Category: news

If you’re looking for the next big idea in emerging media, such as virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), there is no better place to look than universities like NYU. This reality is one that NYC Media Lab understands quite well. Tapping into New York’s student talent pool, the organization helps students develop prototypes that will disrupt and advance sectors such as media, technology, healthcare, retail, advertising, and more.

This prototyping of the future was on full display at the recent Demo Day of the Verizon Connected Futures Prototyping & Talent Development Program. Sponsored by NYC Media Lab and Verizon, the Connected Futures program supported 12 student teams who created projects within the areas of AR design and marked tracking, social VR/AR, the intersections of AR and AI, and the next generation in wireless technology. Gaining expertise and insight from the team at Verizon Envrmnt, students from across New York universities, including NYU Tandon School of Engineering, The New School, and Columbia University, designed, iterated and built their ideas into prototypes over six weeks. The program also benefits from support from the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and Distributed Information Systems (CATT).

“Through our Verizon Connected Futures program, we have a dozen new ideas at various stages of realization,” Justin Hendrix, Executive Director of NYC Media Lab, shared at the Demo Day. “We’re experiencing what’s possible right now with new technology.” The 12 teams designed products and services that span various industries, including education, transportation, retail, music, psychology, and more.

Driven by their passion for innovation and using technology to serve society, three NYU Tandon student teams shared their prototypes to a rapt audience of industry experts at the Demo Day.

CitytravelAR

Baris Siniksaran and Subigya Basnet with their mobile app CitytravelAR

Navigating the New York City subway system can be difficult, so the team behind CitytravelAR created an augmented reality wayfinding platform that allows you to use your smartphone to easily get around the city. “Using subway signage as AR markers, users would be able to not only find out the best train route for their journey, but also learn about local communities in and around the station area,” Subigya Basnet said. Basnet alongside his teammates and fellow Integrated Digital Media graduate students Vhalerie Lee and Baris Siniksaran hope their application can function within building smart cities using AR technology to merge commuting and community. “For all of us, NYU Tandon gave us the platform to begin this dive into VR/AR production and development,” Basnet shared, as he, Lee, and Siniksaran have all created projects like the “Game of Thrones” AR narrative experience and WAVR. “The opportunity to experiment our ideas encouraged us to take up opportunities, like the Verizon Connected Futures Challenge.”

ARSL

Heng Li and Mingfei Huang demonstrate ARSL

Computer science students Zhongheng (Heng) Li, Jacky Chen, and Mingfei Huangdebuted their mobile app that provides real-time sign language interpretation to help people communicate with each other more easily. With computer vision, cloud computing, and AR, ARSL uses a smartphone’s camera to capture and translate sign languages into the other user’s native spoken language, and instantaneously records spoken language and translates into sign. “This accessible solution empowers people to get connected,” Li said, adding that his team has a shared passion for using emerging tech for social good. With the millions of people around the world who are deaf or hearing impaired, this app could help people book appointments, explain their symptoms to doctors, or ask for directions, all through a translator in the palm of their hands.

Vrbal

Olivia Cabello, far right, was part of the multi-school team Vrbal

Olivia Cabello, a graduate student in Integrated Digital Media, has vast experience in human-centered design, and brought her expertise to the interdisciplinary and multi-school team that developed Vrbal. The VR training experience allows people with social anxiety or communication disorders to practice for situations, such as public speaking, interviews, and more. Using smart and adaptable technology, such as IBM’s Watson, Vrbal helps users gain more confidence and comfort in particular situations through its personalized environments and its interactive AI assistant that guides them along. Cabello added her user experience background to design Vrbal’s interface.

Camila Ryder
Graduate School of Arts and Science
Master of Arts in English Literature, Class of 2018

There may not have been a red carpet involved, but Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Claudio Silva had cause for celebration when the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) announced the winners of the 2018 Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards, which honor breakthroughs in technology that have a significant effect on television engineering.

Silva is the developer of a visual analytics tool now being used in Major League Baseball (MLB) stadiums across the country as part of the Emmy-winning Statcast, which combines the tool with a radar-based ball-tracking system and an optical player-tracking solution.

Silva’s tool — which he dubbed Baseball 4D when he presented it at the 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Visualization Conference — provided the ability to analyze each and every play on the field for the first time in sports history, allowing fans and industry officials to answer previously unanswerable analytics questions like where players should be positioned to best catch a ball traveling at a particular velocity or which players were most likely to accurately anticipate a pitch’s trajectory.

Silva collaborated with MLB Advanced Media on the development of the system — which involves groups of high-performance cameras installed throughout the ballpark along with software that produces highly interactive visualizations of the game in unprecedented detail. MLB Advanced Media shares the Emmy, which will be presented on April 8th, 2018 at a ceremony in Las Vegas, with the company ChyronHego, which was responsible for Statcast’s optical player-tracking equipment, and TrackMan, the creators of its radar-based ball-tracking system.

The Emmy win was not the only time in recent weeks that Silva had made a splash in the media. In Rio to visit the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a well-regarded institution of higher learning, he was interviewed about machine learning and data visualization by the Brazilian publication O Globo.

While the Emmy may recognize the significance of visual analytics in sports, his research into data visualization has far-reaching applications and potentials, from building software in smart cars to creating interactive urban design models.

Jemima Costanza is now on a pre-med track. Maeve Farrell has set her sights on a career at a major research university. Edward Huang and Vicente Gomez are studying computer science as undergraduates. Amaya Munoz foresees a future as an electrical and computer engineer. Jamie Monroy views biotechnology as an exciting career path. The list could go on and on. After taking part in the Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE) program as high school students, person after person begins to picture a career in the world of science, engineering, or technology one day.

