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113 Collegiate Loop, Tallahassee, FL

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Urban areas are the major places of human-environment interaction. With only 2% of world’s land mass, urban areas are home to more than 50% of world population, consume more than 70% of global energy, and create more than 80% of greenhouse emissions. Studying how to make urban areas more sustainable is of great importance to humanity. Geospatial data science, which is a subset of data science, focuses on time-based spatial data that is related to a specific location on the Earth's surface, provides a powerful tool for sustainability studies. Through Earth-observation, we can monitor and analyze the spatial distributions of geographical phenomena. Using geospatial analytics, we can understand and answer where and why things happen there. Powered by high-performance geocomputing, we can examine and simulate the complex interactions in social-environment system at fine level through modeling and computing. In this talk, Dr. Xiojiang Li will talk about parts of his work on geospatial data science for urban green space mapping, super high-resolution urban heat exposure modeling, and urban social-environmental analyses in major US cities.

 

Dr. Li is an Assistant Professor of Urban Spatial Analytics at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Senseable City Lab at MIT. His research focuses on Urban Analytics, Geospatial Data Science, Urban Resilience to Climate Change, Landscape and Environmental Planning, and Urban Environmental Health. He has proposed using Google Street View and machine learning for urban landscape studies and developed the Treepedia project, which aims to map and quantify streetscapes for cities around the world. He also works on using GeoAI, urban analytics, and urban microclimate modeling with the support of NSF, NASA, and the Microsoft AI for Earth Grant to investigate the impacts of extreme heat on pedestrians and heat vulnerability across different neighborhoods and racial/ethnic groups. His research aims to provide a better understanding of urban socio-environmental systems and explore how data, science, design, and planning help us to tackle socio-environmental challenges. He was selected as one of the 50 Rising Stars by Geospatial World and was awarded the Global Young Scientist Award at the World Geospatial Developers Conference in 2021. His work has been featured in popular media outlets including TIME, Scientific American, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Guardian, Wired, and more.

 

This event will be followed by a no-host social hour at Proof at the FSU Student Union.

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