Phi Bui
PhD student, Urban Systems · Department of Civil, Urban, and Environmental Engineering · NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Advisor: Debra F. Laefer, Urban Modeling Group
Research
My thesis is Quantify, Standardize, Mitigate: Uncertainty in 3D Models of Urban Environments for Autonomous Decision-Making. Two scans of the same unchanged street disagree. The thesis measures that disagreement on city-scale repeat lidar, states what a survey at a given point density can and cannot see, and turns the result into a calibrated bound per asset that a planner, an inspector, or a runtime supervisor for a learned policy can act on. The work sits between measurement science and machine learning: error budgets for repeat aerial scans, probability-of-detection curves for infrastructure features, and bounded reporting for autonomous systems.
Before the PhD I spent a year at Cyvl building lidar and imagery pipelines for municipal road networks, an internship at the Air Force Research Laboratory on multi-agent reinforcement learning, and a master's at Tufts on human-robot interaction. The through-line is the same question: when a machine reports on the physical world, how far can the report be trusted, and does it say so.
Publications and presentations
State-Wise Constrained Policy Shaping for Zero-Shot Runtime Behavior Steering
Thomas Howell, Phi Bui, Robert McPherson, Vasanth Sarathy
AAAI-26 Workshop on AI Governance (AIGOV), Singapore, 2026. Oral presentation. Peer-reviewed workshop paper. The full-paper version, "State-Wise Constrained Policy Shaping for Runtime Normative Supervision," is under review at the AAAI-27 Main Technical Track and advanced to Phase 2 in September 2026.
Scoring Rules Certify Reporting, Not Seeking: A Dilemma for Level-Based Rewards in Sequential, Embodied Perception
Phi Bui
IROS 2026 Full-Shift Robot Co-Workers workshop, Pittsburgh, 2026. Poster. Non-archival workshop.
GailBot: A PyPI-Distributed Transcription Pipeline for Conversation-Analytic Research
Lab demonstration with Saul Albert, Umair Muhammad, J.P. de Ruiter
ICCA 2026 workshop "Using AI within CA Workflows," University of Alberta, 2026.
Manuscripts under review and in preparation are listed on the CV.
Honors and awards
- School of Engineering Ph.D. Fellowship, NYU Tandon School of Engineering · 2026. $95,119.
- Environmental Technology Lab (ETL) Challenge, NYC Department of Environmental Protection · 2026. Cyvl's winning submission, selected to the 2026 cohort.
- Honos Civicus Society, Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University · 2025. Inducted for civic impact through Untitled LLC.
- Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Computer Science Honor Society, WPI · 2021 to 2023. Inducted through the School of Arts and Sciences.
Experience
- School of Engineering Fellow, NYU Tandon · Aug 2026 to present. Research in the Urban Modeling Group, advised by Dr. Debra Laefer. Poster at the IROS 2026 Full-Shift Robot Co-Workers workshop.
- Full-Stack Software Engineer, Cyvl · Aug 2025 to Aug 2026. Production pipelines that turn petabyte-scale lidar and street-level imagery into digital twins of municipal infrastructure. Designed the AI ingestion pipeline behind the winning NYC DEP ETL Challenge submission. Indexed 500k+ street-level images per city for sub-second semantic search. Built Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers with City of Boston leadership, so civic staff can query infrastructure data in plain language. An internal assignment on calibrated confidence scoring grew into my doctoral research.
- Research Intern, AI Futures Collab, WPI · May to Sep 2025. Worked with Dr. Yunus Telliel on human-AI interfacing and literacy, and on the transparency and ethics of AI-driven media.
- Swarm Robotics AI Research Intern, Air Force Research Laboratory · May to Aug 2025, Eglin AFB. Multi-agent reinforcement learning for swarm coordination under communication constraints.
- Graduate Research Assistant, Human Interaction Lab, Tufts University · Jan to May 2025. Lead engineer of the back-end team for GailBot, a Docker-based, plugin-driven transcription pipeline for conversation-analytic research. Presented GailBot at ICCA 2026.
- Full-Stack Software Engineer, enLabel · Jan 2024 to Jan 2025. React and TypeScript front end over an ASP.NET API. Resolved 50+ bugs and tickets in legacy code.
- Website Developer, ProsperOn · Jun 2023 to Feb 2024. Financial-simulation web pages in React and TypeScript.
Projects and code
- Gestalt · Independent project, 2026. Local search over Markdown notes for Claude Code and Cursor: stella_en_400M_v5 dense vectors in SQLite, BM25 as the lexical fallback, and an optional Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B rerank. nDCG@10 of 0.794 on BEIR SciFact, 0.422 on NFCorpus and 0.572 on FiQA, with 95% bootstrap intervals and paired permutation tests. Apache-2.0, with a one-command rerun and a Zenodo DOI.
- civic-honesty-benchmark · a 596-question live-data benchmark of language-model agents over NYC street-pavement open data. Gold answers are recomputed against the live API.
- LLMs Can Be Judgy Too · Tufts, Dec 2024 to May 2025. A PPO framework that uses a fine-tuned LLM as a proxy human reward for generating facial expressions. The hybrid of LLM and human feedback matched the LLM-only accuracy with 32% less variance.
- Caption Enrichment for Neurodivergent Users · Tufts, Jan to May 2025. A real-time captioning extension with a quantized Mistral-7B model that adds tone, sentiment, and intent. Under 200 ms latency, over 95% word accuracy, and two pilot studies.
- Sphero swarm navigation · Tufts, Sep to Dec 2024. Overhead-camera Monte Carlo localization and probabilistic roadmaps for Sphero Bolt swarms. A follow-on study compared manual and autonomous control, and users preferred manual control.
- Worcester PermitPro · WPI Major Qualifying Project, Aug to Dec 2023. An AI-assisted land-acquisition platform built with the City of Worcester, now part of its low-income housing development pipeline.
Education
- PhD in Urban Systems · New York University Tandon School of Engineering, 2026 to present. School of Engineering PhD Fellowship. Thesis: Quantify, Standardize, Mitigate: Uncertainty in 3D Models of Urban Environments for Autonomous Decision-Making.
- M.S. in Computer Science, Human-Robot Interaction · Tufts University, 2025.
- B.S. in Computer Science, with distinction · Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2023.
Teaching and Service
- Instructor, "Infrastructure Intelligence" sessions, Public Innovation Institute × Cyvl summer program, 2025 to 2026.
- Co-founder and Chief Logistics Officer, Untitled LLC, a Boston arts collective, 2023 to 2026.
- Freelance front-end developer and educator for local artists, 2023 to present.