News

Dr. Azza Abouzied, CITIES Principal Investigator and NYUAD Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded the competitive ADEK ASPIRE 2020 research grant under the application titled “Scalable Delta Processing of Constrained Optimization Queries.” This grant will allow Professor Abouzied to further develop her work consisting of building tools for decision-making in uncertain contexts with changing data and changing constraints. The grant covers over AED 976,000 for a duration of three years. Congratulations Professor Abouzied!

Traffic Management in the UAE: Radio Podcast Interview
February 2022
Featuring Prof. Monica Menendez
– In English, the interview starts at 34:55 in Dubai Eye 103.8: The Agenda

Following the success of the first two projects (Assessing the Threat Levels of Misinformation Campaigns; Stealthy Attacks on Autonomous Vehicle-based Control Systems and Their Defenses) activated in 2021-2022, the Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES) and the Center for Cyber Security (CCS) at NYUAD are jointly inviting scientific proposals to activate an interdisciplinary research project at the crossroads of both centers. 

The ideal interdisciplinary project should touch on aspects related to cities and cybersecurity and propose research that truly reflects the vision of both CITIES and CCS. To learn more about the two centers, their vision, and research goals, please visit CITIES and CCS. The selected project will receive funding for a two-year post-doctoral position and one full month of summer salary per year to be distributed among the project PIs. Projects should start in September 2022, and will end by August 2024.

In line with the NYUAD vision, this program is designed to foster collaboration among faculty from different research centers and divisions, and it is open to any NYUAD faculty. The proposal must involve two faculty members, with at most one affiliated with either Center (e.g., either a faculty member from each of the two funding centers, a faculty member from one of the two funding centers, and an external faculty member, or two external faculty members). 

Proposals are due by the end of the day on Friday, March 11th, 2022. They are expected to be around three pages long and should follow this template. All proposals will be reviewed by a committee representing both CITIES and CCS, and at most two projects will be selected. 

For any inquiries, please contact nyuad.cities@nyu.edu, ccsad@nyu.edu.

Listen to a new radio podcast interview featuring Prof. Monica Menendez. In English, the interview starts at 35:35 in Dubai Eye 103.8: The Agenda.

Check the new article in Foreign Affairs Latino América, featuring Prof. Monica Menendez & CITIES Research Associate José Balsa-Barreiro on how to understand mobility in cities.

Check the recent news featuring Prof. Bruno Abrahao, CITIES Co-Investigator. 

From posts to tweets to chats, likes to shares, humans are producing a massive amount of data on social media every day. The microblogging site Twitter, with 400 million users alone, allows users with programming skills to extract data from their site through a number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). What can we learn from this data – and can it be used safely to make the world a better place?  

On November 18,  four speakers from Toronto, Seattle, Jakarta, and Shanghai gathered to consider these questions at the panel sponsored by the NYU Shanghai Library, Social Media for Social Good: Twitter API Deciphered in Small Bytes. The speakers described how analyzing data extracted from Twitter informed their research on issues such as migration, mental illness, and disaster prevention and relief. 

“Despite its limitations, publicly-available big data like Twitter provides researchers an opportunity to understand deep problems at low cost without intruding on individuals’ privacy. It can transform the way we understand ourselves and the world,” said Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics Bruno Abrahao, who shared how he and his team used Twitter as a“giant clinical trial on the web” to develop methods to aid the treatment of depression. 

See more here. 

This informal workshop was organized on the 23rd of November, 2021, and was proposed as a brainstorming exercise with a select number of students from different universities. Three NYUAD students participated in this workshop, discussing topics around the summit’s key themes.

Repost from @nyuadengage,
Professor Monica Menendez shed light on the innovation that we can expect to see transforming cities around the globe at US Pavilion, Dubai EXPO 2020.