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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240206T180000
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DTSTAMP:20260515T090106
CREATED:20241210T190431Z
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SUMMARY:Community Partners in Residence (CPR) Program - Meeting 5
DESCRIPTION:On Tuesday\, February 6\, 2024\, the NSF Center for Smart StreetScapes (CS3) held its fifth Community Partners in Residence (CPR) Program workshop. The session was convened and led once again by Ester Fuchs\, Chief Social Impact Officer of the CS3 and Professor of International and Public Affairs and Political Science at Columbia University. The focus of this week’s workshop was on the subjects of security\, privacy\, and fairness as they pertain to emerging streetscape technology. \nRoxana Geambasu\, an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University\, opened the session by addressing privacy\, fairness\, and transparency issues in streetscape technologies. She acknowledged the significant potential of these technologies but also highlighted risks such as compromised sensors\, potential hacker attacks\, and the misuse of city data. Geambasu proposed a comprehensive approach to enhance security\, privacy\, and fairness through community engagement\, emphasizing the need for a programming framework for future streetscape applications. \nThe presentation delved into the tradeoff between accuracy and privacy in real-time data feeding to streetscape applications\, introducing the concept of “anonymization” as the first level of data protection. This process involves edge computers for object detection and tracking\, providing real-time anonymized data to applications. Geambasu acknowledged the drawbacks of anonymization\, leading to the discussion of an advanced protection level that involves sharing noisy aggregates over the dataset instead of raw data. This method prevents accurate reconstruction of individual entries\, striking a balance between privacy and meaningful tradeoffs for streetscape applications. Geambasu concluded by emphasizing the crucial role of effective researcher-community engagement in navigating this tradeoff\, providing specific and actionable guidance. \nFollowing Prof. Geambasu’s presentation\, the floor was opened to the CPRs for questions. Participants seemed primarily concerned with the security and ownership of data\, with a majority of questions being devoted to ascertaining who would control the data generated by smart streetscape infrastructure\, as well as how demands to access the data by third parties would be handled. In addition\, CPRs floated questions regarding the anonymization of data and protection of individual privacy. Prof. Geambasu’s responses generally served to assure CPRs that data security and anonymization would occur as soon as possible within the pipeline\, minimizing risk for people being observed. CPRs were also informed of the existence of Columbia University’s independent internal review board for the project. \nThe second presentation by Salvatore Stolfo\, a computer science professor at Columbia University\, highlighted current security challenges\, including the risks associated with compromised IoT sensors and edge server hacking. He emphasized the need for policies and transparency in handling data collected by third parties and underscored the importance of further research on AI failures. The CPR survey results revealed concerns about data misuse\, particularly with companies\, and discomfort with technologies like facial recognition and AI. Stolfo also discussed the community’s interest in understanding how the technology is engaged with community application and how they can be abused. Stolfo emphasized the significance of finding the right tradeoff\, acknowledging the benefits of technology in preventing crimes and terrorist attacks. He presented ongoing research addressing the protection of physically deployed sensors and the overall system\, including centralized command and control for managing security technology and self-protecting streetscape security systems. Additionally\, he highlighted research efforts focused on AI failures and trustworthiness to enhance identity authentication\, scene analysis\, and situation awareness accuracy. \nAfter Prof. Stolfo’s presentation\, CPRs raised questions regarding the accuracy of facial recognition technology when used on people with darker skin and in a crowd setting\, as well as the identification of legitimate data. Their concerns were acknowledged\, with Prof. Stolfo reassuring the audience that facial recognition technology is rather robust in certain contexts. He admitted that there are ongoing difficulties in applying the technology to finding a subset of individuals within a set of many faces\, and also warned participants of the difficulties in discerning legitimate software from malicious imitations. He also acknowledged the possibility that a well-intentioned actor may accidentally cause harm to a system. \nThe meeting transitioned into breakout sessions\, where the groups of CPRs shared today’s insights facilitated by CS3 staff. A prevalent concern raised by the majority was the privacy risk associated with valuable data\, even if being anonymized. They expressed the need for a deeper understanding and discussion regarding the tradeoff between privacy and functionality of data. Facilitators initiated discussion on challenges of the streetscapes impacted by privacy security and transparency. In active discussions\, CPRs highlighted the demand for protective measures for physical technology\, transparency in politics and procedures\, and the trustworthiness of the systems. They emphasized the importance of decentralized control of data acquisition\, addressing environmental and contextual biases in facial recognition\, and mitigating the risk of hackers maliciously controlling streetscapes. Additionally\, there was a collective awareness of the significance of education required to find a balance between functionality and privacy\, with CPRs proposing discussion among community reporters on TV and at community board meetings to further address this issue. \nCPR workshops are invite-only. If you are interested in attending a workshop or learning more about CS3’s community engagement process\, please contact our team at streetscapes@columbia.edu.
