Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar featuring Yuhao Kang from the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday, June 4th from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PT. The seminar will be held in Electrical and Computer Engineering Building 125 – Campus Map.
“Human-centered Geospatial AI: Understanding Human Multi-Sensory Environmental Perceptions”
Abstract: The emergence of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) – the use of geographic knowledge and AI approaches to extract meaningful insights from large-scale geographic data – has achieved remarkable success not only in modeling physical geographic phenomena but also in advancing human subjective experiences at place. Prior studies often lack methods to measure how we perceive, experience, and interact with a particular location and environment. In this talk, Dr. Kang will present a series of works that utilize GeoAI to understand human experience and sense of place. First, by combining street view images and deep learning, his work delved into human subjective safety perceptions (e.g., whether a neighborhood is perceived as a safe place) to model human interactions. Second, Dr. Kang will introduce the Geo-contextual Soundscape to Landscape (GeoS2L) generation problem. To support this task, he will introduce SounDiT model which translates human auditory perceptions into visual representations for understanding the soundscape of place. In addition, two large-scale multimodal datasets are constructed, and a practice-informed Place Similarity Score evaluation framework is designed. Dr. Kang’s work demonstrate how human multi-sensory experiences can be linked to comprehensively understand human sense of place using AI, and highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of geography, urban planning, and AI.
Biography: Dr. Yuhao Kang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the GISense Lab. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and obtained his bachelor’s degree from Wuhan University. He also had working experience at USC, Google X, and MoBike. He was the founder of the non-profit educational organization GISphere that promotes global GIS education. 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. He has published over 50 articles on prestigious journals including IJGIS, CEUS, Landscape and Urban Planning, and PNAS, etc. He has served as the associate editor of the Computational Urban Science, the editorial board member of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. He was the recipient of the Waldo-Tobler Young Researcher Award by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, CaGIS Rising Award, CPGIS Education Excellence Award, etc.
The 2024-2025 seminars will be held in person, and are free and open to the public.