People It has been my great pleasure to work with my students and collaborators, whose passion and dedication to their interests continually inspire me. I am proud of their achievements. Faculty: Dr. Yuhao Kang Lab members: Ph.D. students: Haofeng Tan, Hanqi Li, Xihan Yao, Somang Kim Undergraduate students: Andy Qin, Fredrick Behmer, Marchesa Cook, Arnav Mehta, Maanya Chugh, Aryan Jalota, Enoch Lee, Harini Champooranan, Oscar Friend, Diya Pyata, Rithvik Chintha Collaborators: Junbo Wang, Jisun Lee, Bowen Liao Alumni: Koichi Ito, Michael Holfold, Xingyu Fang, Bangzhao Shu, Mathis Spanneut, Albert Jiang, Suhana Challa If you would like to join the GISense Lab, please contact us via gisenselab@outlook.com! Faculty Dr. Yuhao Kang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor, directing the GISense Lab at the Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, received his Ph.D. from the GeoDS Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and obtained his bachelor’s degree from Wuhan University. Before joining UT, he had working experience at the University of South Carolina, Google X, and MoBike. He was the founder of the non-profit educational organization GISphere that summarizes global GIS programs and faculty. Dr. Kang’s research mainly focuses on Human-centered GeoAI and Geospatial Data Science to understand how human see, hear, and experience at place, and develop ethical and responsible GeoAI approaches. 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. Lab Members My name is Haofeng Tan. I am a Ph.D. student in GIScience at the Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, co-supervised by Prof. Susan Wang and Prof. Yuhao Kang. My current research interests mainly focus on exploring human perceptions, emotions, and cognition of places through advanced GeoAI methods, especially Generative AI. I majored in Cartography and Geographic Information System for my master’s degree at Wuhan University and Geoinformatics for my bachelor’s degree at Chongqing University. My name is Hanqi Li. I am a Ph.D. student in Geography and Environmental Studies at the Department of Geography & Anthropology, as well as a master’s student in Applied Statistics in the Department of Experimental Statistics at Louisiana State University. My primary research interest is interdisciplinary research in health and GIS. My current research focuses on spatial disaggregation of health data and spatial optimization of healthcare resources. I earned my master’s degree in GIS from Wuhan University. Xihan Yao is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on integrating high-resolution GIS and remote sensing data to analyze the built environment and applying GeoAI to advance the understanding of human–environment interactions. He earned a Master’s degree in Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor’s degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. My name is Somang Kim. I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. I am passionate about addressing urban challenges through GeoAI, emphasizing human–environment relationships in places, and contributing to the creation of safe and sustainable cities. Currently, I am working on integrating human brain activity and generative AI to explore people’s geographic imagination. I earned my B.A. and M.A. in Geography from Ewha Womans University. Andy Qin is an undergraduate student studying Computer Science and Business through the Texas CSB Honors Program at UT Austin. He is currently working on using reinforcement learning to optimize healthcare landscapes. My name is Maanya Chugh and I am a junior from New Jersey at The University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a B.S. in Information Technology with a specialization in Human-Centered Data Science. I am currently working on AI-driven urban safety research, developing multimodal models that integrate soundscapes, visual data, and geospatial analysis to explore how people perceive safety in different environments. My research background includes building AI agents and automating large-scale data pipelines. Beyond the lab, I have interned in enterprise AI governance and audit analytics, contributed to ethical technology initiatives, and published work on algorithmic fairness. My broader interests lie at the intersection of geospatial AI, human-centered design, and ethical innovation. My name is Aryan Jalota and I am an undergraduate student at The University of Texas at Austin pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Statistics. I am currently working in the GISense Lab on multimodal GeoAI research, developing models that integrate visual, auditory, and geospatial data to better understand how people perceive and experience places. My work includes structuring large-scale datasets, reproducing and training baseline models, and contributing to multimodal encoder development for perception-focused tasks. I also support the Sound2Image project by building a user study platform for perceptual evaluation and scalable data collection. My name is Enoch Lee, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin studying Economics and Data Science. I am passionate about applying computer vision and deep learning to improve autonomous vehicle perception, humanoid robot intelligence, and urban traffic safety. Currently, I am working on fine-tuning a vision language model (VLM) on street view images to evaluate pedestrian safety and identify environmental risk factors in urban spaces. My name is Diya Pyata, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a B.S. in Neuroscience and a minor in Statistics and Data Science. As a member of the GISense Lab, I am utilizing fMRI to investigate how people perceive safety in public