URBAN AGILITY - Key Persons
Dr Wang's interdisciplinary research concerns urban resilience and safety, uniquely standing at the nexus of urban planning, civil engineering, and Artificial Intelligence. She studies Human Activity and Engineered Systems in response to different types of extreme weather and climate events, as well as public health hazards including pandemics. As one of the founding faculty of the FIBER and the leadership team for the new Urban Analytics programs at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at DCP, her research, teaching, and service contribute to both the built environment resilience and AI initiatives significantly. She develops cutting-edge AI-based data analytical and geo-visualization techniques to detect crises, assess damage, and coordinate urban safety. She also studies complex interactions between information, human behaviors, and built environments under extreme events to guide equitable risk communication, combat misinformation, and disseminate targeted warnings. Her research also understands and models urban population behavior dynamics to inform resilient and adaptive urban design and planning in preparation for extreme events and disruptive urban technologies.
Fang is a graduated PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning, and she also pursued her master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on urban computing and land use modeling using machine learning techniques, especially natural language processing methods. She is an expert in Geographic Information System and python programming. She also has rich experience in data analysis and visualization. Fang enjoys traveling in her spare time.
Goshtasb Shahriari-Mehr is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He received his Bachelor's degree in Civil Eng. With the specialization of Geomatics from K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. He earned his MSc. degree in Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) from the University of Tehran. His previous research interests included Location-based Services, Recommender System, Mobility Analysis, etc. He is interested in pursuing his research in the field of transportation planning and spatiotemporal analysis.
Haiyan is a PhD student in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. After earning her master degree in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech, she worked for Virginia Tech Transportation Institute as a research assistant. Her previous research experiences include data analysis using statistical and machine learning methods, GIS spatial analysis, transportation safety research, etc. Her current research interests include human mobility and sentiment, real-time urban events prediction, urban-scale multi-modal data analysis. In her spare time, she enjoys table games, manga and travel.
Lian is currently a MURP degree candidate at the University of Florida with an interest in brownfield/infill development and resilience-building. Prior to attending the University of Florida, Lian obtained a Bachelors of Arts in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, and served as Sustainability Administrator for the City of North Miami for approximately two years. In her free time, Lian enjoys cycling, running, and painting.
Silas is a master's student in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program at the University of Florida. He obtained his Bachelor's in Human Settlement Planning at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi. While in Ghana, he worked in the GIS unit of the Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority. He currently works on a NASA/USAID funded project with a team of researchers from UF on the Ghana Land Use Project (GALUP). Silas is interested in pursuing his research in land use modelling and smart city development. He enjoys watching and playing soccer and basketball.