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Tandon Alumni Win Grand Prize in NASA Film Competition

October 31, 2018 | NYU Tandon School of Engineering

It’s been only 49 years since the first human walked on the Moon, and with NASA’s sights now set on Mars, it may be only a matter of time before humans also walk the Martian surface.

As NASA prepares for its mission to the Red Planet, it tasked artists and filmmakers with envisioning the future of deep space exploration.

The agency, in collaboration with partners like the nonprofit SciArt Exchange and Cinemark, called for video and poster submissions from university students and early-career professionals for the ProjectMars International Art and Film Competition. After receiving more than 570 entries, NASA and its panel of judges announced that the Grand Prize in Film had gone to NYU Tandon School of Engineering alumni Subigya Basnet and Mayukh Goswami, along with their collaborator, Divya More.

Using jaw-dropping animation, their film, Rendezvous with Mars, tells the story of an astronaut on her mission to Mars, as she recalls her childhood dreams of traveling to space.

“We wanted to tell viewers that going to Mars — or being a space-faring civilization — is a foundational dream within our zeitgeist. All of us, as children, are fascinated by space and the mysteries of the universe, but through the process of growing up we move away from that dream,” explained Goswami, who graduated from Tandon’s Integrated Digital Media (IDM) program in May 2018. “In this video, we are asking the viewers to seize it.”

“We wanted to convey the idea that the dream of interplanetary travel should not be limited to an exclusive group of people,” Basnet, also a 2018 IDM graduate, added. “It is a human endeavor, and people from even the humblest beginning can aspire to go beyond.”

After learning about the ProjectMars competition earlier this year, Basnet, Goswami, and More spent three months iterating and developing their film, transforming it from a simple idea and 2D animation into a uniquely relatable story of determination and childhood aspiration. Most of the film was created via brainstorming sessions over Skype, Goswami explained, as he and Basnet balanced their day jobs, and More worked in Mumbai.

Frequent collaborators throughout their time at Tandon, Basnet and Goswami were natural partners for NASA’s competition. Having delved into virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), film, and other forms of digital storytelling in their IDM classes and creative projects, Basnet noted that their collaboration “was born out of our mutual love for telling compelling stories regardless of the medium we work on. Video happens to be a medium where both Mayukh and I can bring out our best and bring it together to tell a story.”

Rendezvous with Mars quickly emerged at the top of the hundreds of entries from around the globe, impressing the panel of judges, which included a former astronaut, NASA’s creative team, and Rogue One film director Gareth Edwards.

“We wanted to make something that the judges can see has the potential to plant the seed of this great dream of [space travel] in the audience. If nothing else, we hope our film conveys our effort in solidarity with NASA’s mission of putting us on Mars,” Goswami said. “This mission is something that should not only be interesting to those who live in America, but for everyone on Earth.”

As they plan to share their film with a global audience, Goswami and Basnet also hope to continue collaborating on future projects. “Winning the grand prize for me is a vindication of our ideas and our hard work as a team. Hopefully, this will be just one in a long line of collaborations between the three of us,” Goswami added.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/tandon-alumni-win-grand-prize-nasa-film-competition

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Breaking Down Walls: Doctoral Candidate Working at Frontier of Cybersecurity and 3D Printing

October 8, 2018

Fei Chen Places Third in Highly Competitive Falling Walls Lab Pitch Event

Fei Chen is no stranger to breaking down walls. Since she joined associate professor Nikhil Gupta’s Composite Materials and Mechanics Laboratory (CMML) four years ago as a research student, the NYU Tandon doctoral candidate has been developing pioneering research into 3D printing and cybersecurity. In 2019, Chen will be the first female Ph.D. student to graduate from CMML and as Gupta’s advisee.

While both are incredible feats, the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering student sees these simply as challenges she’s ready to take on. A rigorous researcher, Chen works alongside Gupta to answer some of the biggest security concerns about 3D printing — a field in which many have not yet endeavored.

3D printing is popping up in a variety of sectors, Chen explains, noting that many “companies are using 3D printers to make very high-value parts.” Biomedical manufacturers can now easily print materials for their life-saving devices. Aircraft and aerospace designs can seamlessly move from computer to product in a matter of minutes. Even military research labs are implementing 3D-printed parts.

Despite its far-reaching potential, 3D printing is still a relatively new type of technology and currently faces the growing threat of stolen intellectual property (IP) and counterfeiting. Just as anyone’s computers, servers, or hardware are at risk for hacking, so too are 3D printers, companies, and their designs.

In response to these threats, Gupta and Chen published their groundbreaking research in 2017 in Materials and Design. In it, they detail how intentionally embedded hidden flaws they placed in computer aided design (CAD) files can disappear when printed under specific parameters. If anyone else besides the IP owner and trusted partners attempted to print with these files, they’d end up with defective parts.

Just this past August 2018, Gupta and Chen’s research team became the first to transform flat QR (Quick Response) codes into hidden 3D features within 3D-printed parts. Using a unique method that “explodes” a QR code in a CAD file, false QR tags thwart potential thieves.

“What you see in a file is not necessarily what you produce with a 3D printer when you use our design-security feature. You are the IP owner, and you will be the only one that can produce your high-quality part with these features that we’ve created. When anyone else tries to produce this part, they would print something that is defective and poor quality,” Chen says.

She presented her research at the Falling Walls Lab contest on September 13, 2018, placing third in the highly competitive international pitch event that was held at the Leslie eLab. Participants had only three minutes to showcase their research and business ventures to a jury. (The event was co-sponsored by the German Center for Research and Innovation New York and NYU Tandon.)

Out of the many applications submitted from all over the U.S., Chen was one of nine entrepreneurs selected to present, and the only student from NYU. Students and professors from universities like Virginia Tech, MIT, Harvard, and Columbia competed, but Chen soared to the top. “It was a very diverse selection of participants, working in distinct areas, including sociology, artificial intelligence, engineering designs, and biomedical applications,” she shares.

Describing to the audience the prototypes she, Gupta, and their research team created, Chen highlighted the common thread amongst all industries currently using, or thinking of using 3D printing: protecting their IP.

“In her pitch, Fei tried to strike a similar chord with everyone in the audience, rather than speaking to one specific application,” Gupta explains. “Our societies, economies, and people’s lives will be impacted by these threats of counterfeiting and intellectual property, but her findings present greater possibilities for doctors, engineers, and anybody using 3D printing.”

From Curious Student to Pioneering Researcher

Born in Baise, China, Chen spent most of her childhood in Dongguan before coming to Tandon in 2012. Earning her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from both Beijing Jiaotong University and Tandon (when both universities had a dual-degree program), Chen quickly fell in love with the school and decided to pursue her doctoral degree here in 2015.

Gupta challenged Chen to explore the little-researched world of 3D printing and cybersecurity when she joined his lab. “Even though people have been developing new techniques and materials, the security concerns hadn’t been addressed in much research literature yet,” Chen says.                          

A world-renowned researcher, entrepreneur, and leading expert in additive manufacturing and composite materials, Gupta is an incredibly supportive mentor and adviser to Chen, and adamant that she is the brains behind their studies’ innovative methods. “It’s important to understand that while I’m probably the public face of this research, all the work and a lot of the ideas now originate from Fei,” Gupta explains. “Originally we started this research before Fei joined. We wanted to create this field where people were finding solutions to cybersecurity concerns in 3D printing field. When she came on board, she contributed tremendously.”

Gupta emphasizes that Chen manages the entire project, balancing multiple components and communicating with collaborators, including NYU Abu Dhabi researchers, computer scientists, and the U.S. Army Research Lab. While it may be exciting to be published in respected journals, Gupta and Chen both agree that their work is more about the process.

“In my experience, it’s rare that you test something and it works immediately. It always takes so much time, and many trials and little steps,” Chen says. “I don’t think that there’s any problem to that, though. It’s a good way to create new knowledge and inventions.”

