The Future is Bright

from Engineering Optimism - The Unconventional Engineer Vol. 3

Health Engineering

IT WAS A WINNING YEAR FOR TANDON

Whether they’re designing a rocket capable of flying an important payload or building a network of sensors to detect flooding, NYU Tandon students and faculty prove the power of teamwork and collaboration.

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

This year’s InnoVention teams got rewarded for their hustle and vision

InnoVention is a prototyping competition that challenges NYU students from around the globe to prototype and pitch commercially viable ideas for real-world problems. When the dust cleared at the New York-based 2022 competition, winners included:

• Grand Prize recipient Ivy Road, a service that matches international students with highly qualified peer tutors. Developed by Dan Zhang (Tandon ‘25) and Ailin Jia (Gallatin ‘25), it’s a demonstration of engineering students’ ability to work with their counterparts across NYU to provide essential services to students everywhere..

• EaSEE Bot, a device developed by Bilal Sher (Tandon ‘22) and Beyza Kiper (Tandon ‘25) that helps ensure the safety and efficiency of a building’s exterior by flying around the structure and auto-generating a 3D model using advanced computer vision and AI techniques. EaSEE Bot combines two core elements of Tandon’s areas of research excellence, robotics and urban. EaSEE Bot has also won honors from the U.S. Department of Energy and at the 2021 global edition of InnoVention.

Shooting for the moon

The NASA Student Launch, an annual research-based initiative aimed at designing, building, and flying payloads or vehicle components that advance high-power rocketry, is widely considered the most prestigious student aerospace competition in the nation. Last year, NYU Tandon’s Rogue Aerospace was named the number-two rookie team of 2021 and garnered first place in the Project Review Award category; they were also named the Overall Winner of the Student Launch Design Division. Now, no longer rookies, they proved their mettle among the more than 60 teams at the 2022 competition, garnering the Overall number-two spot in the University Student Launch Initiative Design Division. In addition, the team received the first place AIAA Vehicle Design Award (for the most creative, innovative, and safety-conscious overall rocket design) and the Project Review Award (presented to the team with the best combination of written reviews and formal presentations).

An unsinkable team

In 2022, members of Tandon’s Concrete Canoe team aced the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Metropolitan Regional Competition, marking the sixth consecutive regional win for the team and setting a new school record. Thanks to that performance, the team headed once more to the nationals, held live at Louisiana Tech University in early June. (It was the first in-person nationals since 2019.) There they had an outstanding finish, placing first in the important category of final product, third in the written design category, and — in a crowded field — placed fifth overall.

Business as usual: another competition, another win for Tandon’s trading teams

Browse the NYU Tandon website and you’ll see numerous headlines that appear similar: “NYU Tandon Team Excels in Prestigious International Trading Competition,” “FRE Trading Teams Shine in Annual University Trading Challenge,” “Finance and Risk Engineering Students Excel at National Financial Trading Competition,” “Tandon Team Trades with the Best of Them.”

The phenomenon can’t be blamed on an unimaginative headline writer. As Professor Ron Slivka (FRE), who has coached Tandon’s trading teams for several years, points out, the department has fielded winning teams in various competitions for the last seven years straight. FRE’s latest triumph occurred

at the Eleventh Annual Academic Affiliate Membership Student Competition, organized by the International Association for Quantitative Finance. After submissions had gone through a blind, multilevel selection process and were reviewed by a judging panel comprised of IAQF Board Members, two of the six winning teams hailed from Tandon. While Tandon was the only program with multiple winners, that was not unusual for the school. This was actually the third year in a row FRE placed more than one team in the IAQF winners circle.

An earthshaking accomplishment

The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that earthquake losses in the U.S. add up to more than $4 billion a year. Around the world, some 20,000 people are killed annually when tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust shift, and the resulting seismic waves wreak havoc.

NYU Tandon is helping educate the next generation of earthquake engineers — those able to analyze the potential consequences of strong earthquakes and design and build structures that can withstand seismic effects as much as possible — and this year, a group of students from the NYU Tandon Seismic Design Team took part in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s Annual Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition. Students were charged with creating a scaled balsa wood model of a proposed building design using laser cutting and 3D printing, and bringing it to the competition, where it would be subjected to intensive testing on the shake table.

Despite being at their very first in-person competition — and despite going head-to-head with several teams comprising dozens of students — the fledgling Tandon team landed in fifth place among U.S. universities and 11th on the global stage against schools in Romania, Indonesia, Egypt, Canada, and elsewhere.

RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

Million dollar ideas

Tandon researchers are producing big ideas, with big funding to back it up. Multiple projects from our researchers received grants worth over a million dollars, including:

• $4 million for FloodNet, a collaborative project that seeks to install flood sensors across New York City in order to build an early warning system for those in harm’s way (see page 24).

• $5 million from DARPA awarded to VIDA to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) “virtual assistant” providing just-in-time visual and audio feedback to help with task execution.

• $2.5 million for the launch of a New York-based Offshore Wind Innovation Hub that will facilitate partnerships with start-ups that bring new technological solutions to the rapidly growing US offshore wind industry. It represents a partnership between power company Equinor and the NYU Tandon Future Labs.

• $2.5 million in National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to several teams of wireless researchers, whose projects will focus on making current and future wireless infrastructure, software and hardware systems more resilient to flaws, accidents, subterfuge and hacks.

• $2 million from the NSF to create and grow the use of dataintensive technologies in healthcare, including telehealth and AI based tools.The project will help modernize healthcare systems and improve outcomes for patients.

• $1 million dollars to develop a database search engine to help experts to weed through the vast amount of publicly available information to discover datasets that are needed for their specific applications.

OUR NEWEST FACULTY MEMBERS

We take great pride in being a school whose faculty has included such luminaries as the “Father of Polymer Science” Herman Mark and microwave pioneer Ernst Weber. We take equal pride in our current faculty members, who are making notable strides in a wide variety of cutting-edge fields, including wireless communications, protein engineering, and clean energy. This year they will be joined by one of the largest groups of new incoming faculty in recent memory — teaching and researching in areas from environmental engineering to AI and beyond — and poised to contribute to the Tandon legacy in their own ways.