spaces, specifically focusing on Street-View Based Safety Ratings. My work on this study is funded by the Undergraduate Research Fellowship. I am also working on fine-tuning deep learning architectures and synthesizing computational neuroscience literature to optimize neural dataset performance. My research interests lie in leveraging neuroimaging and data science to decode how the physical environment shapes human perception and cognition. Beyond the lab, I serve as a mentor for the EvoDevOmics FRI Program, where I lead transcriptomic data analysis. My name is Rithvik Chintha, and I am an undergraduate student at The University of Texas at Austin pursuing a B.S.A. in Neuroscience with a certificate in Elements of Computing. As a member of the GISense Lab, I use fMRI data to investigate how individuals perceive their surrounding environments. I design experiments using PsychoPy and conduct literature reviews to evaluate and refine existing methodologies in this area. My research interests focus on applying computational techniques to decode neuroimaging data and better understand how the human brain processes environmental information. Collaborators Junbo is a first-year M.S. student in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Currently, He is a member of the GRIND Lab (Geospatial Responsible AI for Nature–Human Dynamics Lab) and the GISense Lab (Geospatial Intelligent Sensing and Mapping Lab). His interests lie in GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence), with an emphasis on building foundation models and investigating their applications in natural hazard/disaster studies and human-centered representations of environmental perception. Ji Sun is a second year M.S. student at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), specializing in spatial data analysis and urban policy. As a visiting scholar (2025) at GISense Lab, she focused on analyzing accessibility to maternal healthcare facilities in Texas. Bowen is a second-year M.A. student in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, affiliated with the CICI Lab and the GISense Lab. His research focuses on urban acoustic environments, with a particular emphasis on spatial and socioeconomic inequalities in everyday sound experiences. Integrating soundscape science, environmental justice theory, and AI-enabled acoustic sensing, his work examines how the quality of involuntary sound exposure is distributed unevenly across urban populations, and what these patterns reveal about experiential dimensions of urban life that conventional planning metrics overlook. Alumni Koichi Ito is a Ph.D. candidate at the Urban Analytics Lab at the National University of Singapore, where he researches how the built environment influences active mobility behaviors. His work focuses on analyzing street view imagery, for which he developed the Python package ZenSVI. He holds a Master of Urban Planning from the National University of Singapore and a Bachelor of Arts from Soka University of America. My name is Mathis Spanneut, and I am a sophomore from Boise, Idaho, studying Environmental Science at UT Austin with a certificate in Elements of Computing. I am passionate about applying data science and technology to address environmental challenges. Currently, I’m working on AI modeling research that connects soundscapes to geographic locations, using Python and spatial datasets to train AI models that create visualizations of places based on auditory data. Albert Jiang is a student at UT Austin studying Computer Science as part of the Turing Scholar Honors Program. He is interested in applying deep learning techniques to solve problems in urban and rural planning. Outside of research, he enjoys reading, listening to classical music, and building interesting software projects. Suhana Challa is a sophomore at The University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Management Information Systems with a minor in Global Sustainability. She is currently working on a project, leveraging AI and GIS to analyze multisensory data and explore how urban environments shape perceptions of safety. Her interests lie at the intersection of technology, sustainability, and community impact. Michael (Mike) Holfold is from Pennsylvania and went to Salisbury University in Maryland for his undergraduate degree. There, he was a Geography major with tracks in Climatology and GIS, while being an NCAA athlete on the baseball team. He then went to the University of South Carolina to pursue an MS in Geography, focusing on hazard science, climate, and GIS. His master’s thesis analyzed the predictive power of land characteristics on urban heat and humidity, which Dr. Kang was a committee member for. Mike moved to Arlington, Virginia and took a position at Partner Forces, a Homeland Security contractor. Xingyu Fang obtained an M.S. degree from the University of College London and an undergraduate degree from the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan). I am Bangzhao Shu, currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Before starting my Ph.D., I earned dual master’s degrees in Information and Geospatial Data Science from the University of Michigan. My research interests include (1) Natural Language Processing, (2) Mental Health and NLP, and (3) Computational Social Science. Specifically, I study the emotional intelligence of large language models (LLMs), including their ability to predict emotions, their emotional biases, and their effectiveness in providing emotional support. I also have experience researching the personas of LLMs, including their consistency and stability. More broadly, I have a strong interest in interdisciplinary work, particularly in applying NLP methods to enhance geospatial tasks.
