Public Events

Ensemble machine learning model to analyze the association between admissions in Emergency Room and environmental factors

This study proposes an ensemble machine learning model to analyze the association between cardiovascular, respiratory, and total admissions in Emergency Room (ER) and environmental factors, such as air pollution and weather-climatic conditions. The aim is to improve the understanding of interactions between these factors, considering non-linearities and temporal dependencies, overcoming the limitations of traditional methods, and providing new perspectives on the relationships between diseases, pollution, climate, and hospital admissions.

The analysis was conducted using ensemble learning techniques, applying three regression models: Random Forest, XGBoost, and Adaboost. Ensemble learning improves predictive power by combining different models to reduce overfitting and variance, offering more robust predictions. The Bayesian optimization technique was applied to improve the accuracy of the predictions. The performance of the three optimized models was evaluated through various metrics, also considering cross-validation of the k-fold technique (k=10) to provide a more robust estimate of predictive capabilities. The application of SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis allowed us to identify the most important variables for hospital admissions and related patterns.

About the Speaker
Dr. Vito Telesca is a professor of hydrology at the University of Basilicata, and received a Ph.D. in Environmental Monitoring. Dr. Telesca is an expert in surface hydrological and fluvial processes. In particular, his research activity is focused on the effect of weather variability on human health, numerical algorithms for climate models, machine and deep learning models development for hydro-climatic problems, hydrological processes monitoring and modeling, and soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer processes. Dr. Telesca is the author of over 110 research papers in national and international journals, meeting proceedings, and workshop reports. He is an advisor in national and international research activities and scientific responsibility in national and international research projects involving university, public, and private land management enterprises. He is the winner of the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award 2010 by the World Meteorological Organization for the paper J.M. Sánchez, G. Scavone, V. Caselles, E. Valor, V.A. Copertino, and V. Telesca “Monitoring daily evapotranspiration at a regional scale from Landsat-TM and ETM+ data: application to the Basilicata Region”, published by Journal of Hydrology in 2008. From October 2010 to September 2012, he was a Board of Governors of the University of Basilicata member. From May 2017 to September 2020, he was a member of the Academic Senate of the University of Basilicata. From July 2018 to November 2020, he was a Coordinator of the Degree Courses Council in Civil and Environmental Engineering (School of Engineering of the University of Basilicata).

Dr. Daniel T. O’Brien is a leader of the burgeoning field of “urban informatics”, which uses modern digital data to better understand and serve local communities. He is a Professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), an interuniversity center that is an international model for advancing place-based, civically-engaged research that leverages data to benefit local communities.

Dr. O’Brien researches the physical and social conditions of neighborhoods and the citywide systems that serve them, often emphasizing questions of equity. This mission has allowed him to study many different subjects, including crime, education, transportation, climate resilience, public health, and public infrastructure, resulting in 50+ peer-reviewed publications and coverage from multiple media outlets, including Wired, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. He has raised $9M for his work, including grants from the National Science Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and others. His book The Urban Commons(Harvard University Press; 2018) won the American Political Science Association’s Dennis Judd Best Book Award for work on urban and local politics.

Dr. O’Brien has designed programs for educating and supporting others in the practice of urban informatics. BARI’s annual conference convenes researchers, public officials, community-based organizations, and others engaged in data-driven research and practice in greater Boston. BARI’s Boston Data Portal makes research-ready data describing the people and places of Boston accessible to multiple levels of data literacy, from data scientists to everyday residents. BARI also offers public urban informatics education for community-based organizations and high school students. His textbook, Urban Informatics (Chapman Hall / CRC Press; 2022), which is based on curricula he developed for Northeastern University’s Masters of Science in Urban Informatics, is freely available online.

Dr. Cynthia Zeng is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business in Abu Dhabi, and a research affiliate of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. Cynthia Zeng completed a PhD in Operations Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Cynthia Zeng’s research addresses the challenges of climate adaptation and sustainable development through technological innovation. She specializes in developing artificial intelligence solutions to forecast and manage extreme weather events. Her PhD thesis, titled “Multimodal Machine Learning for Climate Adaptation”, includes selected works on hurricanes prediction, flood prediction, near-term wind prediction, and flood insurance pricing.In addition to academic pursuits, Dr. Cynthia Zeng gained valuable industry experience as a quantitative analyst at BlackRock Systematic Equities, generating alpha signals using data science; at the SoftBank Vision Fund, focusing on late-stage investments in AI tech unicorns. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Imperial College London.

