AVAIL IS AN APPLIED RESEARCH LABORATORY

 

SPECIALIZING IN DATA SCIENCE AND REGIONAL PLANNING

The New York State Hazard Mitigation Plan

As the severity and frequency of natural disasters increase, so does the devastation and exorbitant cost of recovery left in their wake. In recent years, national focus has taken a dramatic shift towards mitigation – sustained actions that reduce the loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters. New York State recognizes that the time to act is before disaster strikes. Current research shows that for every $1 spent on mitigation, an average $6 is saved. However, since the largest amount of federal mitigation dollars becomes available following a declared disaster, resulting actions taken are inevitably reactive instead of proactive. In New York, we believe that the solution to this is to devote greater resources to mitigation planning – both at the state and local level. How we learn and interact with information is constantly evolving. Static, narrative heavy planning documents no longer serve to efficiently inform decision making. The contents within Mitigate NY transition the model of planning to one that maintains up-to-date risk data that is digestible and accessible to all. This kind of partnership – one that encourages an interdisciplinary approach to research, data, and practice – can be sustained and enriched indefinitely. Engaging students, academics and practitioners simultaneously with locals, government representatives and policy-makers fosters a collaborative foundation for implementation of hazard mitigation.

SAMBAS - Modeling Probable Pathways of Illegal Immigration Across the U.S. Border with Mexico

One of the key challenges in securing the US border is deterring the smuggling of illicit goods and humans between the Ports-of-Entry (POEs). While technologies from other law enforcement sectors could provide an advantage to USBP operations such as predictive hot-spot policing, these advances will miss the pathways that smugglers have taken to cross between POEs. Simulation Analysis and Modeling for Border Apprehension and Security (SAMBAS) represents an advancement in the utilization of simulations and modeling approaches by field agents to support Border Security. Built on empirically-driven social and geospatial science about decision-making patterns of those illegally entering the United States between POEs, the resulting Probable Pathways software will integrate generalized intelligence and insights on smuggler behavior at the Sector level; process the results within 1 hour of query; provide updatable probable pathways across user-defined location and time-periods; and presented in an easy-to-use framework alongside a training manual and user examples.

NJDOT Traveler Information Application Pilot Project for the Routes 1 and 18 Corridors

The NJDOT Bureau of Research and Division of Mobility Engineering started this project with the University of Albany and Info Logistics in August of 2017. The purpose of the project is to develop a mobile, traveler application that provides information on traffic conditions, travel times, transit availability, and parking availability. The application is intended to ultimately provide decision support based on specific user inputs and external data sources.

NPMRDS Congestion and Reliability Performance Analytics

Working in coordination with New York State DOT and New York Metropolitan Planning Organizations, AVAIL is building a performance measurement dashboard based on NPMRDS. The NPMRDS Analytics Tool Suite provides you with the visualization tools you need to analyze and report network performance, run corridor analyses, and conduct project analyses at various geographic and temporal resolutions. AVAIL's NPMRDS Tools provide pinpoint Analysis of PM3 Measures to aid users in discovery of which TMCs are contributing negatively to your performance scores. The Tools allow users to track PM3 progress month over month and year over year and provides default templates for quick and easy analysis as well as highly customizable features for more in-depth analyses for publishing reports directly to the web.

Transit Demand Modeling

In June 2014, AVAIL was awarded a Project Phase II for its Bus Stop Level Transit Demand Modelling Project in order to pursue additional objectives in developing state-of-the-art microsimulation software for Transit Demand Modelling.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Atlas

In December 2014, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation awarded AVAIL with a grant to create an Entrepreneurial Landscape Analysis Tool that shows business climate change over time. This web-tool combines data sets with leading indicator potential overlaying information visually and geospatially - highlighting business type distributions, property value and income. This project visualizes nationally available datasets for understanding economic activity and job creation using the LEHD Quarterly Work Force Indicator (QWI), LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), Zip & County Business Patterns, Quarterly Census of Earning and Wages (QCEW) and Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS). These data sets allow AVAIL to develop a number of interdependent visualizations to understand change in economic activity for Census Urban Areas and allow for comparison of American cities with each other and themselves across the 20 year span from 1992 to 2012. We will also use this data to look in detail at Urbanized Areas at the zip code and census tract levels to understand the spatial aspects of economic activity such as industry clustering and employment density. AVAIL will cross this broad analysis of Urbanized Areas with a business level analysis using publicly available data on entrepreneurial activity from Startup Genome and Crunchbase, as well as Longitudinal Data from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) Database.

MTA Real-time Data Conversion

AVAIL was awarded a grant by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to create an Application Programming Interface (API) that is capable of converting MTA’s Subway system data, GTFS Realtime, on the fly into SIRI, the format used to publish their bus data. In recent years, the standardization of transit schedule information has yielded a dramatic increase in the accessibility of computerized transit schedules, and has brought about the availability of real-time service schedule. Currently, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) publishes its real-time transit data in two very different formats. This is due to system/vendor limitations. AVAIL will unify their data streams into one format in order to provide developers and travelers more complete access to real-time transit data in the largest mass transit market in the country.

Federal Highways Web-based Data

AVAIL is developing a web-based traffic data analytics data administration module as part of a Federal Highways Administration Pooled Fund Study for six state DOTs (Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, North Carolina and Michigan). The data administration module is an all inclusive transportation data visualization software suite focusing on continuous counts data, WIM and HPMS. The software will be made open-source upon completion and it is expected that the software will be used by transportation professionals around the US.

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