She shares this advice to the high school students she mentors in the Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE) — the K-12 STEM program she has been part of for three years. “I tell them on their first day to not worry about things you might see as failures, or if something’s not working out, but to enjoy the process and ask as many questions as they want,” Chen emphasizes. “This is the same for me, you cannot just feel frustrated when this one thing doesn’t work. Professor Gupta tells me this all the time: if this isn’t working, there may be another way to make it work.”

Now, as Chen prepares for her job search ahead of graduation, she’s determined to continue working with 3D printing and cybersecurity, and her own mentor sees unlimited possibilities for her. “Her research can branch out to other manufacturing methods, or it can be more focused on cybersecurity methods like encryption tools,” Gupta encourages. “We don’t know where this will end up, but she has a lot of unique ideas that she can test in her future research.”

On Friday, October 12, 2018, Chen will speak at the “Additive Manufacturing: State of the Art and Trends” workshop organized for American Society for Mechanical Engineers. The lecture also features Rakesh Kumar Behera and will be moderated by Nikhil Gupta.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/breaking-down-walls-doctoral-candidate-working-frontier-cybersecurity-and-3d-printing

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Saving the Lives of Life Savers

October 3, 2018

NYU Researchers and Major Urban Fire Departments Partner to Create Scenario-Based Simulation Training for Nationwide Firefighters

In celebration of Fire Prevention Week from October 7 – 13, 2018, we highlight NYU Fire Research Group’s impact in supporting the firefighters who risk their lives for us daily.

This year, people across the U.S. watched as destructive wildfires raged across California, Oregon, and Washington, and as the thousands of firefighters poured in from all over the country to help contain these fast-moving fires.

Though battling these wildland fires bears its own set of challenges compared to residential fires, firefighters must always strategize and coordinate their efforts to effectively manage a fire from spreading — no matter the location — while also ensuring their own safety.

Yet, researchers at the Fire Research Group at NYU Tandon School of Engineering discovered that many fire departments lack the resources and budget to train their firefighters in the latest advanced firefighting methods emerging out of research centers and from scientific studies.

ALIVE (Advanced Learning through Integrated Visual Environments) is a decades-long effort to bridge the information gap between research and real-life firefighting. Developed by the Fire Research Group under the leadership of Dr. Sunil Kumar, ALIVE is an online, scenario-based simulation training program created by a team of NYU Tandon Mechanical Engineering faculty and scientists working to disseminate firefighting tactics and research-based information to urban and rural fire departments. It is funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG).

Spearheaded by Dr. Prabodh Panindre, a Senior Research Scientist and Adjunct Mechanical Engineering Faculty at NYU Tandon, ALIVE’s interactive online modules train firefighters in diverse firefighting issues such as residential fires, wind-driven high-rise fires, firefighter health and safety, and fire scenarios. Its latest module — Wildland Fires — focuses on training firefighters to manage and coordinate their attack methods on wildfires.

Culling together research, expertise from multiple fire departments and experts, and insight from national organizations such as the Underwriters Laboratories (UL), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Forest Service, the modules provide firefighters, including part-time and volunteer firefighters, with life-saving and critical information on combating various types of fires.

The modules are engaging, adaptive, data-driven, and live — allowing departments to understand where more training is needed in specific areas. The online training teaches critical firefighting concepts, and lets users immediately apply what they’ve learned to realistic scenarios and quizzes. Even if you select the wrong answer, the program explains why an answer is or isn’t the most effective way to address a situation based on scientific research, reinforcing the best actions for firefighters when they’re out in the field.

Fighting Fire with Scientific Evidence-Based Learning

“When we first started the project, it was centered on training the FDNY on high-rise fires,” Panindre explains. After seeing the positive response, the team behind ALIVE spent three years researching its effectiveness on a national scale and discovered that firefighters retained more information using ALIVE’s online modules versus the traditional classroom training. “Now, more than 75,000 firefighters from all 50 states have gone through our training modules. More than 1,000 departments are incorporating these modules into their own training programs,” shares Panindre.  

One such department is the Houston Fire Department, which has been an ALIVE partner for many years and incorporates the ALIVE modules into their classroom training.

Senior Captain Jeffery King of the Houston Fire Department (HFD), a partner with ALIVE and NYU Fire Research Group, knows the importance of disseminating advanced firefighting research to fellow firefighters, having lent his expertise to ALIVE’s module development for Residential Fires and Fire Scenarios. He shared that HFD’s continuing education program trained their whole department in August 2018 with the Fire Scenarios module, and currently all of its members are using the cardiovascular health module.

“In the last 15 to 20 years, we have learned more about the science of firefighting, a better understanding of how to do our job, and more about the physiological impact of firefighting – one of those being cardiovascular health,” King says. “The health and safety of each firefighter is paramount to a department’s success. Getting this information out to firefighters through the module is absolutely critical. NYU has done a phenomenal job of taking difficult information and putting it into a format that is easily understandable, deliverable to the people in the fire service, and in a means that can impact what’s going on every day in fire departments.”

“Around 50-60% of firefighters die of cardiac events,” Dr. Kumar explains. “Using scientific data and interviews, our module explains how cardiac arrest occurs, the impact of firefighting gear and hot environments upon their health, signs and symptoms, and how to prevent cardiac problems in fire service.”

Managing Destructive Wildfires

ALIVE is currently unveiling its new wildland fire module. Aimed to help first responders and initial incident attack commanders effectively manage wildland fires, the module addresses the unique challenges of wildland fires due to their erratic behavior, more difficult terrain, and dangerous environmental conditions. The NYU Fire Research Group partnered with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Los Angeles County Fire Dept. (LACoFD), California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), and Barona Fire Department (BFD) in developing the module.

Nationwide wildland fire experts provided insight into the critical issues and training points, including Former Battalion Chief for Cal Fire Pete Scully. With over 33 years of active service battling wildfires, Scully tapped into his vast knowledge and own experiences to distill the best information into the module.

“I thought back to areas where I made mistakes, and my own first-hand experiences as a chief officer regarding how incidents were or weren’t properly managed,” he says. “Wildland fires can be very intimidating, and often when someone first arrives on the scene that isn’t experienced, they don’t take the time to manage and size up the big picture of the situation. Often, opportunities are missed. They might be focusing on where the most smoke or most flames are, but that’s not really where the most efficient use of resources is. This module is designed to get firefighters thinking about managing an incident properly and efficiently.”

Both Scully and Panindre agree that ALIVE’s modules are not meant to replace classroom training, but rather to supplement and complement training programs within a fire department, and help volunteer firefighters gain more training.

Emphasizing ALIVE’s accessibility, Panindre explained that “70% percent of the nation’s fire service are smaller, rural fire departments, yet they don’t have the budget or resources of larger departments like FDNY. We tried to focus on helping those firefighter departments who have few firefighters and resources, but want to increase their training. We make sure we can reach them through our modules.”

All ALIVE training modules are free for all firefighters and fire departments. Firefighters can access the free training modules on the Fire Research Group’s website, and through mobile applications. Fire departments interested in offering ALIVE training to their members can register by emailing the NYU Fire Research Group at fire.research@nyu.edu.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/saving-lives-life-savers

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Radio Club of America Awards Armstrong Medal to Wireless Communications Researcher and Educator Theodore Rappaport

September 28, 2018

Armstrong Medal Honors Founder of NYU WIRELESS Research Center for His Lasting Contributions

BROOKLYN, New York, Friday, September 27, 2018 – The Radio Club of America (RCA) announced that Professor Theodore “Ted” Rappaport, founding director of NYU WIRELESS and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, will receive the Armstrong Medal for demonstrated excellence and lasting contributions to radio arts and sciences.

Rappaport conducted seminal research, most recently in the millimeter wave (mmWave) radio spectrum. He advanced commercialization of this 5G technology that will bring broadband speeds to wireless communication – thereby potentially revolutionizing medicine, enabling autonomous vehicles, inexpensively connecting rural communities to the digital world, and more.