Funded by a grant from the Pinkerton Foundation, ARISE was launched in 2013 by NYU’s Center for K12 STEM Education, with the aim of inviting rising juniors and seniors from New York City high schools into university labs to engage in high-level research. The seven-week program introduces them to the scientific method, data collection and analysis, lab safety, and ethics, and they are expected to make solid and useful contributions to their labs’ research objectives and daily operation. “We were individually mentored by graduate students and post-docs,” Gomez — who participated in ARISE in 2015 but whose connection to Tandon’s summer offerings stretches back even further, to when he participated in a program called Science of Smart Cities as a middle school student — recalls. “They did not sugarcoat the rigor a scientific career demands, and they didn’t take it easy on us simply because we were still in high school.”

ARISE — which recruits many students from demographic groups generally underrepresented in STEM disciplines, including women, students of color and those from low-income backgrounds — hosted 48 participants this summer, embedding them in a wide variety of faculty labs (see below) and assigning them Tandon graduate and post-doctoral mentors.

The resulting projects, presented to the public at the end of the program, ranged from assessing DNA extraction methods from museum specimens, to building sensors to study noise pollution in the city, to testing the effects of temperature and orientation on 3D printed parts and more.

Jason Mei of Stuyvesant High School and Xue Ye Lin of Brooklyn Tech, for example, worked with Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Miguel Modestino, who recently garnered a 2017 Global Change Award from the H&M Foundation for his development of a method of using solar energy and plant waste, rather than fossil fuel, to synthesize nylon. The pair — both of whom aspire to study chemical engineering once they are in college — fabricated custom solar arrays that may one day be employed to scale up Modestino’s process. “You might think that high school students would not be capable of making any meaningful or practical contributions in a university lab, but these two have proven you wrong,” Modestino says. “Their help was invaluable, and I’d be happy to have many more like them.”

Like Modestino, many of the professors who volunteered to host ARISE students were amply impressed. For proof, look no further than the figures compiled by Ben Esner, the head of the Center for K12 STEM Education.

“This year, an unprecedented 16 labs and faculty members have asked their ARISE students to continue working on their research during the school year, even though the program has officially ended for the summer,” he explains. “Out of 48 students, 26 will be staying on, furthering their own learning, contributing to their mentors’ research, and proving that programs like this are an invaluable way to get and keep young people interested in STEM.”

NYU Wireless teamed with the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) to build a wireless emulator for 5G systems. The emulator recreates both the wireless channel and the phased-array antennas. It can be used for transmitter and receiver devices so researchers can understand how 5G will perform in different environments and weather conditions.

According to a blog post from NYU Wireless, researchers used commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware from National Instruments coupled with emulator software that is based upon reference designs available to the academic researchers.  By using COTS, the researchers said they can lower the cost and complexity of the testing.

(See more…)

Since its inception in 2013, the Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE) program at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering has been nurturing NYC’s best young STEM talent. The full-time, seven-week program offers college-level workshops and seminars for New York high school students, as well as high-level research experience in participating NYU faculty labs and mentoring by a graduate or postdoctoral student.

Budding researcher and Stuyvesant High School student Caleb Smith-Salzbergrecently joined a research team headed by Professor Shivendra Panwar that centers on innovations in wireless technologies. Never did he imagine that his first research paper would be accepted for publication and presentation at the 2017 IEEE INFOCOM, a top-ranked conference on networking sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Smith-Salzberg is the first-listed author of the paper, an honor that would be unusual even for an undergraduate student. In “Bridging the digital divide between research and home networks,” he and his co-authors describe efforts to make it easier for researchers to improve the performance of networked applications and services on real-world networks. Their tool, which makes test networks more representative of typical home broadband connections, debuted at IEEE INFOCOM’s International Workshop on Computer and Networking Experimental Research Using Testbeds (CNERT) on May 1, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. Smith-Salzberg and his ARISE mentor Fraida Fund, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, also exhibited their work at NYU Tandon’s Research Expo in April.

Smith-Salzberg worked extensively last summer with Fund, who gives him due credit for his contributions. “He did most of the work developing the tool described in the paper over the summer, when he was working with us full-time,” Fund said. “Then, we worked on the paper draft together over the first half of this academic year. Every week, he came to Tandon once a week  after school, and we worked on the text together.”

Smith-Salzberg found his experience in the ARISE program gratifying and encourages anyone lucky enough to take part in the program to make the most of it. “I was treated by everyone at the lab as an equal member of the team,” he said. “I presented at the weekly meetings, and in my last week I presented to a larger group, which included Professor Panwar. This experience at a real workplace environment is very special, and there are not many programs that offer such an opportunity.”

Their research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT), NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Center for K-12 STEM Education, and the Pinkerton Foundation.

Dr. Roberto Padovani gave the prestigious Jack Keil Wolf Lecture on Wednesday in NYU Tandon’s brand new Makerspace. His presentation, “The Road to 5G,” focused on the standardization efforts the industry is making for next generation cellular technology or 5G.

Dr. Padovani is the Executive Vice President and Fellow at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. He joined Qualcomm in 1986 and served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer from 2002 to 2011.

Jack Keil Wolf Lecture Series is in honor of an information theorist whose pivotal contributions to digital communication and data storage technology helped shape our networked world, was a member of the Electrical Engineering Department at New York University from 1963 to 1965, and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now NYU Tandon School of Engineering) from 1965 to 1973. Dr. Wolf was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1993. He was the recipient of the 1990 E. H. Armstrong Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society and was co-recipient of the 1975 IEEE Information Theory Group Paper Award for the paper “Noiseless coding for correlated information sources” (co-authored with D. Slepian). He served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Group from 1970 to 1976 and from 1980 to 1986. Dr. Wolf was President of the IEEE Information Theory Group in 1974. He was International Chairman of Committee C of URSI from 1980 to 1983.