Urban Research
Research areas cover urban infrastructure engineering, urban informatics, and innovative technologies for upgrading infrastructure performance, lifecycle management and resiliency.
Urban Informatics research focuses on the acquisition, integration, and analysis of diverse, large-scale data to understand and improve urban systems and quality of life in cities. Researchers seek a better understanding of complex urban systems and operations, utilizing existing and emerging data streams and novel urban sensors to observe, model, and analyze city form and function. Research in urban informatics is directly linked to practice by identifying and deploying new data-driven solutions to the most pressing challenges facing cities and their residents. The goal of this work is to make cities around the world more sustainable, livable, equitable, and resilient.
Current research includes:
- Intelligent infrastructure systems engineering monitoring and management
- Data-driven decision support
- Artificial intelligence systems for early detection and preemptive mitigation of water leaks and bio contamination anomalies (iii) Smart asset management for energy, water and gas distribution networks
- Disaster resiliency of urban infrastructure
- Transportation infrastructure management in collaboration with NYC DOT and MTA
- Infrastructure rehabilitation technologies and Interference Management with NYC DDC (vii) Coastal eco system preservation in water stress regions with UNESCO-IHP
- Public education for promoting urban safety culture.
Related Research Groups:
|
The Urban Intelligence Lab is grounded in solving real-world problems and providing decision-makers with a comprehensive understanding of the inter-relationship between physical infrastructure systems, natural systems, and human systems to engage in long-term sustainability and resilience planning that is based on evidence and rigorous, objective research. |
 |
|
The digital age has produced an incredible ability to collect, store, and analyze data. Bringing this “big data” to bear on societal problems — from clean air to transportation to healthcare — is at the heart of USP and a path to improvement of both existing and newly-built cities. |
 |
|
Quantified Community and Smart Neighborhood Lab The Center for Urban Science And Progress (NYU CUSP) is a unique public-private research center that uses New York City as its laboratory and classroom to help cities around the world become more productive and livable. |
 |
|
Future Building Informatics and Visualization Lab It focuses on understanding the operational challenges associated with construction and operation of facilities and infrastructure systems in urban settings. |
 |
|
Recent extreme weather events in the US East Coast and the Caribbean highlight the impact of the interdependencies of critical infrastructure systems in coastal population centers when exposed to weather extremes. It highlights how those interdependencies cause failures of physical assets leading to adverse impacts on the health and economic wellbeing of communities in those regions. Using Puerto Rico’s recent experience when faced with Hurricane Maria, through an NSF funded project we seeks to develop a data driven modeling framework for such population centers, toward understanding the complex physical and social vulnerabilities, and interdependencies that resulted in failure of the lifeline infrastructure in coastal weather extremes. |
 |