Matt Franchi
I am a third-year Computer Science PhD Candidate at Cornell University. I study at Cornell's New York City campus, Cornell Tech. Before that, I was an undergraduate student at Clemson University, where I completed a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (during the pandemic, unfortunately). I am also a research fellow at Hayden AI Technologies. My research is supported by the Cornell Dean's Excellence Fellowship and the Digital Life Initiative Doctoral Fellowship.
My research interests include urban data science; computational social science, particularly in issues pertaining to societal inequality; fashion & design; and computer vision towards urban sensing. My research has been published in the New York Times, The Economist, Gothamist, and other local NYC news outlets.
I play classical and neoclassical piano music, and write my own 'peaceful piano' compositions since 2020.
Selected Work
- The New York Times
Think N.Y.C.’s Roads Are Crowded? Good Luck on the Sidewalks.
- ACM AutoUI '24 [Best Paper Honorable Mention]
Towards Instrumented Fingerprinting of Urban Traffic: A Novel Methodology using Distributed Mobile Point-of-View Cameras
- The Economist
New York City is covered in illegal scaffolding
- ACM FAccT '23
Detecting disparities in police deployments using dashcam data
Writing
Estimating the Perceived 'Claustrophobia' of New York City's Streets
Published: at 03:30 AMNew York City is a large place; almost 469 square miles of pretty dense civilization. Within the city, there are thousands of miles of sidewalks. As you walk through different neighborhoods, you may experience a variety of different atmospheres. In Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, it's quaint and quiet. In SoHo these days, there are so many pedestrians that they spill off the narrow sidewalks. While a neighborhood's atmosphere is, of course, a function of time, it is possible to get an average consensus of how 'crowded' each neighborhood feels by averaging over time. When we say 'crowded', we mean not just with people; we also mean with static objects, or street furniture, or, to get even more colloquial, 'clutter'. When we mix 'crowdedness' within the narrow environment of NYC's sidewalks, we endeavor to call this feeling 'claustrophobia', a direct mapping to the definition in psychology.
Winter's Best, '23
Published: at 03:30 AMMy favorite sonic finds from the winter of 2023.
Is the English Alphabet at its Brim?
Published: at 03:30 AMI investigate the extent to which 3 and 4 letter combinations are populated by online search results, in an attempt to find underutilized words (or, at least, pronounceable letter combinations.)