I am currently a City and Regional Planning PhD at Georgia Institute of Technology. I work with Dr. Clio Andris at Friendly Cities Lab. My research broadly sit in the realm of urban analytics. More specifically, I study spatial and social networks on various spatial scales: 1) how human activities or cities are organized spatially and socially from network perspectives, and 2) how built environment and point of interests support/suppress human connections in contentious urban space. 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 dissertation focuses on understanding the costs, tradeoffs, and impacts of material (built environment) infrastructure of spatial and social connectivity in city. I ask what kinds of connectivity are prioritized or supported (by infrastructure), for whom, at what cost, and what can planners do in actions to amplify/mitigate the impacts. While connectivity is the key to a place’s influence and growth, it also encodes inequality and exclusion.
Download my resumé .
- Spatial Social Networks
- Urban Analytics (GIS, Machine Learning, Agent-based Modeling, etc.)
- Digital Civics, Critical Data/GIS, Participatory and Collaborative Planning
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
🙌 [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. Travel support is available. Apply here.
🙌 [New!] I am proud to support my lab’s first Atlanta Environment Data + Mapping Hackathon (Feb 18th, 2023)!
🔈 [New!] 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).
📚 [New!] I have defended my dissertation proposal Connectivity for whom and at what cost: Contesting network infrastructure duality in urban planning (Dec 15th, 2022)!
🔈 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).
🔈 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).
🔈 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.
🔈 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).
💰 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).
🙌 I was a member of the organizing team of the 3rd workshop of Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping: Harnessing Human-Machine Intelligence for High-Stake Public Policy and Resilience Planning. The workshop was part of ACM KDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Hybrid Conference on Aug 15, 2022. Download Workshop proceeding PDF.
📄 My new paper with collaborators titled Characteristics of Jetters and Little Boxes: An Extensibility Study Using the Neighborhood Connectivity Survey (PDF) is published in Social Inclusion’s special issue “on the interplay of space, places, and social networks”. (July, 2022). This work was presented at North American Regional Science Conference (NARSC) in Nov, 2020.
Recent Publications
Projects