The RCA, the oldest worldwide organization of wireless communications professionals, also cited Rappaport for his lifelong contributions as an educator. In addition to his position as the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical Engineering at NYU Tandon, he is also on the faculty of the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Radiology Department of the School of Medicine.

Rappaport joins a distinguished group of past recipients of the Armstrong Medal — all luminaries in the wireless industry — including Arthur Collins, Walter Cronkite, Harold Beverage, Morgan O’Brien, and Major Edward H. Armstrong himself, who laid the foundations for much of the modern radio, including circuitry and the FM radio system.

In 1991, Rappaport was named an RCA Fellow at the age of 30, making him one of the youngest in recent history.

In 2012, Rappaport launched NYU WIRELESS at NYU Tandon, the first U.S. academic center to merge wireless engineering research with computer science and medicine. Since its founding, NYU WIRELESS has remained at the frontier of next-generation mobile technology, with undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers transforming the wireless field through their research into mmWave technology, channel modeling, Massive MIMO, beyond-5G technologies, circuits, and nano devices. The center pioneered mmWave frequencies for mobile communications and acted as an accelerant for the technology by bringing together leading businesses, institutes, and academic researchers at the annual Brooklyn 5G Summit.

Before Rappaport’s seminal paper “Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work!” many researchers disregarded the potential of the mmWave spectrum. It was Rappaport’s research that demonstrated to the world the viability of mmWave radio frequency bands, central to implementing 5G wireless technology.

In addition to the Armstrong Medal, Rappaport has received many prestigious honors throughout his career, including the Marconi Young Scientist Award (1990) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology Sir Monty Finniston Medal (2011). In addition to authoring and co-authoring more than 200 papers and 20 books in wireless communications, Rappaport holds more than 100 U.S. and international patents, founded two of the world’s largest academic wireless research centers prior to NYU WIRELESS, and founded and advised multiple wireless companies.

“Ted Rappaport has shown the world the future of wireless communications, not only through his work on mmWave technology but as a leader, researcher, and educator in the wireless field,” said Jelena Kovačević, dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “The RCA’s recognition of Ted, particularly with the Armstrong Medal, demonstrates how instrumental his work is on a global scale. His immense contributions have placed NYU Tandon on the map as a leader in wireless technology.”

Rappaport will receive the Armstrong Medal at the club’s November 17 Banquet and Awards Ceremony in New York City, where he will also serve as the keynote speaker.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/radio-club-america-awards-armstrong-medal-wireless-communications-researcher-and-educator

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Tandon-made virtual reality project wins first prize at NYC Media Lab Summit

September 28, 2018

Summit features student and faculty-designed projects in biotech, virtual reality

Virtual reality. Machine learning. Biotech. These may be the buzzwords of the tech industry, but students across New York universities are currently exploring the intersection of these emerging technologies and media in their research projects and entrepreneurial ventures. Many of these projects took center stage at the NYC Media Lab 2018 Summit and Demo Expo on September 21.

Over 100 demos, ranging from mobile augmented reality apps to innovative biomedical designs, demonstrated the diversity of ideas developed within schools like NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Held at The New School, the Demo Expo featured interactive presentations of student and faculty-designed prototypes and startups to the hundreds of attendees professionals who come to see the latest discoveries.

The NYC Media Lab, the consortium of universities and partners of which NYU Tandon is a part, awarded $25,000 in monetary prizes to the top projects, with the first prize going to the NYU Tandon-made venture, Relevant Motion.

Combining motion capture technology with a virtual reality platform, Relevant Motion provides low-cost, in-home and in-clinic occupational therapy — allowing patients to take charge of their physical rehabilitation progress. Developed by Todd Bryant, adjunct professor of the “Bodies in Motion” course within NYU Tandon Integrated Digital Media (DM), Relevant Motion features other NYU Tandon team members including Kat Sullivan (adjunct professor at IDM), Spencer Cappiello ’18, Najma Dawood ’18, and Claire Kearney-Volpe (adjunct professor at IDM).

Behind many Tandon projects at the Summit were women engineers, technologists, and data scientists. Dean Jelena Kovačević took to the Summit’s mainstage to emphasize Tandon’s commitment to gender equality in STEM, and shared with the audience that 43 percent of the incoming class is female at Tandon.

Our students, alumni, and faculty shared designs and prototypes they’ve been tinkering away at, including new ventures and labors of love developed over a few years. Here, we highlight a few demos that show that ideas made at NYU Tandon can impact our communities locally and globally.

Ocean Advocacy through VR

Taking advocacy to the next level through VR is the under-the-sea VR experience “Grandpa’s Reef.” Funded by the National Geographic Young Explorers Collaboration Grant, Sara Camnasio ’18 and her fellow Young Explorers collaborated to create a VR film that transports viewers to a healthy, vibrant coral reef. “Grandpa’s Reef” centers on increasing ocean advocacy in young Filipinos by showing the beauty of reefs and ocean conservation. The film will debut in the Philippines in 2019. “The Philippines has some of the most pristine coral reefs on the planet and virtual reality can take you there,” Camnasio said. “It’s incredibly exciting to work directly with local communities and inspire the next generation of ocean advocates.”

Instant Healthcare

An over-the-counter digital platform called Digistrips can quickly detect urinary tract infections (UTIs), and connects patients with virtual health practitioners who can treat and prescribe medicine. Digistrips merges together the healthcare and biomedical expertise from Tandon Chemical and Biomolecular doctoral candidate Deniz Vurmaz, Tandon’s Sayli Modak ’15, NYU College of Dentistry’s Shruti Warhadpande, and NYU Langone’s Sofia Bakogianni. Borne out of the NYU I-Corps Site Summer Program, Digistrips accelerates the diagnosis process for UTIs by using an urination cup coated with biosensors that connects to an application that serves as digital analyzer and virtual healthcare platform. “I’ve suffered from UTIs since I was 5 years old and I know how painful it is, and how important instant solutions are rather than waiting at a hospital and dealing with high costs,” Vurmaz said. “I thought, if I have this problem, other people do too, and deserve better solutions. The working mechanism of Digistrips is ‘test, track,  treat at home.’ We aim to create more convenience for patients.”

See, Hear, Feel

Combining the aural, the visual, and the physical, the interactive art installation Audio Odyssey creates a visual representation of a person’s gestures while mapping sounds and beats to each movement. IDM student Tamanda Msosa developed Audio Odyssey as a way of blending his two loves, music and programming. Using Leap Motion, Msosa’s installation allows for tactile interaction between human and computer, with the added effect of sound. “I believe tech should help enhance our interaction with the things around us with the least amount of intrusion,” Msosa shared.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/tandon-made-virtual-reality-project-wins-first-prize-nyc-media-lab-summit

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Leading Geotechnical Publication Features Professor Iskander

September 19, 2018

Groundbreaking Research Highlighted in Pile Driver Long before Magued Iskander became NYU Tandon’s Chair of the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and a leading expert in geotechnical engineering, he was a student discovering his career path just like the many students walking the halls of NYU Tandon today.

Iskander’s journey from university student to renowned educator features prominently in the latest issue of the Pile Driver magazine, a publication of the Pile Driving Contractors Association. The magazine’s feature article spotlights Iskander’s storied 30-year career, tracing his early days as a civil engineer in the Egyptian armed forces, to his doctoral research on the capacity of piles in sand, and up through his current research at NYU Tandon.

Pile drivers, also known as hammers, are devices engineers use to install piles, or poles, into soils to support buildings, skyscrapers, and other structures with deep foundations. (The magazine highlights the latest trends and technologies for pile driving, and reaches a global audience of industry professionals and engineering firms.)

Known internationally for his research on replacing conventional piling with recycled polymeric piling in structures near water, Iskander is also recognized in the article for his development of transparent soil surrogates — surrogates that are used to study the behavior of soils near foundations in model tests. His visualization techniques have widespread impact and applications, with 30 universities having employed them. His present work is experimenting with computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to predict pile capacity.

