Time: 9:15am – 10:45am

Venue: Room 520, 5/F, Chen Kou Bun Building, CUHK

Speaker: Dr. Jiali Zhou, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Design, The University of Hong Kong.

Abstract:
Cities are complex socio-technical systems in which people, environments, infrastructure, and institutions continuously interact. Fine-grained behavioural, spatial, and digital data provide new opportunities to examine these interactions across scales and from a more human-centred perspective.
The seminar is organised around three interconnected research dimensions: mobility, inclusivity, and sustainability. The mobility strand examines passenger behaviour, system dynamics, and social interaction through agent-based modelling, mobility data, machine learning, and simulation. The inclusivity strand investigates how urban environments and accessibility are experienced differently across social groups, including research on gender differences in active travel, older adults, and persons with disabilities. The sustainability strand extends from everyday accessibility to questions of resilience, examining how urban systems maintain function and adapt under disruption.
Across these three dimensions, the seminar further considers how data-driven urban research can contribute to gender studies. In particular, gender perspectives can be more systematically incorporated into analyses of mobility, behaviour, accessibility, environmental exposure, social interaction, and responses to disruption, helping to reveal differentiated urban experiences and support more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable cities.

Speaker’s Biography:
Dr. Jiali Zhou is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on human-centred urban mobility and transport systems, with particular interests in travel behaviour and social interaction, gender and mobility, inclusive accessibility, and urban resilience.. Methodologically, he combines big data, GeoAI, machine learning, simulation, and mixed-method approaches. He received his PhD with a focus on transport engineering from Northeastern University and previously conducted research at the MIT Transit Lab, following earlier training at Carnegie Mellon University and South China University of Technology.

Registration: https://bit.ly/4A2ihC1