Greg Morrisett is the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech and a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University.

As Dean, he has overall responsibility for the campus, including the academic quality and direction of the Cornell Tech degree programs and research. Working with both internal and external stakeholders, he is developing approaches for working with companies, nonprofits, government agencies and early stage investors, as well as overseeing the faculty recruitment and entrepreneurial initiatives of the campus.

Prior to joining Cornell Tech, Morrisett was Dean of Computing and Information Science (CIS) at Cornell University from 2015-2019. Previously, he held the Allen B. Cutting chair in Computer Science at Harvard University from 2004-2015 where he also served as Associate Dean for Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Before Harvard, Morrisett spent eight years on the faculty of Cornell’s Computer Science Department.

Morrisett’s research focuses on the application of programming language technology for building secure, reliable, and high-performance software systems. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond and both his Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.

Incorporating human behavior into network epidemic models

The spreading dynamics of an epidemic and the collective behavioral pattern of the population over which it spreads are deeply intertwined and the latter can critically shape the outcome of the former. Motivated by this, our research group is engaged in devising parsimonious yet dynamically rich models that, despite their simplicity, are able to faithful reproduce complex epidemic phenomena, including successful collective responses, periodic oscillations, and resurgent epidemic outbreaks. In this talk, I will outline some of these models and present our recent results.Bio: Alessandro Rizzo is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, where he directs the Complex Systems Laboratory. Dr. Rizzo conducts and supervises research on modeling, analysis and control of complex systems and networks, distributed estimation and control, bioinspired and distributed robotics, and nonlinear dynamics. He holds two international patents; he authored one book and more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Society and was the recipient of two Amazon Research Awards in Robotics, in 2019 and 2021.

About the Speaker
Alessandro Rizzo is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, where he directs the Complex Systems Laboratory. Dr. Rizzo conducts and supervises research on modeling, analysis and control of complex systems and networks, distributed estimation and control, bioinspired and distributed robotics, and nonlinear dynamics. He holds two international patents; he authored one book and more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Society and was the recipient of two Amazon Research Awards in Robotics, in 2019 and 2021.

Anthropocene climate risks and resilience in cities

Cities concentrate people, economic activity, and infrastructure creating vulnerability and risk to climate fueled extreme weather events. With climate change continuing to accelerate, and impacts on cities likely to accelerate as well, building resilience to an Anthropocene climate will require aggressive upscaling in adaptation solutions. What scientific information do cities need to effectively prioritize adaptation and resilience solutions to protect residents, critical infrastructure, and their economies? New York City (NYC) will provide a case study in how co-producing actionable climate science with decision-makers can improve data driven approaches to protect vulnerable residents and build resilience to an increasingly uncertain future. Results from the NYC Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report and the recent NYC Vulnerability, Impacts, and Adaptation Study will serve as a backdrop to examine how scenario modeling and vulnerability assessment can advance more equitable resilience planning and response. Beyond NYC, how can we scale up climate risk information for less resourced cities to have access to similar actionable and cutting-edge science to prioritize investments and develop resilience plans? ClimateIQ, a new climate AI tool in development, will be presented that seeks to advance climate and data science using multiple forms of machine learning to scale operational climate risk data for urban areas across multiple climate hazards.

About the Speaker

Dr. Timon McPhearson is the founding director of the Urban Systems Lab, professor of urban ecology at The New School, and lead editor for Nature-based Solutions for Cities. His work takes an interdisciplinary systems approach to advancing urban resilience, equity, and sustainability earning the Ecological Society of America’s Sustainability Science Award twice as well as the Innovation in Sustainability Science Award. Dr. McPhearson was named an NYC Climate Hero and was awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as co-chair of the NYC Panel on Climate Change. His books including Urban Planet (2018) and Resilient Urban Futures (2021) are widely read (over 300,000 downloads). He advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on urban climate risk and resilience, has spoken to audiences at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell among other universities, and his research is extensively covered including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Science Friday, NBC, PBS Newshour, Voice of America, and more.

