This year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Paul Torrens from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, and Center for Urban Science + Progress, New York University

Simulating Streetscapes

In this talk, I will discuss my work to build computational laboratories of streetscapes, forged from synthetic built environments and populated with crowds of synthetic humans. The work will showcase a suite of GIS technologies that we are developing in an effort to better map computer simulations of streetscapes to real-world behaviors and to real-world environments, using behavioral AI, machine learning, sensor-based motion capture, and immersive visualization. The overarching goal of the work is to expand the range of questions that we can pose with and in computer models, and I will therefore discuss how the tools can be applied to explore thorny problems of real-world concern, in particular for critical scenarios that present at the human-built interface of cities.

Bio

Dr. Paul M. Torrens is a Professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the Tandon School of Engineering, and Professor of Practice for Urban Informatics in the Center for Urban Science + Progress, at New York University. His research and teaching is broadly organized around scientific computing and data science, with a particular focus on the development of modeling and simulation technologies at the interface of human, built, and urban systems. Paul holds a Ph.D. from University College London (2004). His work earned him a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2007 and he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President George W. Bush in 2008. Until recently, Paul was a Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was the founding Director of the Center for Geospatial Information Science.