Xiaofan Liang

Xiaofan Liang

City and Regional Planning PhD

Georgia Institute of Technology

I am a City and Regional Planning PhD Candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Dr. Clio Andris at Friendly Cities Lab. I will be an Assistant Professor of Urban Data and Technology at Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, starting January 2024. My research interests are to support social life in cities and participatory/collaborative processes in planning through urban analytics. My approaches are largely inspired by the field of network science, complex system, and critical & participatory approaches in GIS and planning, and therefore ground my research in the pursuit of authentic human connections and social inclusion in cities.

My past work studied social infrastructure in cities, such as restaurants, and the social and economic impacts of spatial social networks. My current work focuses on two themes: “Critical Connectivity,” which examines how urban infrastructure supports or hinders spatial social networks in cities, and “Participatory AI,” which explores how AI (i.e., anything driven by data and technology) can support, transform, or challenge participatory practices in planning.

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Interests
  • Spatial Social Networks
  • Urban Analytics (GIS, Machine Learning, Agent-based Modeling, etc.)
  • Digital Civics, Critical Data/GIS, Participatory and Collaborative Planning
Education
  • MCRP/PhD in City and Regional Planning, 2019-2023

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • BS in Computational Science, 2015-2019

    Minerva University

  • BA in Sociology, 2013-2015

    University of California - Berkeley

News

πŸ™Œ [New!] My lab Friendly Cities Lab is organizing a spatial social network workshop in Atlanta from May 18 to May 19! I will proudly present the R package and R tutorial I developed on SSN metrics and visualization in R. See workshop details here. Check out our SNOMAN (Social Network Mapping Nexus) website for more on-going work and SSN paper collection!

πŸ”ˆ [New!] I will be a panel speaker at the event Geography According to ChatGPT. Register the event here. I will share my exploration of ChatGPT’s performance at spatial social network reasoning and visualization (May 4th, 2023).

πŸ† [New!] I was awarded the Professional Excellence Award by Georgia Tech School of City and Regional Planning! (April 26th, 2023)

πŸ“„ [New!] My new paper with collaborators titled Is your neighbor your friend? Scan methods for spatial social network hotspot detection is published in Transactions in GIS for early view! You can replicate the methods in this paper through SSNtools R package and R tutorial (more in-progress) (April 23th, 2023).

πŸ’° [New!] I was awarded the 2023 ACSP Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship ($800) to support the writing and publication of my dissertation project Capturing the Social Impact of Demolishing a Historic Street for a New Subway Station: Evidence from a Participatory GIS Survey in Guangzhou, China (March 30th, 2023)!

πŸ”ˆ I organized the Participatory AI session at AAG 2023 with Prof. Renee Sieber, Prof. Xinyue Ye, and PhD Jiaxin Du. The session explored how AI can support or even transform traditional participatory practices, which includes public consultation, decision support, stakeholder engagement, and up to citizen control. I presented my research of human-in-the-loop machine learning (March 26th, 2023)!

πŸ™Œ I am proud to support my lab’s first Atlanta Environment Data + Mapping Hackathon (Feb 18th, 2023)!

πŸ”ˆ I gave a guest lecture titled “Spatial Social Networks Application in PPGIS” at University of Waterloo “GEOG-609 GIS and Spatial Decision Support for Planning and Resource Management” (Feb 14th, 2023).

πŸ“š I have defended my dissertation proposal Connectivity for whom and at what cost: Contesting network infrastructure duality in urban planning (Dec 15th, 2022)!

πŸ”ˆ I was invited by prof. Xiang ‘Jacob’ Yan to give a guest lecture titled “Spatial Networks Application in Transportation Planning” at his class “Applied Data Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering” at University of Florida. The lecture will feature my publication A Review of Spatial Network Insights and Methods in the Context of Planning: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities and my dissertation projects using network analytics to examine the role of airport and metro stations (Dec 1st, 2022).

πŸ”ˆ I presented my dissertation project Capturing the Social Impact of Demolishing a Historic Street for a New Subway Station: Evidence from a Participatory GIS Survey in Guangzhou, China at ACSP 2022 conference in Toronto (Nov 3rd, 2022).

πŸ”ˆ I was invited to Dr. Andrew L. Tan Data Science Institute at De La Salle University (Philippines) to give a seminar talk about Detecting Vacant, Abandoned, and Disinvested (VAD) Properties in Savannah, Georgia using Human-in-the-loop Machine Learning Oct 12, 2022 09:00 AM in Asia/Manila. Register the talk here.

πŸ”ˆ My and Clio’s research on chain restaurants was featured by the Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, FiveThirtyEight, and Georgia Public Broadcasting. We released a 2021 restaurant dataset and I created a Mapbox JS data viz for exploration (Oct 1st, 2022).

πŸ’° I was awarded $12,000 The ACRP (Airport Cooperative Research Program) Graduate Research Award for the project Toward an Inclusive Aerotropolis: Critical Connectivity Analysis around Atlanta Airport, in collaboration with Prof. Perry Yang and Aerotropolis Atlanta. (Aug 1st, 2022)

✈️ I was a visiting scholar at Urban Analytics Lab (National University of Singapore) this summer 2022 (May - July 2022).

Recent Publications

(2023). Is Your Neighbor Your Friend? Scan Methods for Spatial Social Network (SSN) Hotspot Detection. Transactions in GIS, 27(3), 607-625.

PDF Cite Project DOI Tutorial R package

(2022). Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping and Policymaking: Toward Planetary-Scale Resilience, Equity, and Sustainability. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’22), August 14–18, 2022, Washington, DC, USA (Workshop Summary).

PDF Cite Project DOI Workshop Website

(2022). Characteristics of Jetters and Little Boxes: An Extensibility Study Using the Neighborhood Connectivity Survey. Social Inclusion, 10(3).

PDF Cite Project DOI

(2021). A Review of Spatial Network Insights and Methods in the Context of Planning: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities. In book: Urban Informatics and Future Cities (pp.71-91).

PDF Cite Project DOI Slides

(2021). Measuring McCities: Landscapes of chain and independent restaurants in the United States. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 49(2), 585-602.

PDF Cite Project DOI Data Interactive Map

(2021). Systematic shifts in scaling behavior based on organizational strategy in universities. PloS one, 16 (10), e0254582.

PDF Cite Project DOI News

Projects

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Place social diversity explorer
A D3 explorer to show the racial and income diversity of people visiting point of interests (POI) in Atlanta. What kinds of POI are most/least diverse and where do they locate?
Place social diversity explorer
Detecting vacant, abandoned, and disinvested properties in Savannah Georgia through human-in-the-loop machine learning
What are the main factors that are predictive of blighted properties in the city of Savannah? How can we build a predictive model with housing experts’ local knowledge “in the loop”?
Detecting vacant, abandoned, and disinvested properties in Savannah Georgia through human-in-the-loop machine learning
Measuring McCities: Landscapes of chain and independent restaurants in the United States
Which cities most resemble McCities? What kinds of built environment and sociodemographic characteristics are associated with the prevelance of chain restaurants?
Measuring McCities: Landscapes of chain and independent restaurants in the United States
Systematic shifts in scaling behavior based on organizational strategy in universities
Some colleges are mammals, others are cities. How scale of universities affect factors like tuition, research production, and teaching salaries? What are the tradeoffs and constraints for universities to be scale efficiently?
Systematic shifts in scaling behavior based on organizational strategy in universities