Reflecting on his journey from a young student to his current place at the helm of NYU Tandon’s Civil & Urban Engineering department, Iskander remembers his lifelong fascination with foundations and piling. “I came to America exactly 30 years ago to study foundation engineering. In fact, I wrote my dissertation on the behavior of pipe piles in sand,” Iskander notes. “It is very gratifying that on the 30th anniversary of me arriving to the U.S. as a student, I have been recognized in one of the top foundation engineering trade publications, and one especially dedicated to piling.”

In the feature, Pile Driver also details Iskander’s dedication to teaching the next generation of civil and geotechnical engineers, in particular his involvement in Tandon’s K-12 STEM programs. Helping inspire students as young as second grade envision themselves as scientists and engineers, these programs bring authentic tools such as sensors into classroom experiments, engaging students who typically receive less opportunities and resources.

Almost 33 years since he graduated from university, Iskander recognizes that hard work and perseverance are at the heart of wealth and success, and emphasizes that students who take shortcuts seldom reach their goals. 

He also encourages students to always help others and expect nothing in return: “Those you help may never be able to pay you back, but somehow you will be repaid in full and more.”

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/leading-geotechnical-publication-features-professor-iskander

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Professor’s Work Explores Intersection of AI and the Environment

September 17, 2018

Tega Brain’s latest installation uses AI to modify mini-ecosystems

Can artificial intelligence (AI) help researchers, engineers, and conservationists solve our current environmental challenges? This is the question on the minds of many as major companies like Microsoft launch initiatives like AI for Earth and seek out ways to use AI to help environments sustain themselves autonomously.

It’s also a question that NYU Tandon Professor Tega Brain has been wrestling with in her latest project, Deep Swamp. An art installation that finds itself at the intersection of engineering, urban design, ecology, and machine learning, Deep Swamp features aquarium tanks filled with wetland species and three AI agents named Harrison, Hans, and Nicholas who modify their environments to attempt to attain an “ideal” wetland.

Trained on massive collections of image data culled from the web, each of the AI agents has a distinct goal. Harrison works towards shaping its ecosystem that looks like a ‘natural’ wetland. Hans mimics landscape paintings to produce a wetland environment similar to artistic representations of nature. Nicholas seeks out attention, and optimizes its environment to try to attract visitors.

“Each system takes a photo every few minutes, looks as the photo and asks, ‘How close is it to becoming a natural wetland, or to becoming a work of art, or attracting the attention of gallery goers?’” Brain, an assistant industry professor in Integrated Digital Media, explains. “Each system will reinforce the conditions that score the highest in this process, and then tries to optimize its environment based on these settings.”

Deep Swamp debuted at the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, China in July 2018 as part of the “Machines Are Not Alone: A Machinic Trilogy” exhibition. Playing with the exhibit’s theme of “machinic ecology,” Brain’s installation grapples with the role of AI and machine learning in trying to sustain ecosystems without human intervention. Expressive of her research and work that she deems “eccentric engineering,” Brain hopes her project prompts visitors to consider the complexity of trying to control our environment. “How ecological problems are framed, and therefore what gets engineered as appropriate ‘solutions’ are thorny questions that go way beyond the technical.”

“Wetlands are now seen as a technology, and we often build them to purify water, to reduce flooding, and improve water quality downstream, but historically we haven’t preserved them. They’re places we’ve built airports and parking lots.” Brain explains, who said her past work in building wetlands for urban stormwater treatment inspired her decision to experiment with these ecosystems. “Our understanding of the environment is only partial, yet we continually work with the assumption that we’re able to model, manage, and therefore optimize the environment in certain ways.”

Deep Swamp reveals a tendency that Brain sees to view nature as a machine, a view that is reinforced by our culture’s celebration of computational technologies. “We see the environment as data, a model, a thing to manipulate and engineer, but this is just one way to look and engage with it,” Brain shares, noting the environment’s continual resistance to being fully represented in a technological system.

The exhibit and the Deep Swamp installation will be on view at the Chronus Art Center through October 21, 2018. Brain will also be taking Deep Swamp on tour, as it will be featured in the 6th Guangzhou Triennial in December 2018 at the Guangdong Museum of Art, China.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/professors-work-explores-intersection-ai-and-environment

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On International Day of Democracy, International Leaders Call for More Open Public Institutions

September 13, 2018

The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Publishes the CrowdLaw Manifesto, Collects Signatures in Support of Principles to Spread Democracy through Digital Collaboration

BROOKLYN, New York, Thursday, September 13, 2018 – As the United Nations celebrates the International Day of Democracy on September 15 with its theme of “Democracy Under Strain,” The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering will unveil its CrowdLaw Manifesto to strengthen public participation in lawmaking by encouraging citizens to help build, shape, and influence the laws and policies that affect their daily lives.

Among its 12 calls to action to individuals, legislatures, researchers and technology designers, the manifesto encourages the public to demand and institutions to create new mechanisms to harness collective intelligence to improve the quality of lawmaking as well as more research on what works to build a global movement for participatory democracy.

The CrowdLaw Manifesto emerged from a collaborative effort of 20 international experts and CrowdLaw community members. At a convening held earlier this year by The GovLab at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, government leaders, academics, NGOs, and technologists formulated the CrowdLaw Manifesto to detail the initiative’s foundational principles and to encourage greater implementation of CrowdLaw practices to improve governance through 21st century technology and tools.

Beth Simone Noveck, professor in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at NYU Tandon and director of The GovLab, explained the timely significance of the CrowdLaw Manifesto as governments around the globe face greater public distrust and threats to democracy.

“This manifesto shares what we see as the future of governing, which moves beyond viewing public opinion and petitions as the main form of civic engagement,” Noveck said. “Technology enables us to collectively ask and answer how we should redesign our governing practices to solve the complex policy challenges of the 21st century at local, national, and global levels. We ask citizens throughout the world to join us as signatories to this manifesto and thereby encourage democracy to put down strong roots in communities everywhere.”

The global embrace of CrowdLaw principles is demonstrated by international launches planned for the Crowd Law Manifesto: at Reworks Agora in Agora, Greece — the birthplace of democracy — on September 16,  and at Nesta’s Designing Collective Intelligence event in London on September 17.

More than 30 organizations and 80 individuals working on citizen engagement and democracy worldwide have already signed the manifesto. Signatories include

Madrid City Council

Sabine Romon, chief smart city officer, General Secretariat, Paris City Council

Ben Kallos, New York City Council member, District 5 (Upper East Side, Roosevelt Island, East Midtown, East Harlem), New York City Council

Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan

Raffaele Lillo, chief data officer, Digital Transformation Team, Government of Italy

Mukelani Dimba, civil society co-chair, Open Government Partnership

“The successes of the CrowdLaw concept — and its remarkably rapid adoption across the world by citizens seeking to affect change — exemplify the powerful force that academia can exert when working in concert with government and citizens,” said NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević. “On behalf of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, I proudly sign the CrowdLaw Manfesto and congratulate The GovLab and its collaborators for  creating these digital tools and momentum for good government.”

“One of the most urgent debates of our time is about the exact role that these new technologies can and should play in our societies and particularly in our public decision-making processes,” said Victoria Alsina, research professor in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at NYU Tandon and coordinator of the CrowdLaw Initiative at The GovLab. “By exploiting technology to engage a broader and more diverse constituency in the lawmaking process, CrowdLaw has the potential to enhance the quality of lawmaking practices and to transform fundamentally the source of authority undergirding the legislative process.”

In July 2018, the GovLab debuted the CrowdLaw Catalog as an online platform to bring together real-world examples of CrowdLaw projects from 39 countries. With over 100 cases of public participatory lawmaking listed, the online portal aims to help civic leaders create new projects or bolster existing ones, and encourages users to continue adding more CrowdLaw cases to increase research and evaluation of these practices.

