The world's urban population is growing -- leaving cities to face a variety of challenges, ranging from environmental pollution to providing community health to safety. This doctoral seminar course focuses on understanding and undertaking urban challenges using computing technologies. Cities and their residents produce large scale traces of data including communication data, social proximity data, or mobility data. This course covers three major areas on (1) understanding how these traces are generated, managed, and processed; (2) how they can be modeled to address urban challenges; and (3) what are the ethical issues associated with it. This is a project-based, hands-on course which involves applying solutions from state-of-the-art literature to address a real-world problem. A number of guest lectures will provide additional perspectives to the discussions of the class.