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Departmental Research Seminars
Via Zoom: link will be provided upon successful registration
Enquiry: geog.event@hku.hk
[ 10:00-10:45 ]
Topic:
Urban environmental change and its implications for sustainability
Our home planet is experiencing an unprecedented period of urbanization, which is expected to continue across the next few decades. An improved understanding of complex urban systems under urbanization is highly needed for sustainable urban development and requires integrated efforts across disciplines, methods, and scales. This seminar will present our recent studies focusing on characterizing historical and future urban dynamic as well as the associated urban environmental changes from local to global scales using satellite remote sensing observations and developed modeling capabilities. Two important implications of urbanization, including building energy demand and pollen allergy disease, will also be explored in the seminar. The resultant products, models, and findings from this study will be of great value for advancing our understanding of the coupled urban-nature system under urbanization for sustainability in the context of climate change.
Speaker:
Dr. Yuyu ZHOU
Associate Professor, Department of Geological & Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University, United States
Dr. Yuyu Zhou is an Associate Professor at the Department of Geological & Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University. His research interests lie in the applications of geospatial technologies including remote sensing, GIS, geovisualization, spatial analytic tools, and integrated assessment modeling to understanding the issues of urban environmental change and the potential solutions. He has published over 160 papers in leading journals such as Energy & Environmental Science, PNAS, Remote Sensing of Environment, and Global Change Biology, and received over 20 grants from organizations including NASA, NSF, and DOE.
[ 11:15–12:00 ]
Topic:
A global portrait of expressed negativity towards COVID-19 in social media space
Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has induced a mental health crisis. Social media data offer a unique opportunity to track the mental health signals of a given population and quantify their negativity towards COVID-19. To date, however, we know little about how negative sentiments differ across countries and how these relate to the shifting policy landscape through the pandemic. Using 2.1 billion individual-level geotagged tweets posted between 1 February 2020 and 31 March 2021, we measure and map the shifts in negativity across 217 countries and unpack its relationship with COVID-19 policies. Findings reveal that countries with more stringent policies were associated with lower levels of negativity, however such a relationship weakened in later phases of the pandemic. This study offers a novel framework to monitor mental health signals globally, helping international authorizations, including the United Nations and World Health Organization, to design smart country-specific mental health initiatives in response to future public emergencies.
Speaker:
Dr. Siqin WANG
Research Fellow, University of Tokyo, Japan
Dr. Siqin WANG is holding the Bachelor in Urban Planning from Sun Yat-Sen University, China (2004-2009), Master in GIScience from Northern Illinois University, US (2009-2011) and PhD in Geography from University of Queensland, Australia (2015-2018). Her research interests lie in developing and applying methods and frameworks of GIScience (i.e., GIS, remote sensing, spatial analysis and web mapping) and big data analytics (e.g., AI, machine/deep learning, and spatial econometrics) to solve real-world problems in the urban environment, particularly in the domain of human mobility and migration, digital health geography, built environment, social vulnerability in climatic hazard planning, and human-environment interactions. Since her PhD conferral in 2018, she has 38 peer-reviewed journal articles (28 in Q1 journals), as the first/co-first/corresponding author in 30 articles. She has four research projects (as the chief/principal investigator) since 2018, a total 300K AUD (1.7 million HKD) granted. She currently acts as the associate chair of Spatial Data Lab affiliated to Harvard University and the reviewer of +20 international journals.
