Award Abstract # 2133516
NSF Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3)

NSF Org: EEC
Division of Engineering Education and Centers
Recipient: THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Initial Amendment Date: August 9, 2022
Latest Amendment Date: May 29, 2025
Award Number: 2133516
Award Instrument: Cooperative Agreement
Program Manager: Sandra Cruz-Pol
scruzpol@nsf.gov
 (703)292-2928
EEC
 Division of Engineering Education and Centers
ENG
 Directorate for Engineering
Start Date: September 1, 2022
End Date: August 31, 2027 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $26,000,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $13,765,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2022 = $3,500,000.00
FY 2023 = $4,500,000.00

FY 2024 = $5,765,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Andrew Smyth (Principal Investigator)
    smyth@civil.columbia.edu
  • Jason Hallstrom (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Mubarak Shah (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Ester Fuchs (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Tian Zheng (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Jason Hallstrom (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Jinwoo Jang (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Malo Hutson (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Columbia University
615 W 131ST ST
NEW YORK
NY  US  10027-7922
(212)854-6851
Sponsor Congressional District: 13
Primary Place of Performance: Columbia University
2960 Broadway
New York
NY  US  10027-6902
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
13
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): F4N1QNPB95M4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): HSI-Hispanic Serving Instituti,
ERC-Eng Research Centers
Primary Program Source: 01002223DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002324DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002425DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

04002425DB NSF STEM Education
Program Reference Code(s): 125E, 126E, 128E, 132E, 1480, 7680
Program Element Code(s): 077Y00, 148000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.041, 47.076

ABSTRACT

More than 80% of Americans and over half the world?s population live in urban areas. High-density cities are transforming how people live, work, travel, and manage urban infrastructure. With the nation?s urban areas facing emerging challenges threatening livability and safety, it is the streetscape ?neighborhood streets, sidewalks, and public spaces? that marks the nexus of public and commercial activities, where rich, spatially and temporarily dense data can be harnessed for the public good. The NSF Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), led by Columbia University, together with Florida Atlantic University, Rutgers University, and Lehman College, will develop a rich ecosystem of streetscape applications built upon real-time, hyper-local intelligence to advance livable and safe communities. CS3 will adopt a fundamentally new approach to engineering research, leveraging a varied cohort of non-academic stakeholders ?industry partners, community organizations, municipalities, and K-12 schools? as collaborative co-producers of knowledge and auditors of technology research and development. With an extensive network of partners, CS3 will explore five application themes: road safety and traffic efficiency, public safety, assistive technologies, the future of outdoor work, and hyper-local sensing and modeling. CS3?s engineering process will begin with the study of community-specific application requirements, constraints, and priorities. The resulting community-inspired applications will be piloted within three distinct urban testbeds ?in New York City (NY), West Palm Beach (FL), and New Brunswick (NJ)? leveraging prior federal and municipal investments. Outcomes from these pilots will catalyze a novel innovation ecosystem, drawing upon CS3?s broad network of aspiring entrepreneurs, emerging start-ups, and established companies. Realizing and sustaining this vision requires a next-generation workforce that cross-cuts engineering, AI and data science, social science, and policy; CS3 will leverage shared, day-to-day streetscape experiences to attract students from many disciplines and all backgrounds to engage in the emerging discipline of smart cities. Built on the closely integrated foundational elements of NSF?s ERC program ?Research, Engineering Workforce Development, and Innovation Ecosystem? CS3?s work has the potential to redefine America?s streetscapes by applying a digital layer over physical urban infrastructure, ensuring that America?s cities meet the needs of local communities and that the technologies being adopted take into account critical questions regarding safety, privacy, and security.

The NSF Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) will advance livable and safe communities through real-time, hyper-local streetscape applications built on advancements in edge-cloud technology, wireless-optical engineering, visual analytics, computer security, and social science. CS3 will unite varied research communities through a convergent research model that delivers innovations across five engineering and scientific areas: (1) Wi-Edge ? the integration of high-speed wireless-optical networking, high-performance edge-cloud computing, and software-defined radios and networking; (2) Situational Awareness ? fine-scale, real-time observation, modeling, and forecasting of human behavior over variable time horizons at streetscape scales; (3) Security, Privacy & Governance ? addressing socio-technical barriers of privacy and security within locally intelligent streetscapes, yielding a software pipeline for streetscape applications that gives community-configurable guarantees of privacy, reliability, and transparency; (4) Public Interest Technology ? understanding the interactions between the social landscape and CS3 technologies, applications, and security/privacy policies and the resulting regional economic development; and (5) Streetscape Applications ? incorporating the distinct ways in which individual communities read, interpret, and respond to local intelligence within the design process in order to optimize community-specific benefits. CS3 will advance fundamental knowledge in civil and urban systems engineering, electrical and network engineering, AI-powered visual analytics and sensor fusion, computer privacy and security, and public interest technology ? catalyzing and coalescing the emerging discipline of smart cities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

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