Student Seminar by Ms. Ting Lian on Aug 27, 2025, 3PM

Title: Walking (In)Convenience: An in-depth study of pedestrian detours to daily facilities

Speaker: Ms. Ting Lian (Department of Geography)

Date: Aug 27, 2025 (Wednesday)

Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Venue: Room 1010, CLL, Department of Geography, 10/F, The Jokey Club Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Registration Link: https://forms.office.com/r/391ZWvpDXw

Food and drinks will be provided for successfully registered participants.

About the talk: As active transport planning advances globally, this study highlights the importance of walkability, focusing on convenience as measured by the pedestrian detour ratio (PDR). Analyzing 3.85 million residential–facility pairs across Hong Kong, we found that walking convenience was highest in the CBD, but varied by district and facility type. Over a third of residential–facility pairs required improvement. Inconvenient walking routes were linked to vehicle-oriented street blocks, high-income areas, and challenging terrain, while features like pedestrian crossings and major roads improved directness. Our findings provide a basis for integrating PDR into street design and planning, with recommendations to calm traffic and enhance pedestrian crossings in less walkable areas.

About the speaker: Ting Lian is a PhD candidate in Transport Geography at The University of Hong Kong, supervised by Professor Becky P.Y. Loo. Ting's research focuses on sustainable urban transport systems, with expertise in spatial analysis and machine learning. She has published in leading journals such as Computers, Environment and Urban Systems and the Journal of the American Planning Association, and has contributed to projects on pedestrian accessibility, travel behaviour, and transport safety. Ting has also served as a part-time lecturer for the Master of Transport Policy and Planning (MTP&P) programme.

Student Seminar by Ms. Zhuangyuan Fan on Sep 8, 2025, 3PM

Title: Urban visual intelligence: uncovering hidden pattern of road safety, group behavior, and urban profiles

Speaker: Ms. Zhuangyuan Fan (Department of Geography)

Date: Sep 8, 2025 (Monday)

Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Venue: Room 1010, CLL, Department of Geography, 10/F, The Jokey Club Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Registration Link: https://forms.office.com/r/uqQsrV9Srj

Food and drinks will be provided for successfully registered participants.

About the talk: In the realm of urban studies, a well-established line of research delves into the comprehension of cities through their visual attributes. Nevertheless, what remains unclear is to what extent urban dwellers’ everyday life can be explained by the visual clues of the urban environment. This seminar presents a series of studies that apply computer vision tools to facilitate the measurement of key topics in transport geography. The first part introduces the evaluation of street view images in estimating socioeconomic profiles, including wealth, crime, transport behavior, and health at neighborhood level. The second part zooms into street space and demonstrates the method to identify road crash risk factors from bus dashcam videos. The last part will further dive into small parks in the city and explain how the park place arrangement can influence group encounters. Together, these projects form a body of urban visual intelligence—showcasing how computer vision can uncover hidden city profiles, infer urban dynamics, and synthesize spatial information to better understand the human experience of cities.

About the speaker: Zhuangyuan Fan is a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. She gained her Master of City Planning from MIT and Master of Landscape Architecture from UPenn. Her research focuses on applied artificial intelligence in travel behaviour, road safety and the social benefit of transit-oriented development. Her research has been published in leading journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Landscape and Urban Planning, and Environment and Planning B.

Student Seminar by Dr. Wenbo Sun on Aug 20, 2025 3PM

Title: Truck-and-Drone Routing Problem for Disaster Response: From Deterministic to Dynamic

Speaker: Dr. Wenbo Sun (Department of Data and Systems Engineering)

Date: Aug 20, 2025 (Wednesday)

Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Venue: Room 828, 8/F, Haking Wong Building, The University of Hong Kong

Registration Link: https://forms.office.com/r/vfTz50GGuz

Food and drinks will be provided for successfully registered participants.

About the talk: To enhance rescue efficiency in disaster response, this study develops a flexible truck-and-drone collaborative system that combines the advantages of trucks and drones to provide multi-type rescue services after disasters. Unlike truck-and-drone systems for parcel deliveries, the objective of this study is to achieve a timely and equitable rescue service by minimizing the priority cost, defined as the weighted sum of each task’s service start time. Specifically, this study starts with route optimization for the proposed system under deterministic travel time and rescue demand, which can be formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. A branch-and-bound algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm are developed to solve the proposed problem efficiently. Then, this study develops a robust route optimization method to address the potential travel time uncertainties after disasters. Furthermore, considering dynamic rescue demands in the rescue process, this study models a dynamic truck-and-drone routing problem as a Markov decision process and solves it using a multi-agent reinforcement learning method. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can efficiently solve these complex problems and that flexible truck-and-drone collaboration can significantly enhance rescue efficiency in disaster response.

About the speaker: Dr. Wenbo Sun received his Ph.D. degree in July, 2025 from the Department of Data and Systems Engineering, the University of Hong Kong. He received his Master’s and Bachelor’s degree from Beihang University in 2017 and 2020, respectively. In 2020-2021, he worked as a research assistant at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities. His current research integrates operational research and control engineering to intelligent transportation systems, with special focus on vehicle routing problems with drones and trajectory optimization for connected and autonomous vehicles. He has received several honors and awards, including HKSTS-ATRS Best Paper Award (ATRS 2025), BPS Innovation Scholarships (2025) and Best Presenter Award (ISMT 2024). Dr. Sun has published papers on IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and Transportation Research Part C, and he has presented his research in the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, International Conference of Hong Kong Society for Transportation Studies (HKSTS), Annual Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Conference, etc.