To complement its work on CrowdLaw, The GovLab at NYU Tandon together with NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge is launching a lecture series, “The Future of Democracy.”

Drafters and signatories of the CrowdLaw Manifesto explained its importance in spreading democracy:

“CrowdLaw is an exciting new concept that seeks to encourage deep citizen engagement throughout each phase of law and policy-making processes. Instead of passive participation in public governance through democratic rituals such as voting every four or five years. CrowdLaw innovations enable active citizenship continuously. I believe this can be an essential part of the arsenal for pushing back against the retreat of democracy that seems to have become a defining feature of politics globally.” – Mukelani Dimba, co-chair, Open Government Partnership

“Democratic governance institutions need to experiment and adapt if they are to harness rapid technological change rather than be overwhelmed by it. CrowdLaw provides just that sort of innovation by delivering with a wide range of tools that elected officials can use to engage citizens in policy-making processes. The Design4Democracy.org coalition — a growing group of democracy and human rights organizations, which NDI supports — is committed to ensuring the technology industry embraces democracy as a core design principle. CrowdLaw is a shining example, the embodiment of this philosophy.” – Scott Hubli, director of governance programs, NDI

"In a time of major threats to democracy, such as populism, technological manipulation, and greater complexity, CrowdLaw is the most interesting and inspiring idea I've ever heard on how we can improve the quality of our laws and public decisions, and save democracy." – Josep Lluis Marti, vice-rector and associate professor, Pompeu Fabra University

"I have signed it. You have all my good wishes and support. I think this is a good idea and needs to be expanded.” – Sam Pitroda, chairman, Pitroda Group, and former advisor to the prime minister of India on public information, infrastructure and innovation

To learn more about CrowdLaw, visit crowd.law or contact crowdlaw@thegovlab.org.

To sign the CrowdLaw Manifesto, visit http://manifesto.crowd.law.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/international-day-democracy-international-leaders-call-more-open-public-institutions

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Print Re-Design of The Phoenix

In the spring and summer of 2012, I was a member of the re-design team that spent the spring semester and the summer transforming the visual layout of the print newspaper of The Phoenix. 

February 3, 2012 Issue

September 6, 2012 Issue

The Phoenix is Swarthmore College’s print and online newspaper since 1881. I was Editor-in-Chief in 2011 and served as Managing Editor in 2012.

After multiple interviews with editors and advisers, editorial and design meetings, and design sketches and template iterations, we completely revamped the look and function of our print newspaper to reflect a clean and modern design that evoked a traditional newspaper and moved our original design away from a news magazine layout.

Above, you’ll find the original layout and design from an February 2012 issue, featuring the cover story I wrote on Joshua Bennett. The second image is an example of the re-designed and re-formatted layout that I helped put together alongside the team of editors, designers, and artists for Fall 2012. I served as publicity coordinator and writer during that semester.

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Tandon Researcher Explores Network Synchronization and Resiliency

August 28, 2018

Chaos Journal Features Study by Tandon Professor Porfiri

Chaotic may be the perfect adjective for New York subway rush-hour traffic, but dozens of engineers and scientists are currently working within the realm of chaotic, nonlinear systems to better understand how humans, fish, and networks can be controlled or influenced.

NYU Tandon Professor Maurizio Porfiri, director of the Dynamical Systems Laboratory, is one of these scientists exploring how to control the process by which a group can be synchronized to perform certain actions or specific behaviors. Porfiri’s research alongside Russell Jeter and Igor Belykh was recently published in the prestigious journal Chaos and featured as one of the journal’s Editor’s Picks. Their research is funded by the U.S. Army Research Office.

In “Overcoming network resilience to synchronization through non-fast stochastic broadcasting,” the team revealed that a network can be synchronized by a broadcasting oscillator that intermittently transmits signals, thereby overpowering the network’s resiliency to attacks. By examining the interplay between the switching of the broadcasting node and the network dynamics, their study discovered that so-called non-fast switching rates create “windows of opportunity” for synchronized behaviors or “collective dynamics.”

Porfiri explains that this notion of non-fast stochastic broadcasting has implications across natural and technological networks, from schools of fish to a network’s ability to resist control by an external signal.

“Within this paradigm, we imagine a single, isolated unit that is tasked with the goal of taming the dynamics of an entire group. How can it achieve this goal?” Porfiri said. “One possibility is to broadcast information intermittently to the whole group, at a target frequency that is conducive to coordination. In this vein, a robotic fish may be tasked with guiding a group of fish to safety and its approach could be to intermittently release a signal to the group, like a visual cue or food, for the group to follow.”

Porfiri noted that this research has an impact across his other projects, including their exploration of creating models for an epidemic’s spreading and their study of human-computer interactions. “In these cases, it is critical to address the problem of promoting or hampering collective dynamics through the use of selected units in the network.”

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/tandon-researcher-explores-network-synchronization-and-resiliency

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Perceiving Reality, Distortion, and More through Technology

Dozens of Projects Displayed at 2018 Integrated Digital Media Showcase

May 14, 2018

Every year at the Integrated Digital Media (IDM) showcase, attendees are sure to discover something new, innovative, creative, and downright inspiring. This year’s showcase held on May 4, 2018 in NYU Tandon’s Media and Games Network (MAGNET) was no different.

The annual showcase features student projects and designs that all embody the IDM ethos of merging together creativity, research, emerging technologies, and a multidisciplinary approach. Celebrating the extraordinary work its students develop throughout the year as well as their academic careers at NYU Tandon and within the IDM program in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society, this year’s showcase centered on the theme of Optics, which highlighted the projects “investigating the power of perception to shape realities and distort images in contemporary media.”

The showcase is a student-run event, designed by IDM students for IDM students. Students took charge working in groups to create the showcase — from graphics, wayfinding, social media and public relations, curation, and exhibition design. Throughout the halls of MAGNET, light-up displays built by the exhibition design team guided attendees through the three sections — perception, illusion, and reality —prescribed by the curation team. The selfie mirrors, also designed by the exhibition design team, were a perfect spot to take a break from the show and snap pictures to share on social media.

The students worked extremely hard these last few weeks, in pulling this show together. We had so many students helping out. You could tell from the extraordinary energy on the floor that night. It’s incredible. This was the best show we’ve had yet and the showcase team pulled out all the stops for this one.” — Visiting Assistant Professor and showcase mentor Katherine Bennett.

Displaying her project “Aware,” Cadence Daniels focused on ethical literacy within product development, in which she created a tool that can help new companies and emerging leaders consider inclusion throughout product ideation and development. “This tool aims to bring together corporate responsibility, diversity, and inclusion to the product development stage,” Daniels said.

Human-centered design and technology are also at the heart of REMI (Remote Epicurean Manual Intelligence). Conceived by graduate and undergraduate students Annie Brinich, Calvin Cheang, Isabel Chen, Katie Lau, Jimmy Lauchoy, and Richelle Newby, REMI evolved out of a Microsoft Design Challenge within the User Experience Design course taught by Dana Karwas, and aims to help chefs with visual impairments cook safely. They interviewed multiple consultants, experts, and professional chefs, including Christine Ha, the winner of the third season of Master Chef and who is visually impaired. Their product is two wearable devices for each wrist, named REMI and RAMI, which communicate through voice commands and employ object identification, heat sensing, haptic feedback, and navigational assistance to help chefs find a utensil or spice container, keep them safe from hot surfaces, or even set a timer.

“It’s important that everything we’re designing and building is something that’s approved by the user and is something that will actually be useful for someone with visual impairments,” Newby explained. “Safety and efficiency were the two main things expressed to us, so we wanted to incorporate them fully into our devices.”