Sybil Derrible is a Professor in the Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy), a Research Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, and the Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago.

His research is at the nexus of urban metabolism, infrastructure planning and design, data science / artificial intelligence, complexity science, and system resilience to redefine how infrastructure is planned, designed, built, and operated, championing principles of livability, sustainability, and resilience.

He is the author of the textbook Urban Engineering for Sustainability (MIT Press, 2019) and the popular science book The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives (Prometheus Books, 2025).

He is also a Lead Author on the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7). He received a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Walter L. Huber Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for “outstanding research focusing on smart, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure.” Since 2019, he has been recognized in the top 2% researcher in my field for career and single-year impact by Elsevier.

Dr. Sybil Derrible also serves as an Associate Editor for Scientific Reports (Nature), the Journal of Infrastructure Systems (ASCE), and Cleaner Production Letters (Elsevier), and he is the Chair of AMR10, the Critical Transportation Infrastructure Protection committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).

Dr. Lin’s research areas include Natural Hazards and Risk Analysis, Wind Engineering, Coastal Engineering, and Climate Change Impact and Adaptation. Her current primary focus is hurricane risk analysis. She integrates science, engineering, and policy to study hurricane-related weather extremes (strong winds, heavy rainfall, and storm surges), how they change with changing climate, and how their impact on society can be better mitigated. Dr. Lin has led a NSF CAREER project and a multi-institutional NSF Hazards SEEs project on hurricane hazards and risk in a changing climate.

The Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech program foregrounds questions about the public impact of new technologies, pursuing solutions that advance social, political, and economic rights. Through the Just Tech Fellowship and digital platform, the program creates a new research ecosystem that informs public policy and imagines futures where social and public interests drive technological change.

Mara Mills is associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and cofounding director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, a hub for public humanities and disability arts programming. She is also a founding editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently coeditor of the collections How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025), funded by the National Science Foundation; Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023); and a volume of the journal Osiris on "Disability and the History of Science." Upcoming publications include a collaborative research project with anthropologist Michele Friedner, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on "The Global Cochlear Implant."

Edward B. Kang is assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the codirector of a multiyear project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) titled Machine Listening in the Age of Artificial Intelligenceand a co-organizer of the AI in Society group at the Institute for Public Knowledge. His current book project, Machine Voices (under contract with The MIT Press), parses the scientific, cultural, and technical formats through which so-called "artificial intelligence" (AI), voice, and listening are fastened together. He received his PhD in communication from the University of Southern California's (USC) Annenberg School, with a graduate certificate in Science & Technology Studies (STS).

Johann Diedrick is a 2023–2025 Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and an adjunct professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). He is an artist, engineer, and educator who combines audio and AI technologies. Through his installations, performances, and sculptures, audiences can experience the world through sonic encounters. His work has been featured in The Wire and presented internationally at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, MoMA PS1, Dia Art Foundation, and the New Museum, among others. He holds a bachelor of arts in sociology of culture from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree from New York University’s ITP program.

Dorothy Santos is a 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). She is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar, an art department assistant professor, and the principal founding faculty for creative technologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her innovative research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, race, and gender. Her writing appears in art21, Slate, and Vice Motherboard, among others. Santos’ work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Southern Exposure, among others. She has a PhD in film and digital media with an emphasis in computational media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jay Cunningham is a 2023–2025 Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He is a public-interest technologist and researcher dedicated to promoting trust and safety in AI/ML, data science, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Cunningham’s work spans critical computing and technology development practices to foster equitable natural language technology experiences for Black / African American English speakers. Jay is an adjunct professor of design strategy at the University of Southern California. He has also made significant industry contributions as a visiting researcher at Google’s People + AI, Apple Human-centered AI/ML, and Microsoft Research Fairness in AI. Jay received his PhD in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.