URL:https://cs3-erc.org/event/community-partners-in-residence-cpr-program-meeting-5/
LOCATION:Harlem\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Community
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240216T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240216T130000
DTSTAMP:20260515T090106
CREATED:20241211T162126Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241211T162126Z
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SUMMARY:CS3 Monthly Research Exchange
DESCRIPTION:At each CS3 Monthly Research Exchange\, three faculty and student researchers in the field of smart urban planning will take the stage to share their latest findings\, breakthroughs\, and urban projects. \nSevin Mohammadi\, Ph.D. Student at Columbia University \n\nPresentation Abstract: Sevin will present her ongoing and completed research\, which converges to enhance urban mobility and operation by leveraging data and advanced machine learning techniques. The main focus of her presentation will be enhancing Emergency Medical Services response in urban environments through data-informed decision-making and policy optimization.\n\nAdditional presenters to be announced. \nThe CS3 Monthly Research Exchanges are internal and open only to CS3 affiliated students\, faculty\, and staff. If you are interested in learning more about the research happening at CS3\, please contact our team at streetscapes@columbia.edu.
URL:https://cs3-erc.org/event/cs3-monthly-research-exchange-5/
LOCATION:Hybrid
CATEGORIES:SLC
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240220T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240220T200000
DTSTAMP:20260515T090106
CREATED:20241210T191430Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241210T191430Z
UID:4088-1708452000-1708459200@cs3-erc.org
SUMMARY:Community Partners in Residence (CPR) Program - Meeting 6
DESCRIPTION:On Tuesday\, February 20\, 2024\, the NSF Center for Smart StreetScapes (CS3) held its sixth Community Partners in Residence (CPR) Program workshop. The session was convened and led again by Ester Fuchs\, Chief Social Impact Officer of the CS3 and Professor of International and Public Affairs and Political Science at Columbia University. The focus of this week’s workshop was on the subjects of public safety\, emergency response\, and individual privacy as it pertains to the deployment of streetscape technology. \nAfter opening remarks by Ester Fuchs\, Mubarak Shah\, Chair Professor in University of Central Florida\, Director at the Center for Research in Computer Vision\, Situational Awareness Research Lead\, CS3\, presented a summary of his research on the use of “computer vision situational awareness” in order to interpret and identify actions that occur in an image or a video. He discussed that the aim of classifying human actions can take several forms such as activity recognition\, that is\, classification of human actions and their application in the real world to situations\, and anomaly detection\, recognition when someone is behaving abnormally or an accident occurs. However\, he acknowledged that along with development of this technology are the twin drawbacks of privacy and bias; it’s important to protect the privacy of those being captured on camera as the majority of the time their actions are benign\, while the accuracy of an activity recognition program suffer from bias in its ability to identify certain actions based on the traits of the subjects in the video. Specifically\, bias is caused largely by the system learning false associations between subject attributes and behavior and could be combated by using more materials to better inform the program. Mubarak highlighted that the future direction of the team is to continue to work to resolve the issues of privacy and bias. \nFollowing Professor Mubarak’s presentation\, CPRs posed questions centered around the potential of computer vision situational awareness for public safety\, such as “What if we don’t want the identity of shoplifters to remain anonymous?” and “How does this converge with the law and help to combat recidivism?” He clarified that if there should be something where the police wanted the video\, it can be revealed\, ideally while the privacy of people who are not doing anything illegal is preserved. In response to concerns about malicious training data\, he explained that the idea of this research is to make systems more robust against these kinds of attacks by producing a system that looks at the activity of the individual and not the person’s physical characteristics. \nThe second presentation was delivered by Andrew Smyth\, Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at Columbia University\, Principal Investigator & Chair of the CS3\, offering a use case from his prior work where additional camera technology and machine learning can be used to improve city services beyond the current capabilities. Initiated in 2021 as response times became increasingly slower\, his project aimed to optimize the FDNY EMS response operations using historical data from the 1.1 million hospital transport emergencies that occur per year. The typical decision for the dispatch is to send the patient to the nearest hospital based on location and issue as identified through “critical care codes” using a static computerized map\, while the location choices do not take into account traffic patterns or times of day/week. He demonstrated that new routing patterns developed using data analytics demonstrate a crucial one minute improvement to routing times\, though they are not currently being used by the city. Without having access to the Google Maps data\, having more accurate/real-time data through cameras would go a long way to advancing response times\, which ideally could operate streetlights or change traffic patterns to assist. Andrew concluded his presentation by introducing his second aspect of the project focusing on pandemic hospital load balancing where streetscapes camera data can be used to route patients to alternative hospitals when the nearest option is at-capacity. \nCPRs reacted to Andrew’s presentation with questions such as “How does level of trauma impact response times?” and “How do street alterations such as planters\, bike lanes\, etc. impact response times?“ He clarified that the ambulance will take different approaches to how they move on the street based on the level of care needed and that the more data there is the more it can accommodate changes to the street\, and we can collect some forms of data in real-time from Streetscape-level cameras. \nThe meeting then moved into breakout sessions\, where CPRs shared ideas\, feelings and questions about public safety\, emergency response\, and individual privacy. As for new learning from today’s presentations\, many showed their awareness of bias issues around computer vision applications and concerns about privacy when collecting data. Moving to the discussion to identify practical problems on the streetscapes that you think might be addressed through this kind of research\, there were many suggestions using real-time data from CPRs such as finding alternative routes for emergency vehicles and during festivals\, the most appropriate hospitals\, putting those ideas in application for consumer use. \nCPR workshops are invite-only. If you are interested in attending a workshop or learning more about CS3’s community engagement process\, please contact our team at streetscapes@columbia.edu.
URL:https://cs3-erc.org/event/community-partners-in-residence-cpr-program-meeting-6/
LOCATION:Harlem\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Community
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