New York University, Center for Urban Science and Progress

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is a public-private planning, applied science, and engineering research center housed at New York University. Its goal is to bring the best available knowledge and techniques from a range of academic and technical disciplines to bear on the challenges of planning and governing cities. Projects often focus on new efforts to collect and use data from the urban environment to solve problems creatively, such as the “quantified neighborhood” sensor project at Hudson Yards. CUSP also trains urban data scientists through multiple graduate degree programs, and connects them to real-world policy experiments to give them experience and expose them to public sector employment opportunities. The grant supports the Civic Analytics Postgraduate Fellowship Program, which provides annual postgraduate fellowships to early-career urban science and informatics practitioners who are working with city agencies on high-impact, high-priority city analytics projects. The program is building a talent pipeline for urban analytics, delivering measurable impact for city agencies in New York City, and testing a model of collaborative engagement for city analytics projects that could be adapted in other cities.