Urban computing to get a boost with new open-source platform funded by the National Science Foundation

A research team led by Institute Professor Claudio Silva and the Visualization Imaging and Data Analytics Research Center (VIDA) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is creating an open-source platform that aims to make complex urban data more accessible and usable, potentially leading to smarter, more sustainable cities.

The project, called OSCUR (Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing Research), will develop a comprehensive user-friendly suite of tools and resources for collecting and analyzing urban data. It intends to help city planners and researchers around the world work together to better tackle city challenges like transportation and climate change.

“While open data is increasingly available across a host of urban areas - from resource consumption to housing and infrastructure — its potential remains largely untapped because of unique challenges related to the diversity and scale of the data and the complex computations required to obtain trustworthy insights,” said Silva, who is the project’s Principal Investigator (PI). Silva co-directs VIDA and is also on the faculty of the NYU Center for Data Science (CDS). 

 “OSCUR intends to unlock that potential,” Silva added.

The National Science Foundation just awarded OSCUR a five-year, $5 million grant. Researchers from the University of Washington (UW) — led by Jon E. Froehlich, professor in human-computer interaction at UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering — and the University of Illinois Chicago, led by Fabio Miranda, assistant professor of computer science who is an alumnus of VIDA at NYU, are part of the OSCUR team.

The platform will integrate various open-source components to support the urban data lifecycle, including data collection, curation, management, analysis, and visualization. 

One of OSCUR's key innovations is its ability to handle diverse types of urban data, from traditional tabular datasets to complex spatial information and sensor readings. The team is focused on making the platform easy to use and accessible to researchers, city planners, and community groups with varying levels of technical expertise.

"With OSCUR, we're trying to democratize urban computing and empower a broad range of stakeholders to analyze urban data at scale,” explained Juliana Freire, a project co-PI. Freire is an NYU Tandon Institute Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, a co-director of VIDA, and on the faculty of CDS. “We want to remove the silos in which urban data typically lives, lower the barrier to entry for urban computing and facilitate better collaboration. By providing a unified platform with powerful tools, we hope to accelerate research and development in this critical field."

Graham Dove — a project co-PI who is an NYU Tandon Assistant Professor of Technology Management and Information and a faculty member of NYU Tandon’s Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) — will lead the team’s efforts to work with city agencies and community organizations to ensure OSCUR meets real-world needs.  The team plans to host workshops — first in New York City and then Chicago and Seattle —  to engage the urban computing community and gather feedback on the platform's development. 

"The true beauty and promise of OSCUR is in how it attempts to unify long-standing and deeply interconnected problems in urban science that often have disparate approaches spread across disciplines,” said Froelich. “We are trying to develop standardized tools, datasets, and data standards to address problems related to climate change (e.g., urban heat island effects), walkability and bikeability, urban accessibility for people with disabilities, and more.”

The project's broader impacts extend beyond the technical realm. OSCUR aims to address key issues such as urban accessibility, environmental justice, and community resilience. The team is actively working to involve underserved communities and increase diversity in STEM fields through targeted outreach and educational programs.

“In Chicago, we are collaborating with communities on the South Side to try to understand how they are disproportionately impacted by pollution in their neighborhoods,” said Miranda. “One of the key aspects is lowering the barrier for accessing all of these technologies, to ensure that community members can get the information they need.”

The OSCUR project grew out of work at CUSP, which Silva co-founded at NYU Tandon in 2012. CUSP researchers collaborated with New York City agencies, created useful tools like TaxiVis — a project spearheaded by Silva — and trained urban data scientists. These experiences revealed the need for better, more widely accessible urban computing tools. OSCUR emerged as a larger initiative to address this need, aiming to benefit multiple cities and researchers worldwide.