Also within the vein of wearable technology was Katie Pulles project “Exploring Touch,” a long-term project that Pulles hopes will lead to an immersive art piece about understanding anxiety. “In order to understand how to convey anxiety to people, I needed to collect data, so using wearable tech I created clothing that correlates data from biosensors and touch sensors,” Pulles explained. Tracking heart rate, sweat rate, manual emotional input, and more, a shirt or sweater can collect data when people feel anxious in public spaces, especially in a city like New York. “I want my eventual project to be an immersive experience for users to know what it’s like to go through anxiety, and in order to gather real data, it would have to be something on your person, so wearable tech is the best option.”

Many other projects touched upon how to use technology in how we perceive reality and our physical and emotional responses, such as Alexis Zerafa’s “Odmor,” a mobile augmented reality application that connects with a wearable ring to help people with anxiety and panic attacks learn breathing control techniques. Mayukh Goswami and Siyuan Qiu displayed their virtual reality experience Contrapasso VR, which explored a person’s psyche with the onslaught of mass media influences.

Breaking boundaries and barriers of reality, art, and technology, the student projects at the IDM showcase dabbled in a variety of mediums, from film, to VR/AR, to gaming to engineer new experiences and designs.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/perceiving-reality-distortion-and-more-through-technology

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Seniors Pitch Their Products at Annual Capstone Competition and Earn Cash Prizes

May 9, 2018

Many graduating undergraduate students at NYU Tandon School of Engineering spend their final year creating, building, and designing their senior capstone project. A culminating project that embodies all of their academic and entrepreneurial skills they’ve developed during their time at NYU Tandon, the capstone provides students a chance to let their talents shine.

At the third annual Senior Capstone Competition and Showcase on May 7, 2018, a select group of students had the opportunity to not only present their final designs and prototypes, they even had a chance to garner cash prizes to support their continued work after they leave the halls of NYU Tandon.

Sponsored by the Convergence of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Institute, the 2018 Senior Capstone Competition featured 19 teams who took over the MakerSpace and guided crowds of students, faculty, and guests through demos of their designs. From the 19, six teams were selected by the capstone competition committee, which includes Industry Professor Michael Knox, MakerSpace Manager Victoria Bill, and Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and CIE Institute director Jin Montclare, to pitch their capstone projects to a panel of judges. The six teams had 10 minutes to present their work and field questions during a Q&A session with the judges, which included Julia Byrd, Assistant Director of PowerBridge NY; Kai Tham, an NYU Tandon alumnus and entrepreneur; Richard Rizza, an NYU Tandon alumnus and President of A6 Technology Company, Inc.; and Lee M. von Kraus, Founder of Nebulab.

Now in its third year, the Senior Capstone Competition fosters an entrepreneurial environment for students to test their ideas and products' viability. The judges’ panel selects the top three projects in the categories of Highest Entrepreneurial Potential, Best Design, and Greatest Social Impact; student attendees also bestow the Student’s Choice award to a special team. All of the capstones featured this year demonstrated the innovative and inventive spirit that our students acquire here at NYU Tandon.

EXO2

Earning the award for “Best Design,” EXO2 is a soft robotics exoskeleton developed by Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering students Meraj Choudhury and Navindra Sawh. The duo designed a more cost-effective option for current robotic exoskeletons that are used in physical therapy, which tend to be very expensive. “Our project is a lower-limb, physical therapy exoskeleton that uses pneumatic artificial muscles as primary actuators. The primary function of the exoskeleton is to stimulate the neuromuscular system of the user by allowing them to perform simulated or assisted walking,” Sawh explained, adding that the exoskeleton can be used for certain types of paralysis and can help people with limited mobility. With many robotic exoskeletons costing upwards of $80,000, EXO2 would be a cheaper and effective option for patients undergoing physical therapy. Conceived during their Disability Studies course, Sawh and Choudhury wanted to focus on a physical therapy exoskeleton “because of our interest in robotics and bio-mechanics, but also because we wanted to challenge ourselves to create an innovative, cost-effective solution for physical therapy and rehabilitation, Sawh said.

Odmor

Alexis Zerafa’s project Odmor received the prize for Greatest Social Impact, for her augmented reality (AR) mobile application and wearable that helps people with anxiety disorders. As Zerafa noted in her pitch, over 40 million adults in the U.S. currently experience anxiety, and 2-3% of Americans experience panic disorders in a year according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Zerafa, an Integrated Digital Media major, decided to create a mobile app and wearable ring that uses AR to guide people through breathing techniques in a discrete manner. Users hold up their phone to scan their ring, a flower appears on the screen over the ring, and opens and closes at calming intervals to slow down their heart rate. “While you’ll be able to learn these techniques within a month or two, the app times out, but the ring can be associated with comfort and worn to help you during a panic attack or heightened anxiety,” Zerafa said.

Wi-Find

When firefighters enter buildings to combat a fire, or military personnel conduct an operation, they tend to use manual radio transmissions to estimate their locations, but situational factors can cause issues such as heavy smoke. Hoping to help firefighters and other emergency personnel more efficiently and accurately keep track of their team members during a rescue mission, the team behind Wi-Find developed a portable indoor localization device that employs LoRa wireless technology to track and monitor each person over Wi-Fi. Electrical engineering students Alex Concepcion, Nasif Islam, and Eshka-Ne Kumar selected LoRa for its long-range capabilities, which enables their device to transmit data to a remote computer, estimate distance traveled of each firefighter at a specific location, and also track the path history of each individual. Wi-Find garnered the award for the Highest Entrepreneurial Potential, marking their product as a viable and marketable design for the public safety industry.

Winging-It

Named the Students’ Choice at the Capstone Competition, Winging-It is an electric R/C aircraft that competed at the 2018 Society of Aerospace Engineers (SAE) Aero Design West Competition in California. After winning third place at the national competition and 10th place internationally where they competed against 37 teams, the NYU SAE Aero Design Team’s aircraft successfully completed five flights where it excelled at carrying a maximum payload similar to a commercial airliner. Team members Luciana Jaalouk, Eduardo Hernandez Vivar, Justin Talevski, Juhi Singh, Marc Rozman, and Shivam Suleria debuted their aircraft at the Senior Capstone Competition, and it will now be displayed in the MakerSpace for all to see.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/seniors-pitch-their-products-annual-capstone-competition-and-earn-cash-prizes

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President’s Service Awards Honors NYU Tandon Students

Student Leaders and Organizations Celebrated for Community Building

May 8, 2018

Speak with any of our students here at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and you will quickly discover they’re not only training to become expert engineers and technologists. They’re also effecting change within the NYU, Brooklyn, and New York communities to build a better world through their academic and leadership positions.

On April 26, 2018, NYU President Andrew Hamilton honored the outstanding achievements of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students and student organizations from across NYU who have impacted their local communities through civic engagement and service. The President’s Service Awards celebrate the students who also have promoted and improved the learning, leadership, and quality of student life throughout NYU’s global network of schools.

Recognizing the students who exemplify the NYU motto of “A private university in the public service,” the President’s Service Awards honored some of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering students and student organizations who embody not only NYU’s motto, but also NYU Tandon’s commitment to “technology in service to society.”

This year’s ceremony celebrated the achievements of the following students:

Mohammed Sahil Asif was praised for his incredible ability to foster community within the graduate student population across NYU, as well as his vision and programmatic skills. Asif also was recognized for his all-university impact.

Dhruv Chhabra, as vice president of the Graduate Indian Student Association, spearheaded community building events that brought together students across the Brooklyn and Washington Square campuses, and was honored for his commitment to welcoming new graduate students to Tandon.

Divya Deverakonda garnered the award for her service and dedicated mentorship and leadership within multiple organizations at NYU Tandon, including vice president of the Tandon Undergraduate Student Council and Head Teaching Assistant in the Biomolecular Science Program.

Angie Gonzalez was lauded for her exemplary leadership and dedication to the NYU Tandon student community through her work as a board member for out in STEM (oSTEM), a resident assistant and teaching assistant.

Kirsaly Heredia received the award for her outstanding leadership and initiatives as the programming commissioner for the NYU Tandon Undergraduate Student Council (TUSC).

