soil constitutive models. The analyses optimized three input parameters corresponding to boundary deformations around the tunnel cavity, using a least squares fit to the measured ground movements. The results provide a comprehensive view of the ground movement pattern and a useful framework for understanding how ground response is linked to EPB control parameters, which can be further investigated using 3D finite element models.
Bio
Eva Ieronymaki is an Assistant Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Manhattan College and a Research Affiliate at MIT in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She received a Diploma in 2007 and a Master of Science in “Analysis and design of earthquake resistant structures” in 2008 from National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. She was then awarded the Edward Linde Presidential Fellowship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to continue her graduate studies. There she completed her Master of Science in 2011 and her PhD in 2015, for research in Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. Her research deals primarily with numerical modeling, soil behavior, and effects of tunneling on soils and structures, using advanced constitutive soil models. During her PhD, she collaborated closely with the Crossrail construction consortium (BAM-Ferrovial-Kier) and she performed part of her research on the construction site in England (2013). She also worked as a summer intern, at Attiko Metro S.A., during the construction of the red-line subway extension, in 2007. Dr. Ieronymaki is a licensed professional engineer, a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece since 2007, and an Associate Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) since 2015. She has received several prizes and awards during her undergraduate and graduate studies, including ‘Greek State Scholarship Foundation’ scholarship, Hatzopoulos prize NTUA, Kontodimos prize NTUA and Gerondelis Foundation fellowship.
City-Scale Urban Modeling at Stevens IT
Prof. Laefer was invited to speak on city-scale urban modeling at the picturesque Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. Her talk, presented on May 10th, 2017, shared recent progress and potential in the use of remote sensing for massive urban modeling, including the use of hyperspectral data to conduct material analysis.
Abstract
Despite tremendous advances in virtual reality and gaming environments, little of this has translated into city-scale models with engineering functionality, despite the pressing need for such models in a wide range of subjects (e.g. energy usage, urban heat island, pollution dispersion, pedestrian wind comfort, and blast vulnerability). As such, Prof. Laefer presented the current state of the art with respect to the creation of an automated pipeline for computational model creation that is representative of the actual built environment. Of particular interest is how the latest generation of laser scanning combined with hyperspectral imagery may prove to be a game changer in the auto-generation of computational models at a city-scale.
Guest Speaker: Zorica Nedovic-Budic
We were delighted to hear Prof. Zorica Nedovic-Budic speak at CUSP on May 8, 2017. Prof. Nedovic Budic discussed the power of Crowd-sourced Data for Urban Planning and Emergency Response with case studies from Ireland and Iran.
Abstract
Since mid-1980s the advances in geospatial technologies and information and decision-support systems have offered planners and other professionals dealing with spatially manifested phenomena new tools for storing, analyzing and visualizing information. However, the pace of technological progress has been faster than our ability to fully explore, adapt and exploit the technologies and tools to meaningfully contribute to practice and policy. As we move from geographic information systems (GIS) and WebGIS, to spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and geoportals, and to user-generated content enabled by Web 2.0, our informational capacities are ever expanding, albeit with very little time allowed to understand the impact. Like their predecessors, the recent developments in volunteered geographic information (VGI) and crowd-sourcing facilities have opened up new possibilities. They promise to enable a further step into democratization of data- dependent processes and have blurred the boundary between data users and data producers to create a new hybrid of data producers. This presentation explored two applications of crowd-sourcing: 1. in planning for underutilized inner city properties (Dublin, Ireland); and 2. in assessing the situation for earthquake emergency response (Bam, Iran). The work focused on evaluating the contribution of data generated through crowd- sourcing to better understanding of the local issues and guiding further actions.
Bio
Zorica Nedović-Budić is a professor and head in the Department of Planning and Policy at University of Illinois in Chicago. She received her PhD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was a faculty member at the University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign for 15 years and Chair of Spatial Planning at the University College Dublin for 7 years. Prof. Nedović-Budić’s research is about planning, cities and technology. From 2011 to 2016 she was the principal investigator on a 30-partner European FP7 project Transitioning Towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability (TURaS). She has published extensively in books and refereed journals, co-edited three volumes and served on editorial boards of several journals (including JAPA book review editorship and currently as an associate editor for the ASCE’s Journal of Urban Planning and Development). Prof. Nedović-Budić was on the Board of Directors of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). She sits on the Executive Committee of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).
Urban Research Day at NYU
Professor Laefer was delighted to have the opportunity to present at NYU’s Urban Research Day hosted by the NYU Provost’s Office. We are looking forward to many new and productive collaboration with other urban researchers at NYU.