Team Members
Faculty
Dr. Di Zhu is an Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN), a faculty member of the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), an executive committee member of the MGIS program at UMN, an affiliated professor at the Data Science Initiatives (DSI) of UMN College of Science and Engineering, and the director of Geospatial Data Intelligence (GeoDI) Lab. Before he came to UMN, Dr. Zhu was a visiting researcher at SpaceTimeLab, Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering, University College London (UCL). Dr. Zhu holds a Ph.D. in Cartology and GIScience, a B.S. in Geographic Information Systems, and a B.Ec. in Economics all from Peking University. Dr. Zhu’s research bridges Spatial Statistics, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), and Spatiotemporal Social Sensing, focusing on the human-environment systems within urban socioeconomics, public health, transportation & mobility, sustainability, ecosystems, etc. He has widely published in top journals and conferences, including the International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, GeoInformatica, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ACM SIGKDD, etc. He is a reviewer for over 30 journals and book publishers, and a guest editor for Frontiers in Environmental Science, International Journal of Geographic Information, and Computational Urban Science. He served as a panelist in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program, and a reviewer in the NSF Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences (HEGS) program and NSF Environmental Sustainability (ES) program. He chaired or served as a program committee member for several workshops, symposiums, and paper sessions at conferences such as AAG, ACM SIGSPATIAL, GISRUK, GeoInformatics, GeoKG & GeoAI, I-GUIDE Forum, etc. Dr. Zhu has directed the Faculty Interactive Research Program (FIRP) project subsidized by the Center for Urban & Regional Affairs (CURA) in Minnesota, and the Data Science Initiative (DSI) Medium Seed Grants in UMN. He has won academic accolades such as the Rising Star Award of College GIS Forum in China, the Top 20 WGDC 2022 Global Young Scientist Award, Early Career Award of GIS Research of the United Kingdom, the Tang Lixin Scholarship, Distinction of Doctoral Thesis of Peking University, etc. Dr. Zhu teaches in GIScience, spatial analysis, GeoAI, and spatial networks.
Current Students
My name is Zhongfu Ma. I am a Ph.D. student in Geography at the Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My research interest mainly lies in spatial network and spatial process modeling. Before studying at UMN, I earned my bachelor degree at China University of Geosciences, China.
I am Meicheng Xiong, a phd student in GeoDI lab. My research interests mainly involve GIS, human mobility, and social sensing based on big data. I earned my master's degree at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China.
I am Sheng Wang, a graduate student in GeoDI Lab, Department of Geography, Society and Environment, supervised by Prof. Di Zhu. My research of interests includes Urban Transfer Learning, Human Mobility and Spatio-temporal Prediction. Before joining the GeoDI, I got my M.S. in Geographic Information Systems from East China Normal University (Shanghai, China) and B.S. in Geographical Information Science with a minor in Computer Science in Anhui University (Hefei, China).
Jacob Harris
My name is Jacob Harris and I am a graduate student in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society. Some of my research interests include human-environment systems, transportation & mobility, urban socioeconomics, renewable energy, and sustainability as analyzed through spatial statistics, econometric modeling, and GeoAI. Prior to joining the GeoDI lab, I earned my Master of Science in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota where I researched climate economics in the NatCap TEEMs lab group.
Alumni
Rob Hendrickson
I am Rob, an MGIS student at GeoDI Lab, Department of Geography, Society, and Environment, I graduated in 2022.
Gene Cheng
I am Ziying Cheng, an MGIS student at GeoDI Lab, Department of Geography, Society, and Environment, I graduated in 2021.