Eric Kwok earned accolades for his tireless efforts advocating for and with the LGBTQ community at NYU Tandon as a board member of out in STEM (oSTEM) and for his leadership and dedication as the coordinator of the 2018 HackNYU. Kwok also was honored for his all-university impact.

Nitin Ramaseshan was celebrated for his leadership as president of the Graduate Student Council at NYU Tandon, and for representing the NYU Tandon graduate student committee as the official student spokesperson from NYU Tandon to the NYU Student Government.

Sanjana Kamlesh Ramchandani was cited for her outstanding commitment to NYU Tandon and its graduate student population through her leadership role as commissioner to the NYU Tandon Graduate Student Council.

Zeeshan Anjum Sandhu was praised for his activism and advocacy for global communities unable to defend themselves due to religious persecution, and his commitment to and school spirit at NYU Tandon.

Student organizations and all-university groups received accolades for their work over the past year:

HackNYU 2018 and its board were honored for their leadership and dedication to bringing together the global NYU community learn and create new solutions to the world’s challenges.

National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) was celebrated for their outstanding engagement of students across the NYU Tandon campus, and for their exemplary events that impacted all students.

out in STEM (oSTEM) was recognized for their success in creating an impactful and meaningful space for the LGBTQ community on the Brooklyn campus, including their coordination of Pride Month and Ally Week events.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/presidents-service-awards-honors-nyu-tandon-students

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Honoring Tandon's Passionate Student Leaders and Organizations

May 4, 2018

Here at NYU Tandon, our students understand that engineering and technology can impact others, both inside and outside of the classroom. It’s no surprise, then, that we take time to honor all of their efforts and accomplishments from the past year at the NYU Tandon 2017-2018 Student Leader Awards.

The excitement was palpable at the Student Leader Awards ceremony, with students in the audience coming to cheer on their friends, classmates, and colleagues. The annual event celebrates student leaders, organizations, and faculty advisers who spent the past year dedicating themselves to building a stronger and more inclusive community here. For many of the award recipients and nominees, their work and commitment to NYU Tandon started the day they stepped on campus. Their legacy will also continue long after they graduate, as Brittney Anne Bahlman, Tandon’s Director of Student Affairs and Student Activities, shared in her welcome remarks.

“Today’s celebration is not just about the award recipients. This is a time and space for all of us to come together and celebrate all the accomplishments of our community in the past year, at NYU Tandon and across the university,” Bahlman said. Noting that this year’s student organizations hosted over 450 programs and engaged more than 2,330 students in the fall semester alone — a fact that was met with cheers from the audience.

“This year, Tandon student leaders served on planning committees for university-wide events, including HackNYU and the InnoVention competition, planned the March for Science in NYC, participated in the $300,000 Entrepreneur Challenge at NYU Stern, built cars, canoes and bridges to show the creativity and ingenuity of Tandon students in competitions from coast to coast, and hosted Tandon’s first student-run Pride Month and Ally Week events,” Bahlman said. “These are just a few examples of talent and energy you’re bringing beyond the borders of NYU Tandon to show great work going on here.”

Encouraging students to recognize the accomplishments of others during their time at Tandon, she also emphasized mentorship and guiding new student leaders to continue the work they’ve achieved.

Join us in celebrating this year’s winners:

Organization of the Year: out in STEM (oSTEM)

Student Leaders of the Year: Cadence Daniels and Nitin Ramaseshan

Distinguished Engagement Awards: Angie Gonzalez and Roshan Sridhar

Emerging Leaders Awards: Akiyl El and Ajay Shete

Faculty Adviser of the Year: José Ulerio

Outstanding Programming Awards:

Community Engagement & Civic Responsibility: STEMinist

Diversity and Cultural Competency: National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE)

Innovation & Creative Thinking: Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE)

Interpersonal Leadership Development: Institute of Transportation Engineers

Connection to Global Network University: InnoVention Society

Outstanding Organizational Performance Awards

Financial Management: Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA)

Event Management: Alpha Omega Epsilon

Student Engagement: American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE)

Organizational Management: National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE)

Organizational Growth: out in STEM (oSTEM)

Organizational Collaboration: Tandon Undergraduate Student Council (TUSC); National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE); out in STEM (oSTEM); Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE); Society for Women Engineers (SWE); and STEMinist

Groups recognized for their service included the Graduate and Undergraduate Student Councils, the International Student Advisory Board, First Year Mentorship Program, Orientation Captains, Engaging Engineers, SOEciety Agents of Change, Poly Project Student Ambassadors, and the Tandon Leadership Lab.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/honoring-tandons-passionate-student-leaders-and-organizations

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Student Earns Teaching Fellowship to Support K-12 STEM Education

April 24, 2018

Inspiring the next generation of engineers, chemists, and coders starts in the classroom, and that is at the heart of what the NYU Tandon Scientific Outreach and Research (SOAR) program strives to do. Spearheaded by Chemical and Biomolecular Professor Jin Montclare, the SOAR program partners with two local Brooklyn high schools, the Urban Assembly Institute for Math and Science for Young Women and Brooklyn Technical High School, and works with students directly in their chemistry classrooms and labs.

NYU Tandon computer science student Madeleine Nicolas was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which supports the SOAR program. As a Fellow, Nicolas will be taking her passion for encouraging K-12 girls and boys to take a chance on science.

“I’m a huge proponent of STEM education, so I became interested in the SOAR program as I’m always excited to contribute to initiatives where I can use my technical skills,” Nicolas said. Her teaching fellowship with SOAR is not the first program she has lent her expertise to, though. “I teach coding part-time at elementary schools all over New York City, and over the summer I run a Makerspace at a sleepaway camp, where I incorporate all kinds of interdisciplinary STEAM projects,” she shared.

In her new role, she is developing an online pre-lab platform for students before they start experiments in their chemistry labs. “I’ll be debugging and maintaining the Lab Lessons platform, where high school chemistry and biology students access lab visualizations and other resources.”

With partner high school Brooklyn Tech, Nicolas is already working towards helping students use the Lab Lessons platform during the 2018-2019 academic year, where they can also assess their progress and get feedback from their teachers. Their practice with online modules will also help them prepare for the Regents Examinations required of all New York high school students.

“I’m particularly excited to have Maddie on board with SOAR because of her outstanding programming knowledge and skills,” Montclare said. “She will enable us to not only help engage the students, but also enable teachers to track the students’ learning and reduce time needed to prepare them for labs.”

“I'm really looking forward to the research findings our team observes in relation to student reception to the visualizations as well as the impact of these educational tech tools on their learning,” Nicolas said.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/student-earns-teaching-fellowship-support-k-12-stem-education

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Cybersecurity Lecture Debunks Myths of Field

April 23, 2018

NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Cybersecurity Lecture Series recently hosted the 10th lecture in its series, which brings together some of the top experts and tech professionals to speak on the latest advances and issues within cybersecurity. Now sponsored by finance and insurance corporation AIG, the lecture comes on the heels of recent global cyber-attacks and ransomware such as Petya, which affected a Ukrainian power grid; WannaCry, which disrupted hospital and school systems; and the 2016 email leak from the Democratic National Committee.

With today’s global scale of ransomware and hacking repercussions, cybersecurity no longer remains only within the purview of technology companies, financial institutions, or government agencies. In his opening remarks to the lecture, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder of NYU Center for Cybersecurity (NYU CCS) Ramesh Karri shared that when establishing CCS, “we recognized cybersecurity is much more than a tech challenge and only way to secure digital world is to work with industry, educational institutions, governments, and others.”

Because of this vast scale of cybersecurity, it’s no surprise that many misconceptions and beliefs arise about what it is, how to address it, and how it’s going to affect our future.

