Recent Posts

Tracing the City

Tracing the City

March 24, 2026

Tracing the City features student work our The Cooper Union’s interdisciplinary course, Data Science for Social Good that I’m teaching this year with Tandis Shoushtary A’20. This course pairs engineering, art, and architecture students with New York City nonprofits to help address real-world chal...
Read More
Gorilla Tag

Gorilla Tag

October 23, 2025

Here’s a fun story - the creator of Gorilla Tag, one of the most popular VR games ever, is a Cooper Union Alum!
Read More
Data Science for Social Good, Spring 2024

Data Science for Social Good, Spring 2024

May 15, 2024

We opended our annual data science for social good exhibition today. Once again we partnered with several non profits and performed data visualization and analysis. Have a look below for descriptions of the projects and some pictures of the installation.
Read More
Data Science for Social Good, Spring 2023

Data Science for Social Good, Spring 2023

May 15, 2023

We opended our annual data science for social good exhibition today. Once again we partnered with several non profits and performed data visualization and analysis. Have a look below for descriptions of the projects and some pictures of the installation.
Read More
Data Science for Social Good, Spring 2022

Data Science for Social Good, Spring 2022

May 12, 2022

We opended our annual data science for social good exhibition today, in person again after a year off. Once again we partnered with several non profits and performed data visualization and analysis. Have a look below for descriptions of the projects and some pictures of the installation.
Read More
Understanding the Bailable Population in Mississippi

Understanding the Bailable Population in Mississippi

September 30, 2021

Recently, one of my graduate students defended her Master’s thesis, an examination of the bailable population in Mississippi. This work was done in collaboration with The Bail Project, a non profit who’s mission is to combat mass incarceration and restore presumption of innocence, reunite familie...
Read More

Data Science Projects for Social Good

May 20, 2020

We wrapped up our Data Science and Design Projects for Social Good recently. COVID-19 naturally made for a significant disruption of the semester, but nonetheless there are some really exciting projects that came out of the course. While we weren’t able to have our usual exhibition, we were able ...
Read More
Generative Machine Learing for Architecture

Generative Machine Learing for Architecture

May 12, 2020

We held our final review for a new course, Generative Machine Learning for Architecture (co-instructor Ben Aranda). This was a new experiment at Cooper where we embedded a small group of engineering students into the architecture studio. Although the semester was quite disrupted by COVID-19, we a...
Read More
Shenzen Biennial

Shenzen Biennial

December 22, 2019

The Shenzen Biennial of Urbanism/Architecture opened on Dec 22, 2019, and an exhibit I worked on in conjunction with Ben Aranda and a group of Cooper Union students was an intergral part of the Biennial.
Read More
Engineering With a Conscience

Engineering With a Conscience

December 12, 2019

A recent focus of much of my work has been examining the ethical implications of technology, both intended and unintended. This article on Coooper’s website takes a look at a few of my recent projects and courses, as well as some other efforts at Cooper in this area.
Read More
Interstice

Interstice

April 23, 2019

Graduating art student Aden Bailey held her senior show, Interstice, on April 23rd. As part of this show, Aden curated many pieces that students have done in a couple of my interdisciplinary courses this year. Below are some pieces from the Data Science and Design Projects for Social Good course,...
Read More

Autoencoding Neural Networks as Musical Audio Synthesizers

September 04, 2018

My Master’s student, Joseph Colonel, recently presented a paper Autoencoding Neural Networks as Musical Audio Synthesizers, at the Digital Audio Effects conference in Averio, Portugal. The purpose of this project is to try to unlock the potential of deep neural networks and create a new type of a...
Read More
Data Science Projects for Social Good

Data Science Projects for Social Good

June 03, 2018

In the spring semester of 2018, Will Shaprio and I co-taught a new class, Data Science Projects for Social Good. This course was a unique offering at Cooper, and was taken by juniors, seniors and graduate students from all three schools.
Read More

A step towards a cohort retrieval system for EEG records

December 02, 2017

When performing cohort retrieval, the goal is to find patients who have EEGs that are similar to other patients EEGs. If such a system existed, it would enable a clinician or researcher to quickly look up patients who have EEGs similar to each other. This could then assist them in diagnosing and...
Read More
Projections

Projections

June 03, 2017

This semester, I advised a collaborative project between an electrical engineering student (Jessica Marshall) and an art student (Emily Adamo). The goal of this project was to get an engineer and an artist talking about algorithms and data, and how they are applied and interpreted.
Read More
Exploring causal effects of ad campaigns during the Superbowl

Exploring causal effects of ad campaigns during the Superbowl

April 21, 2017

One of my graduate students, Neema Aggarwal, focused her graduate thesis on an important area of research, causal inference. Neema right now is working as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group, so we wanted to find her a thesis topic that was relevant to buisness work, but also an electric...
Read More

Closing the gender gap at Cooper Union

February 13, 2017

The Cooper Pioneer published this article about closing the gender gap at Cooper Union, something that I think is extremely important for our future as an institution.
Read More

Building a recommendation system for Anime

December 28, 2016

Are you bored on your break and want to find some new anime to watch? Why not try out Xiangling Kong and Venkat Kuruturi’s final project for statistical learning The data scraped for this rec system is uploaded to Kaggle in case you want to build your own:
Read More

Discovering hidden topics in Tweets

December 23, 2016

Here is another outstanding project from my statistical learning course, this one formatted as a blog post. The project collected tweets about sexual violence, and used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm called latent Dirichlet allocation to discover hidden topic groupings. Its would be q...
Read More

Is your car overpriced?

December 22, 2016

An example of some of the work my students did this semester. They scraped some data about car features and prices and built some models to predict the prices. They investigated what car features contribute most to the prices, and then, perhaps most interestingly, determined which cars are most o...
Read More