Poster Session

Each year our summer research program culminates with a poster session in which we celebrate the accomplishments of our students. Of course, with Covid-19 we've had to modify how we are viewing and presenting the work. Students are creating online poster pages and there will be zoom presentations with small groups of students held immediately after the Keynote Address. 

There will be two sessions with up to nine breakout rooms you may visit to listen to student presentations. Students are assigned to presentation groups and time slots. The full schedule with links is available here.

In order to self select breakout rooms you need to be running Zoom version 5.3.0 or higher (Desktop client or mobile app) or version 5.0.0 (4241.1207) or higher (ChromeOS).

Keynote Lecture

Topology and Geometry of Urban Road Networks

Driven by modern applications and the abundance of empirical network
data, network science aims at analyzing real-world complex systems arising in
the social biological and physical sciences by abstracting them into networks
(or graphs). The size and complexity of real networks has produced a deep
change in the way that graphs are approached, and led to the development of new
mathematical and computational tools. In this talk, I will focus on urban road
networks, which act as an urban substrate for social and economical developments
and control many aspects of our society — from disease spread to urban sprawl
and population growth. In this application, edges in the network correspond to
roads and nodes correspond to intersections. While the network itself is
essentially planar and low-dimensional, the way in which people travel on this
network is not. Understanding the relationship between network’s topology and
the organization of travel patterns be used to address open challenges in urban
transportation systems such as traffic congestions and accessibility. I will present an
analysis of the geometrical properties of fastest routes obtained from Google Maps
and how their effective geometry differs from shortest routes, which mostly follow the
underlying Euclidean geometry of the plane.

headshot_shai.jpg

Dr. Saray Shai is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wesleyan
University. She did her undergraduate study in Mathematics and Computer Science
at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and then worked as a software
engineer in an Israeli startup called Diligent. After a few years in a real
job, she went back to University and completed her PhD at the University of
St. Andrews, UK. Before coming to Wesleyan, she was a postdoc in the Department
of Mathematics at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in anything that has to do
with "networks", with a goal to develop mathematical and computational tools
and apply them to data analysis problems arising in a variety of contexts.

 

Resources for students 

We thank the following groups and individuals for their financial support: Academic Affairs, College of the Environment, individual departments, individual mentors, the McNair program, the Quantitative Analysis Center, the CIS Research in the Sciences program, WesMaSS, alumni donors: Joshua Boger, Shonni Silverberg, the Sonnenblick, Lacrosse and Siegal families.