This year’s lecture featured a keynote speech by Dmitri Alperovitch who is the Chief Technology Officer at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that is part of the investigation that discovered Russian hacking of elections in the U.S. Alperovitch broke down some of the top ten myths about cybersecurity, dispelling some of the most prevalent beliefs, including:

Myth 1: Attribution is impossible in cyberspace. Making an analogy to seeing patterns in a string of bank robberies, Alperovitch noted that attribution is “not a new thing and can be done without technical means.” “We’re getting much better at attribution because we have a long history of tracking attacks and understanding full scope of operations of different nation states.”

Myth 4: Information sharing is the answer. Alperovitch distinguished between two types of companies, ones that already share and generate information, like big financial institutions, versus the majority of companies that don’t have the same capabilities. “Most people aren’t prepared to use information you give them, because they don’t have the basic technology to investigate it,” he explained.

Myth 6: This is a solvable problem. What makes cybersecurity so different from other areas of science is that “we’re dealing with a sentient adversary who wants to cause harm to you or your company and can be bribed,” he said.

Myth 8: Cyber-attacks are done at the speed of light. Sharing insight from CrowdStrike’s profiles of 25,000 breaches they stopped, Alperovitch detailed how the average breakout time for attacks was 1 hour and 58 minutes. The time-frame could allow defenders to readily contain hackers in one location and from breaching their full system.

Myth 9: It’s all about keeping the enemy out. “Cybersecurity is all about the speed of response,” he shared, adding three essential metrics including 1 minute for time to detect a threat, 10 minutes to investigate, and 1 hour to remediate.

After his speech, Alperovitch was joined by panelists and information security experts including Omkhar Arasratnam, former Global Director of Cyber Security and Americas Regional Head TSS at Credit Suisse; Quiessence Phillips, Deputy CISO of Threat Management for the City of New York; and Garin Pace, Cyber Product Leader and Financial Lines and Property at AIG. Moderated by Randal Milch, Co-Chair of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity and Distinguished Fellow at NYU Law Center on Law and Security, the panel addressed the importance of translating awareness of cybersecurity issues into education and ways in which cybersecurity is at the heart of industries like finance, insurance, government, and more.

“We need more people to think about cybersecurity and execute it better, so more education and understanding of the risk is necessary,” Pace said. Phillips discussed how “grooming the next generation of security analysts and engineers starts at younger age,” she said. “We need more of these small K-12 programs in schools and online.” Panelists all agreed on starting cybersecurity education much earlier than college. Affordable and inclusive options and scholarships are also important, such as NYU Tandon’s NY Cyber Fellowship. Phillips also shared Mayor Bill de Blasio’s announcement of NYC Secure, a new cybersecurity initiative that aims to protect New York’s phones, Wi-Fi networks, and more.

Alperovitch and Arasratnam emphasized the importance of building relationships and trust for productive information sharing. “Through official information sharing channels, you get information that sometimes will be stale and nonspecific,” Arasratnam said. “Informal relationships and conversations can have more value than these.

Even research and discoveries here in New York can have a significant impact everywhere. “New Yorkers will take the lead in cybersecurity, as it’s the world’s epicenter of finance and media industries,” Karri explained. “When we protect NYC, we protect the economy of our nation and the world.”

The lecture was organized by AIG, NYU Center for Cybersecurity and Tandon Online.

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/cybersecurity-lecture-debunks-myths-field

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Building Tech for Social Good at HackNYU 2018

April 20, 2018

If you’ve ever been to a hackathon, you know the excitement that courses throughout the room when teams come together to brainstorm ideas and develop their project. This year’s HackNYU event was no different. Fueled with pioneering ideas and perhaps a lot of coffee, 500 participants hailing from colleges and high schools across the Northeast, as well as NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, spent the 48-hour hackathon building apps, software, and technology. One of the biggest global hackathons run entirely by students, HackNYU brings people together who share a common goal of merging technology and innovation with social good.

From March 23-25, 2018, participants gathered at NYU’s global campuses including NYU Tandon in Brooklyn. After finding their teams on the first day, students quickly started off developing their ideas into prototypes and demos. Projects centered around four areas, known as tracks, for which teams generated solutions, products, and services.

HackNYU Tracks

Accessibility & Assistive Technology

Sustainability & Social Impact

Healthcare

Education Technology

This year’s theme of building technology for social change inspired 80 project submissions, including ones that enable nervous people to ask questions in class (Clarify), help people who are hearing impaired (Resonate), and streamline clothing donations and recycling (Clothly).

The Sustainability and Social Impact track had the most submissions of the four tracks for the first time. HackNYU also continued its advancement of interdisciplinary projects. “Nearly every track this year had winning teams with at least one high school member. While some were comprised of members from the same school, others showed representation from multiple universities,” shared Stefan Cherubin, an NYU Tandon graduate student in computer science and the HackNYU Education Technology Committee Chair.

Twelve teams won top prizes within the four tracks as well as prizes from industry partners like Google, Facebook, BNY Mellon, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Major League Hacking (see below for full list of winners). Though most of the teams met each other for the first time, a majority of the projects have enough momentum to become a full-fledged startup, including two teams forged from NYU Tandon students.

One project called DermaScan featured NYU Tandon computer science graduate students developed a mobile application with deep learning capabilities that can detect melanoma through your smartphone camera. Led by Mohammed Ilyas Habeeb, Harshit Srivastava, and Antonio Mallia, the team trained its deep neural network through a massive dataset of images. While a first-step in classifying melanoma in patients, they hope their product could be used to detect other skin issues and help dermatologists provide better care.

Safelet is a smart bracelet created by Angie Gonzalez, an electrical engineering student, and Shu-Hsien Huang of NYU College of Arts & Sciences. Aimed at helping women and men in dangerous and unsafe situations, including domestic violence and assault, Safelet includes a button to call 911, voice record & gather evidence, and even provide their GPS location to specific contacts and emergency officials. “Safelet will be significantly cheaper and won’t look like a fitbit, but a piece of jewelry,” Gonzalez said. “We also have a mobile app component that is disguised as a game, that can deter children and/or abusers from identifying it as a life-saving application connected to an everyday bracelet.” Safelet won the JPMorgan Chase & Co.: Best Hack for Disaster Relief and Recovery.

HackNYU 2018 Winners

Education Technology

Clarify

ARTranslator

IdeaCloud

Carlos Michael Rodriguez, Jevons Wang, Elliot Winch, and Bo Peng (NYU CAS), Rachel Rub (NYU Stern)

Matteo Sandrin (NYU Tandon)

Shakil Rafi, Jerry Ye, and Shaina Peters (Stuyvesant High School), Yesmeen Elgabori (Yonkers High School)

Sustainability & Social Impact

Cupcycling

IntentCoin

Clothly (This project was also winner of Best Domain Name from Domain.com Category)

Rupal Mehta, Bryan So, and Sagari Datta (NYU Tandon)

Srinivas Piskala Ganesh Babu (NYU Tandon), Deren Lin and David Margolin (Hunter College), Jeane Carlos (St. Johns University)

Stanley Zeng, Danny Lin, Salman Siraj, Justin Huang, and Kevin J. Zheng (NYU Tandon)

Accessibility & Assistive Technology

MedTime

SenseFood

Echo Journal

Alex Weis, Laura Liu, Alden Lamp, and Mehul Ghosal (Millburn High School)

Divyendra Patil, Rahul Yadav, Poornima Pundir, and Sagar Jain (Stevens Institute of Technology)

Alberta Kovatcheva and Mohammed Yassem (NYU Tandon), Andres Rabellino (NYU CAS), Sunjana Kulkarni (John P. Stevens High School), and Noor Khalil (Johns Hopkins University)

Healthcare

AVA

Nutrition Lens

Insta Cal

Mohamad Sherif (Middlesex County College), Rishab Nayak (Boston University), Anas Elghafari (NYU Tandon), Sarthak Poshattiwar and Alok Tibrewala (George Washington University)

Wangyue Wang, Xiaofan Ni, and Tianyu Wang (NYU Tandon)

Zhengyi Li (NYU Tandon), Jiayang Li (Columbia University)

Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/building-tech-social-good-hacknyu-2018