SDS Lab Research Featured at Congressional Testimony
A written statement on research conducted by the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory at Northeastern University (SDS Lab) led by Auroop Ganguly, distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering, was featured at the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Border Management, Federal Workforce and Regulatory Affairs, as part of a Congressional testimony presented on June 10, 2025. As part of a Congressional testimony, the subcommittee examines and assesses government operations related to border security, the federal workforce, and regulatory affairs to inform policy.
The written testimony, titled “Terrorist Threats to International Sporting Events: A Look at Tactics, Threat Actors, and Targets,” was delivered on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence, including Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality (SENTRY), a multi-institutional research center led by Northeastern University. Michael Silevitch, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, is principal investigator of SENTRY.
The SDS lab’s work that was cited is as follows:
“In addition, given the Paris 2024 rail network attacks, protecting our internal transportation infrastructure is paramount. SENTRY has developed an AI-driven network risk modeling and simulation tool that was being piloted to make resource allocations for rail infrastructure [82].”
Reference [82] cites a paper and an open-access video from the SDS Lab.
The paper is, [82] Jack R. Watson, Samrat Chatterjee, Auroop Ganguly, “Resilience of Urban Rail Transit Networks under Compound Natural and Opportunistic Failures,” 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST) (Boston, USA, 2022): pp. 1-8.
The video is, “Threat Deterrence in Soft Urban Transport Targets with Network Science and Machine Learning,” (April 28, 2025).
The cited paper and video feature Ganguly, along with Sam Chatterjee, CEE affiliated professor at Northeastern and chief data scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab, as well as the following SDS Lab members: MS student Orijeet Mukherjee, PhD student Jack Watson, Postdoc Dongqin Zhou (at the Institute for Experiential AI and the Roux Institute), and Data Scientists (based at the Roux Institute) Soumyo Dey and Kartik Aggarwal.