Vanja Bogicevic, PhD Clinical Assistant Professor, Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality

Recently published two articles on the application of virtual reality in hospitality in tourism. 

• VR as a preamble experience - demonstrates that VR boosts experience with a hotel brand through an elevated sense of presence and more elaborate mental images in individuals' minds than photographs and 360 web-based tours.
• VR is so cool - examines the relationship between perceived coolness of VR and brand bonds, and demonstrates that VR and 360 tours enable hospitality brands to better connect with technology-innovative consumers (e.g., millennials, Gen-z).

She also has co-authored “Technological disruptions in services: lessons from tourism and hospitality,” which proposes how service experiences are disrupted by technological advancements, many of which are relevant for the value propositions of the Metaverse today. Her future projects will focus on exploring the boundary conditions that might influence when consumers would visit a destination in the Metaverse vs in person (e.g., educational vs. aesthetic experiences) and for what types of tourism activities would Metaverse experience substitute physical visit.

Annelise Finegan, PhD Clinical Assistant Professor, Academic Director MS in Translation and Interpreting, Center for Applied Liberal Arts

Interest lies in the interlingual and multilingual facets of emerging technologies, particularly NLP (natural language processing) and AI-driven translation with or without human expert-in-the-loop. In the MS in Translation and Interpreting program, students experience and experiment with machine translation engines, both their use and training, across multiple courses. 

Andrés Fortino, PhD Clinical Associate Professor, Project Management and Information Technology, Division of Programs in Business

Recently awarded the NYU SPS Dean’s Grant to study the local area network loading of Metaverse versus Zoom sessions. His research questions whether Metaverse sessions pose a more significant bandwidth. Students in his classes are undertaking a final group project of soliciting and analyzing NYU SPS student opinions about the University. MS in Management and Systems students worked on a Metaverse research capstone project last summer. His "Research Process and Methods" Fall 2022 class developed research proposals to convert their Metaverse business applications into concrete proof-of-concept proposals. 

Matthew Kwatinetz, PhD Clinical Assistant Professor, Real Estate Director of the Urban Lab, Schack Institute of Real Estate

Has been deeply involved in emerging technologies for the last two years, including the development of numerous virtual worlds for Burning Man’s BRCvr, and the use of virtual reality to model real estate developments and look at design changes virtually, prior to implementing them in real life.

He is interested in developing an emerging technologies component as a part of the NYU SPS Schack Institute of Real Estate Urban Lab and utilizing it as a way to:

• Host conferences across cities that can be more accessible due to not having cost of travel
• Document urban and rural development patterns to use in classes
• Enable development and planning efforts to look virtually at various interventions before implementing them
• Document and learn from anchor efforts, particularly of HBCUs