Author: Brittney Kim O'Neill

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Laefer and Collaborators win ICE Manby Prize

Prof. Debra Laefer and her collaborators Dr. Linh Truong-Hong and Nora Gyetvai were recently award the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Manby Prize for their paper “Laser scan-based structural assessment of wrought iron bridges: Guinness Bridge, Ireland” published in the Journal of Engineering History and Heritage. The prize is awarded annually to the best paper that covers ICT/GIS/BIM in its broadest sense.

The paper introduced a novel method for converting laser scanning data into finite element models that can be used for structural assessment and applied this new method to a case study on the historic Guinness Bridge in Dublin Ireland.

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Laefer Spends Week at Ideas Lab

After being selected for the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution Ideas Lab earlier this year, Prof. Debra F. Laefer, spent the past week at the intensive Ideas Lab workshop, working on groundbreaking ideas to advance data science in the US. Ideas Labs are founded on the idea that, if you solicit ideas, you will tend to get very similar ideas solicitation after solicitation, but if you solicit brilliant minds and give them an opportunity to germinate new ideas together in a supportive, low-distraction, innovation environment, great things can happen. This Ideas Lab session, hosted by SIAM, was focussed on Harnessing the Data Revolution and included researchers from institutions across the US. After this very intense week, Prof. Laefer is excited to pursue further work inspired by the ideas explored in the lab along with a whole new team of data science collaborators. 

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Laefer Leads P3 Discussion of Legal and Financial Issues

At the P3 Summit in New York on January 24th, Prof. Debra F. Laefer moderated a fascinating discussion of the legal and financial issues which surround private public partnership implementations. Panelists included Senator Kevin Parker, Carl Oliveri of Grassi & Co, Elizabeth McCarthy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Patrick Askew of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. 

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Dr. Vo Presents at GeoDelft

Last week, the urban modeling group’s senior researcher, Dr. Anh-Vu Vo, traveled to the Netherlands to take part in GeoDelft. GeoDelft combined the ISPRS Technical Commission (TC) IV symposium, the 3D GeoInfo conference, the 3D Cadastres workshop, and the 3rd International Conference on Smart Data and Smart Cities. Dr. Vo delivered a talk on A 6-dimensional hilbert approach to index full waveform LiDAR data in a distributed computing environment at the ISPRS TCIV symposium. 

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“I had the pleasure to meet all the people working on the frontline of spatial data, urban data integration, and 3D data visualization in Europe,” said Dr. Vo, “to me personally, it was also a trip to catch up with many fellows in TU Delft’s Department of OTB (particularly in Prof. Peter van Oosterom and Prof. Sisi Zlatanova’s teams) whom I met and worked with during my 2-month visit to TU Delft 4 years ago. It was also great to see some of my PhD works in point cloud data management strategies under Prof. Laefer’s supervision is providing some insight and inspiration to some current PhD students in TU Delft.” 

Continued engagement with the international remote sensing and mapping community remains a key priority for NYU CUSP’s Urban Modeling Group; we look forward to the 2019 ISPRS TCIV symposium.

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Prof. Laefer Speaks at NYS GIS Geospatial Summit 2018

On Wednesday Prof. Debra Laefer delivered her talk, This Technology Could Change Life in Cities at Geospatial Summit 2018, hosted by NYS GIS in Upstate New York. Focusing on the power of 3D data integration and emphasizing the power of LiDAR, Prof. Laefer shared her vision for truly 3D data management in the urban environment with a group of GIS professionals from NYS and beyond. 

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New XSEDE Computing Resource Allocation Awarded

After a very productive year of research on an XSEDE Start Up Allocation on the Bridges supercomputer at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the Urban Modeling Group has now been awarded a full Research Allocation (including 268,206.0 SUs on Bridges) as well as staffing support through the ECSS program. These valuable resources will be leveraged to continue work on indexing and data management systems for 3D spatio-temporal data. 

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Paper by Dr. Anh-Vu Vo one of ISPRS’s Most Cited Articles

Dr. Anh-Vu Vo’s 2015 paper “Octree-based region growing for point cloud segmentation” is one of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing’s most highly cited papers since 2015. The paper has been cited in 82 publications, according to Scopus.

Dr. Vo’s paper introduces a novel, region-growing algorithm for the fast surface patch segmentation of three-dimensional point clouds of urban environments, which proved to be at least an order of magnitude faster when compared to a conventional region growing method and able to incorporate semantic-based feature criteria, while achieving precision, recall, and fitness scores of at least 75% and as much as 95%.

ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing is the #1 ranked journal in the field of remote sensing with an impact factor of 5.994. It covers work across photogrammetry, remote sensing, spatial information systems, computer vision, and related fields. The full list of highly cited papers can be found on the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing website.

 

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Laefer Brings Subject Expertise to Multi-National Dense Urban Environment Projects

Through her work with military interests in the US, the UK, and Canada, Prof. Debra Laefer has provided critical subject expertise to stakeholders analyzing the increasingly crucial role of dense urban environments in military engagements.  In addition to her continuing work with the US Army as a member of the Board of Advisors for the Dense Urban Terrain Detachment based at Fort Hamilton, she recently returned from a NATO sponsored trip to the Urbanisation Project Wargame at the Defence Academy, Shrivenham on September 2nd-6th, where she served as the Green Team co-leader. Laefer has also been invited to serve as the Green Team co-leader at the RDECOM Dense Urban Environment Wargame in Washington, DC later this fall.

As urban environments increase in complexity and density and more combat is conducted in these urban spaces, improved 3D intelligence and understanding of these environments will be vital to ensuring the efficacy of the US and their allies efforts in global combat zones. As this area of analysis has evolved, the Urban Modeling Group’s expertise in remote sensing, urban data collection, and 3D data management has been identified as a valuable contribution to efforts to improve approaches to urban engagement.

 

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Urban Modeling Group Research Featured in GIM International and others

The Urban Modeling Group’s Prof. Debra Laefer and Dr. Zohreh Zahiri, in collaboration with University College Dublin’s Aoife Gowen, recently published two papers describing their groundbreaking research in hyperspectral imaging for building materials identification. The research demonstrated, for the first time, the ability to use hyperspectral imaging to characterize differing strengths within a single type of construction material (brick, concrete).

This technology will help civil engineers and developers rapidly analyze the integrity of construction materials and assist with the documentation, preservation, and restoration of historical structures, as well as the asset management of our infrastructure without requiring any destructive testing or even direct contact with the materials under investigation.

This work has since been featured by GIM International, Construction Dive, Hard Find Electronics, Pythom, and Phys.org.

The full press release is available from the Center for Urban Science and Progress.

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Best Paper Award for Urban Modeling Group’s Siyuan Chen

Ireland’s annual civil engineering conference CERAI 2018 wrapped up Thursday, August 30th, with a special honor for the Urban Modeling Group’s Siyuan Chen. Chen’s paper, Bridge Deck Extraction and Investigation through a UAV Derived Point Cloud, was selected for a best paper award. Chen is a PhD student working with the TRUSS program at University College Dublin and supervised by Prof. Debra Laefer (NYU). Through his excellent work in UAV based infrastructure inspection, Chen has made important strides in improving inspection safety, efficiency, and cost efficacy by leveraging UAV data collection and subsequent 3D data analysis techniques.