Research

RESEARCH AGENDA

Research Highlights

01 SenseCapture timely human, environmental, and infrastructure signals. View projects

Adaptive Cross-City Disaster Sentiment Learning

Social-media models often reproduce urban bias because data-rich cities dominate online discussion while rural and disadvantaged communities remain underrepresented. This project develops a context-sensitive framework for more equitable disaster sentiment understanding.

Wildfire Information Ecosystems and Political Polarization

Wildfire communication now unfolds in a digital environment shaped by political identity, engagement ranking, and polarized online communities. This project studies how these structural conditions influence institutional trust during crises.

Multimodal Earthquake Damage Evaluation

Rapid earthquake assessment is limited by sparse ground sensors and delayed official reporting. This project investigates whether multimodal, multilingual social-media observations can provide complementary, fine-grained evidence immediately after an event.

Community Resilience Assessment

COVID-19 Policy Uptake

02 ReasonBuild grounded, interpretable AI across language, geography, and systems. View projects

Geospatially Grounded LLM Agents

This project gives large-language-model agents access to spatial context so they can reason about terrain, infrastructure, communities, and evolving wildfire conditions. It moves agentic AI beyond text-only inference by treating location as a first-class reasoning layer.

LLM-Augmented Semantic Digital Twins

This research develops semantic digital twins that connect technical documents, system models, and evolving project knowledge for adaptive infrastructure planning.

LLMs as Human-Centered World Models

This project explores LLMs as data-driven world models for simulating how communities and infrastructure may experience a disaster before it occurs.

03 ActTurn evidence into equitable planning, risk management, and decisions. View projects

Crowdsourced Intelligence for Inclusive Urban Accessibility

Traditional accessibility surveys are valuable but expensive and geographically limited. This project uses large-scale online reviews to identify where residents experience persistent barriers across everyday urban services.

Appraising Situational Awareness

System Reliability Modeling

Hurricane Risk Response and Healthcare Accessibility

This collaborative UMD–NYU project examines how Hurricane Helene disrupted access to healthcare and other essential services, with particular attention to uneven impacts across communities.

Data-Driven Project Risk Management Performance Evaluation

This funded research project develops evidence-based ways to evaluate risk-management performance in major transportation projects.

Professional Services

• Journal Article Reviewer
  • Natural Hazard and Risk Management: International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction; Natural Hazard Review; Progress in Disaster Science
  • Urban Planning: Sustainable Cities and Society; Cities; International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology
  • Artificial Intelligence Technology: Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing;Computers, Materials & Continua, PeerJ Computer Science
  • Higher Education: The Internet and Higher Education
• Conference Proceeding Reviewer
  • 12NCEE National Conference on Earthquake Engineering