Urban

The world is changing, and it's clear we need to help drive that change

With more than half of the world’s population now residing in urban areas and that figure expected to rise to more than 70% by mid- century, NYU Tandon is innovating ways to make the cities of the future smart and resilient.

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Shaping the future of urban living

Whether it’s designing earthquake-resistant buildings, advancing autonomous vehicles to revolutionize commuting, developing cutting-edge processes to disinfect wastewater, using virtual and augmented reality to create human-friendly spaces, maximizing the efficiency and safety of the construction industry, or myriad other vital components of urban environments, NYU Tandon has the entirety of New York City as a living lab — and a staging ground for modeling solutions for the global urban communities of the future. 

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Transportation Engineering
Urban Infrastructure Systems and Urban Analytics
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Engineering in the center of it all

The city is more than a microcosm of urban society’s great challenges and opportunities — it’s our home. The Tandon community’s education, work, and lives are enriched by being part of the fabric of Brooklyn. Here, entrepreneurs, artists, and engineers work side-by-side amid Brooklyn’s dynamic creative and innovation ecosystem and unparalleled collaboration and cultural opportunities at NYU and beyond. In turn, we work to engage with our neighbors and enhance the community around us, from spearheading rigorous, hands-on K-12 STEM education programs to championing noise mitigation efforts.

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Welcome to Brooklyn
michael horodniceau

Dr. Michael Horodniceanu

Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering Michael Horodniceanu is the inaugural Chair of the IDC Innovation Hub, an initiative aimed at formulating new approaches to the challenges facing the New York metropolitan area and the wider world. As a former president of MTA Capital Construction, he oversaw several mega-projects, including East Side Access, Second Avenue Subway, No. 7 Line Extension, and the Fulton Transit Center.

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Debra Laefer

Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering Debra Laefer has a broad background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation. She is known for her innovative work with hyperspectral imaging and the remote sensing method known as LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and she has helped collect the densest public LiDAR data set in the world. Her work has implications for fields ranging from urban planning and development to autonomous vehicles and drone fleet operation to infectious disease transmission tracking and more.

Research Labs & Centers

Transportation Management

BUILT @ NYU

The Behavioral Urban Informatics, Logistics, and Transport Laboratory conducts research in the area of transportation systems design and modeling. Typical products of this lab may include dynamic operating policies for flexible transport services, a parking pricing and information system for travelers, a decision support tool for evaluating multimodal infrastructure investment strategies, or a fleet routing algorithm for autonomous vehicles or other cyber-physical transportation systems. The lab is a part of the Center for Urban ITS within Tandon, and is headed by Professor Joseph Chow.

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New York City

Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP)

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to the application of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the service of urban communities across the globe. Using New York City as our laboratory and classroom, we strive to develop novel data- and technology-driven solutions for complex urban problems.

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Connected Cities for Smart Mobility toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation (C2SMART)

C2SMART is a U.S. Department of Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center for research, education, workforce development, and technology transfer activities. Rather than just focusing on developing technologies to make a city smarter, C2SMART is dedicated to a related critical step: how to connect these disparate technologies with cities of different population and infrastructure scales and different systems of systems.

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Fire Research Group

Researchers at the Fire Research Group work on an online, scenario-based simulation training program for firefighters. ALIVE (Advanced Learning through Integrated Visual Environments) is a decades-long effort to bridge the information gap between research and real-life firefighting.

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Future Building Informatics and Visualization Lab

The Future Building Informatics and Visualization Lab (biLAB) is part of the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. It focuses on understanding the operational challenges associated with construction and operation of facilities and infrastructure systems in urban settings.

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Flood Rescue

International Center for Enterprise Preparedness (INTERCEP)

INTERCEP is the first academic center dedicated to organizational resilience and agility. The center maintains a global outreach with a special focus on multi-party collaboration including business-to-business and public-private partnerships. Acknowledging that "risk and reward" are at the core of all undertakings in both the public and private sectors, the Center focuses on the development of strategies to most effectively address uncertainty so as to achieve targeted objectives — in essence addressing "risks" to achieve "rewards".

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Sounds of New York City (SONYC)

SONYC researchers have launched a citizen science initiative to train artificial intelligence (AI) technology to understand exactly which sounds are contributing to unhealthy levels of noise in New York City. A first-of-its-kind project addressing urban noise pollution, SONYC is based at NYU Tandon’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

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Urban Future Lab

Urban Future Lab (UFL) is the center of cleantech innovation in New York. We connect people, capital, and purpose to advance market-ready solutions to address climate change. UFL is part of our the NYU Tandon Future Labs, a network of business incubators and accelerators that support early-stage ventures in New York City.

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Urban Intelligence Lab

We are focused on creating new data-driven methodologies to observe, model, and analyze the urban environment. Our work is grounded in solving real-world problems and providing decision-makers with a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between physical infrastructure systems, natural systems, and human systems.

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Traffic Engineering

Urban Mobility and ITS Systems Laboratory

It combines a series of new concepts, technologies and services to integrate information, vehicles and transportation infrastructure to increase mobility, safety and comfort, and reduce energy waste and pollution.

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