Scaffolds, also called sidewalk sheds, are intended to be temporary structures to protect pedestrians from construction and repair hazards. However, some sidewalk sheds are left up for years; this trend recently motivated New York City’s mayor to issue a "Get Sheds Down" plan. We use computer vision to develop a longitudinal map of scaffolding, using a dataset of 29,156,833 dashcam images recorded between August 2023 and January 2024 in NYC. We develop an algorithm to track scaffolding presence over time and match detected scaffolds to reported permit locations, identifying 850,766 images of scaffolding, tagging 5,156 active sidewalk sheds, and estimating 529 unpermitted sheds.
@incollection{shapira2025fingerprinting,title={Fingerprinting {NYC}'s Scaffolding Problem with Longitudinal Dashcam Data},author={Shapira, Dorin and Franchi, Matt and Ju, Wendy},booktitle={Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM)},series={Digital-Era Urban Transformations},publisher={Springer Nature},year={2025},url={https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-98300-9_10},doi={10.1007/978-3-031-98300-9_10},}
2024
Optimization of the Ultrasonic Dynamics and Kinematics for a Micron-Scale Accurate Ultrasonic Transducer
Dorin Shapira, and Izhak Bucher
Proceedings of ISMA 2024 – International Conference on Noise and Vibration Engineering, 2024
@inproceedings{shapira2024ultrasonic,title={Optimization of the Ultrasonic Dynamics and Kinematics for a Micron-Scale Accurate Ultrasonic Transducer},author={Shapira, Dorin and Bucher, Izhak},booktitle={Proceedings of ISMA 2024 -- International Conference on Noise and Vibration Engineering},address={Leuven, Belgium},year={2024},}