Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

In the first decades of the twentieth century, accelerating urbanization and technological developments transformed the sound of the city. Rust’s dissertation explores the effects of this new and changing soundscape on composers and other artists working in sound during the period, including Edgard Varese, Dziga Vertov, Isaac Avraamov, and Charlie Chaplin. Using an acoustemological approach drawn from Steven Feld's work, Rust shows a close interplay between these artists' work and four sonic markers of urbanity: efficiency, movement, multilingualism, and social unrest. Varse is the central focus of this project, and Rust examines his unfinished multimedia project Espace, showing that many of its features grow out of the city, as do the problems that led to it remaining unfinished. For part of the composition element of his thesis, Rust will be creating an interactive installation that creates the imaginary soundscape of a fantastic, magical realist city using electronically transformed instrumental sounds. Having examined urban soundscapes for his written project, Rust intends to reconstruct them in this unfamiliar way to bring the audience's attention anew to the urban soundscapes they are accustomed to, re-aestheticizing what is normally regarded as inconvenient and unpleasant. For this artwork, Rust is keen to experience and reflect a broad range of urban experiences; he would invest time in Shanghai to developing this.

Many historians of modernism have argued that the technique of attention is a central category that dominates discussions on perception in science and art in Germany and Austria around 1900. While there have been major publications on the subject in art history, cultural studies and history of sciences, there has been little research on the transfer between sciences and literature. Bubacz’s dissertation, 'The Possibility of the Senses', analyzes the often-overlooked marginal writings of Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Musil in the context of the history of science in Austria. Investigating the diaries, notebooks, letters, and short prose of these two major Austrian authors, Bubacz plans to reconstruct their distinctive literary contribution to the discourse on perception and argue that their unparalleled examination of attention helped to challenge reductionist approaches especially in biology and psychology. Bubacz’s project thus tries to remedy the gap in the research on the history of attention by reconstructing the intertextual relations between science and the literary production in Austria. He plans to finish the last chapter of his dissertation during his time in Shanghai. Bubacz’s research is not directly connected to the site but relates to his work as a German language teacher. It is his goal as a language instructor to engage every student, often by contrasting German culture to their individual experience. While a GRI fellow in Shanghai, Bubacz hopes to broaden his understanding of different cultural backgrounds to better integrate the growing diversity in the classroom.

Andre Mendes da Silva’s work involves using machine learning to create recommendation systems that can be applied to different fields. One direct application is the hyper agent (http://julian.togelius.com/Mendes2016HyperHeuristic.pdf) that uses artificial intelligence to select subagents to play general video game competitions. Another field is people analytics where he develops recommendation systems that are able to improve different selection processes, such as job applications, turnover rate, and career paths. In his research, he has developed a framework that uses sub-neural networks to collect features from different types of data that include categorical, numerical, video, and audio. These features are ultimately combined and used as input for a hyper-neural network that is able to predict the chance of an applicant becoming a top manager or the chance that a talented employee will leave a company. While at NYU Shanghai da Silva plans to develop research and work with the renowned people in his field, such as professors Nan Cao, Zheng Zhang, and Keith Ross.

Existing research on educational inequality has largely focused on how students who lack the cultural capital that function in schools, fall behind. Fewer studies have examined how teachers may be intentionally or unintentionally evaluating students based on these dominant cultural norms. If beliefs matter for teacher practices and those practices have significant impacts on student outcomes, it is important to consider the ways in which educational environments can influence teachers, in not only the expectations they set, but also in the ways in which they evaluate their students. Using restricted data from large national probability education surveys and multi-level methods of analyses, Kim’s current research explores and expands upon research that looks at the influence of school composition on teachers’ evaluations of student academic effort and student outcomes. Understanding how and in what ways school structures may be influencing teacher behaviors is an important factor to consider in understanding educational inequality.