Statement on Lerone Savage’s unauthorized use of our project information for his thesis entitled “Travel Mode Detection in New York City Using Smartphones and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)”

Hongmian Gong, Ph.D.

Professor of Geography and Environmental Science

Hunter College of City University of New York

I worked with Mr. Evan Bialostozky, then a Master student at Hunter College geography department doing his thesis with me, to development a mode detection algorithm, written in VBA and runs in desktop ArcGIS.  Together with my other research team members, we prepared a series of research reports since 2008 and published two peer-reviewed articles in 2010 and 2012.

I hired Mr. Taylor Oshan (then a Master student at Hunter College geography department) and worked with him for almost a year to convert the mode detection algorithm from VBA to Python and moved it from desktop ArcGIS to ArcGIS enterprise in Amazon Cloud. 

Meantime, I hired Mr. Simin You, then a PhD candidate in computer science at City College of CUNY under the supervision of Dr. Jianting Zhang, to modify an open-source google Android App to send GPS and accelerometer data to our Amazon cloud server and, after the calculation from the mode detection algorithm, send the results back to Android app.  We also built a Web GIS to display and verify mode detection results (project report available at http://www.utrc2.org/sites/default/files/pubs/FinalReportGPSData.pdf since August 2012).

When Taylor graduated in 2013, I invited Dr. Carson Farmer to join the research project to fix some issues in the existing mode detection algorithm.  He agreed to join at first, so Mr. Oshan and I spent an afternoon providing Dr. Farmer all the project information and what needs to be fixed.  However, Dr. Farmer changed his mind the next day and decided not to join our project.  He has a conflict of interest in approving Mr. Savage’s thesis on the same research.

I then obtained professional service from the GIS center at Eastern Michigan University and worked with Mr. Rolland Xiaolin Luo to fix the issues in July 2013 and to provide more technical support in September 2014 for our project of using smartphone app/cloud computing/mode detection for a survey at Queens College (http://www.utrc2.org/research/projects/environmentally-sustainable-and-healthy-transportation).   

I presented some of our research in a presentation in May, 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4i2sjWM7No&feature=youtu.be)

By the time I hired Mr. Lerone Savage in September 2014 to improve our mode detection algorithm under an agreement (see Agreement), we already had a framework that incorporates smartphone app, GPS and accelerometer data, mode detection algorithm in Python, Web GIS, cloud computing, multimodal transportation network, network analysis, real time and scheduled calculation.  However, Mr. Savage writes about our ideas, datasets, diagram, and python code in his thesis as his methodology and achievement, without my written consent and against our agreement.

In particular, Mr. Savage claims his “addition to the code involves … and developing the Network Analyst section so that it would fit within the large framework of this study.” (Page 34, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/231/) However, we had incorporated network analyst into our mode detection algorithm in February 2013 (see Network Analyst Incorporated), before Mr. Savage was hired to improve the algorithm.  When Mr. Savage could not publish his code in ArcGIS and failed to connect his mode detection algorithm to our framework in 2017, I made our previous algorithm (with the network analyst) working again and asked Mr. Savage to use the same parameters to make his algorithm work. 

I advised him to add a flow chart to show his mode detection steps, pointing to our diagram (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4i2sjWM7No&feature=youtu.be video 19:30/22:33) as an example of using black and white line and boxes for the flowchart, he directly copied and pasted our diagram into his thesis submitted on April 14, 2017.  I made comment to him on April 19 that he should not just copy and paste our diagram, he submitted to me a thesis with the same diagram again on April 20.

Mr. Savage removed his mode detection algorithm from our cloud server and complained about me to Hunter College on April 24, 2017 to cut me out of his thesis review and approving process.

Without my consent, Mr. Savage still uses our diagram as his Figure 2, making only small changes.

Mr. Savage misinterprets our NSAT variable in his thesis as the number of satellites in view during time of GPS recording and has values of 0, -1, and -2.  This is even against common sense.

I had to find other research assistants in to redo some of the work I paid Mr. Savage to do since September 2014 in order for another graduate student Mr. Paul Rivers to conduct his thesis research (https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/456/).

Deeply troubled by Mr. Savage’s misappropriation of our years of work at considerable costs, I filed a lawsuit against him in the state court (Index No. 656146/2018) and federal court (Gong v. Savage, 1:23-cv-07355). His thesis has been withdrawn from the Hunter College thesis website.