Tag: debra laefer

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Laefer Featured as Invited Speaker at DEF CON 26

Invited to speak at the BioHack Village at DEF CON 26, Prof. Debra Laefer continued the Urban Modeling Group’s tradition of engagement with potential collaborators from a diversity of disciplines, including macrogenomics and bio hacking, when she spoke at the event last Friday, August 10th in Las Vegas. Prof. Laefer’s talk, Remote Sensing, Distributed Computing, BigData and 3D Epidemiology:  Today’s Public Health Opportunity, focussed on ways that 3D spatial data can revolutionize our understanding of environmental DNA and disease pathology, particularly in urban environments.

 

Abstract: Recent advances in remote sensing, drones, distributed computing, bigdata, and environmental DNA offer an unprecedented opportunity to push epidemiology beyond its traditional, two-dimensional (i.e. map-based) approach and harness the full availability and power of three-dimensional data and novel investigation methods to explore such data. This talk will present an extremely technology-specific vision for achieving this. Examples of the potential usefulness of this approach will be demonstrated with respect to three scenarios:  (1) avian flu, (2) asthma, and post-flooding fecal contamination. The current state of the art of the component technologies will be presented as well as the remaining challenges for their seamless integration

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City-Scale Modeling at the Alan Turing Institute

Prof. Debra Laefer presented a workshop in London today by invitation from the Alan Turing Institute. She brought over a decade of knowledge in urban modeling to share with the Institute’s innovative data science researchers. We hope that this will inspire increasing research in city-scale urban modeling and seed exciting new cross-Atlantic collaborations.

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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.