Research Seminar Series: Yuhao Kang
NYU CUSP is pleased to host our annual Research Seminar Series, featuring leading voices in the growing field of urban informatics. The seminars will examine real-world challenges facing cities and urban environments around the world, with topics ranging from citizen and social sciences to smart infrastructure.
Measuring Safety Perceptions of Neighborhoods with Human-centered Geospatial Data Science
In recent years, Geospatial Data Science – the use of geographic knowledge and AI approaches to extract meaningful insights from large-scale geographic data – has achieved remarkable success in spatial knowledge discovery and reasoning, and geographic phenomena modeling. However, two challenges remain in geospatial data science: (1) geographic phenomena are always treated as functions of a set of physical settings, but human experience has received insufficient attention; (2) there are limited strategies to focus on and address geoethical issues. In this talk, Dr. Kang will present a series of works that utilized geospatial data science to understand human experience and sense of place. In particular, using large-scale street view images, social media data, human mobility data, and advanced GeoAI approaches, he measured and analyzed human subjective safety perceptions (e.g., whether a neighborhood is perceived as a safe place), and emotions (e.g., happiness) at places, as well as human-environment relationships. Also, his work paid attention on geoethical issues such as monitoring perception bias and model bias and protecting geoprivacy.
About the Speaker
Dr. Yuhao Kang is an assistant professor in GIScience leading the GISense Lab at the University of South Carolina. He was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had working experience at Google X and MoBike. Dr. Kang’s research mainly focuses on Human-centered Geospatial Data Science to understand human experience at place and develop ethical and responsible geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) approaches. By leveraging human-centered geospatial data science, Dr. Kang explores various applications such as public health, real estate, crime, to inform decision-making processes in urban planning. He is the author of 40+ publications with 1900+ Google Scholar citations on journals and conferences in GIS and Urban Studies. He was the recipient for several fellowships and awards, including the Young Researcher Award by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, CaGIS Rising Award, CaGIS scholarship, ICA scholarship, etc. He actively contributed to the GIScience community. He founded the non-profit global education project GISphere with over 20,000 members, served as the associate editor of Computational Urban Science, and board members for the AAG GISS/CyberGIS/Cartography groups and CPGIS.