[Rescheduled] Student Seminar by Ms. Zhuangyuan Fan on Sep 9, 2025, 1PM

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

Speaker: Ms. Zhuangyuan Fan (Department of Geography)

Date: Sep 9, 2025 (Tuesday)

Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Venue: Room 612B, Haking Wong Building, The University of Hong Kong

Updated Registration Link: https://forms.office.com/r/BpuKNSzWCL 

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.

21 Jul 2025 (Mon) 11:00-12:00 | Seminar by Sonia Pratt

Academic Publishing: Ethics and Challenge of AI

Speaker:

Sonia Pratt, Publisher

Geography and Transport, Elsevier

Date:    Jul 21, 2025 (Monday)

Time:   11:00 am – 12:00 nn

Venue:  Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two, HKU

Abstract

This talk addresses safeguarding research integrity and publishing ethics amid growing challenges such as paper mills, citation manipulation, and generative AI use. It outlines publisher’s strategy and policy updates to detect and prevent unethical practices before and after publication. Key topics include common ethical pitfalls faced by researchers (e.g., missing ethical consent, authorship issues, plagiarism, image and data manipulation), the responsible use of generative AI, and measures against predatory journals and paper mills.