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 (Listed chronologically): Ph.D. students: Haofeng Tan, Hanqi Li, Xihan Yao, Somang Kim Undergraduate students: Mathis Spanneut, Albert Jiang, Andy Qin, Suhana Challa Alumni: Koichi Ito, Michael Holfold, Xingyu Fang, Bangzhao Shu 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 Geospatial Data Science to understand human experience at place and develop ethical and responsible geospatial artificial intelligence (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. 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. Andy Qin is a freshman 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 accessibility through resource distribution. 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. 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. 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.
