The Center for Connected Multimodal Mobility (C2M2) would like to thank Dr. Kaan Ozbay, Professor & Director, Department of Civil and Urban Engineering & C2SMART Center, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University for participating in our Distinguished Speaker Series on November 13, 2020.
Seminar Title
Understanding Mobility and Policy Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic in New York City through the use of Big Data and Machine Learning
Seminar Abstract
The fast evolving COVID-19 pandemic has drastically reshaped urban mobility patterns. Timely and accurate understanding of the effects of this extreme event is expected to help decision makers and planners to better prepare for similar future events. This research is aimed at using big data obtained from various novel publicly available sources for better understanding the relationship between social distancing and urban mobility during the pandemic, emerging trends of urban mobility amid the pandemic, and the length of a policy lag mainly due to the people’s varying reaction to a specific policy and its specific timing. Various state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used to process and analyze related data will be discussed. Important lessons learned from the major findings of our study will be presented to provide insights that can be used to reduce impacts of similar future events. The presentation will be concluded with a brief discussion of on-going and future COVID-19 related research efforts being conducted by NYU’s C2SMART transportation center.
Speaker Bio
Kaan Ozbay joined Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) as a tenured full Professor at NYU in August 2013. He is currently the founding Director of the C2SMART Center (Tier 1 UTC funded by USDOT). Prior to that Professor Ozbay was a tenured full Professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering where he joined as an Assistant Professor in July 1996. In 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) Department at, Princeton University.
Dr. Ozbay is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. His research interests in transportation cover a wide range of topics including data analytics for advanced technology and sensing applications in smart cities, development of simulation models of large scale complex transportation systems, modeling and evaluation of traffic incident and emergency management, feedback based on-line real-time traffic control techniques, traffic safety, application of operations research techniques in network optimization and humanitarian inventory control, and transportation economics. He has co-authored 4 books and published approximately 400 refereed papers in scholarly journals and conference proceedings. Prof. Ozbay is also an Associate Editor of the ITS journal. Dr. Ozbay is the co-editor of a book titled “Dynamic Traffic Control & Guidance” published by Springer Verlag’s “Complex Social, Economic and Engineered Networks” series in 2013. He also serves as the Associate Editor of Networks and Spatial Economic journal and Transportmetrica B: Transportation Dynamics journal. Since 1994, Dr. Ozbay, has been the Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator of more than 100 projects funded at a level of more than $20,00,000 by National Science Foundation, NJDOT, NYMTC, NY State DOT, New Jersey Highway Authority, USDOT, FHWA, VDOT, CUNY University Transportation Research Center (UTRC), Department of Homeland Security, USDOT ITS Research Center of Excellence.