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.