Aims of Lab

1. Examine Climate-Vulnerable Communities with Urban Data Science

2. Initiate Climate-Resilient Planning in the Context of Global Environmental Change

3. Explore Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Methods for Urban and Regional Planning

News

  • October 18th, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai presented at ACSP Annual Conference in Chicago, IL .

  • October 8th, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai presented at Urban Climate Solution Workshop at Texas A&M University .

  • June 16th, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai attended JPER Writing Workshop at Texas A&M University .

  • April 26th, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai attended UAA Conference at Nashsville .

  • April 12th, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai is involved in an external grant funded by the City of San Antonio, which aims to study the cool pavement in San Antonio. Project title: Evaluating the Urban Heat Mitigation Potential of the San Antonio Cool Pavement Pilot .

  • April 4th, 2023: In collaboration with Dr. Wanyang Hu and Ms. Shuhong Wang, Dr. Wei Zhai published one paper on Smart Cities in China in the peer-reviewed journal, Cities .

  • March 1st, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai is involved in an external grant funded by the City of San Antonio, which aims to study the heat island phenomenon in San Antonio. Project title: How Can We Direct City Resources Toward the Areas Most Impacted by Extreme Heat? .

  • March 25th, 2023: Dr. Wei Zhai presented at AAG Annual Meeting at Denver .

  • Dec 15th, 2022: Dr. Wei Zhai was invited to join the editoral board of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications .

  • Nov 1st, 2022: Dr. Wei Zhai and Dr. Xinyue Ye launched a special issue on the topic of climate-resilient mobility in Travel Behaivour and Society.

  • Sep 1st, 2022: The Urban AI + Resilience Lab is launched in UTSA officially.

  • June 16th, 2022: The paper using big data of ride-hailing services in Austin, Texas has been covered by LSEUSA blog.

Research

Disaster Damage Assessment

An approach that leverages street view images to assess post-disaster damage

Social Media for Disaster Communication

Research that demonstrates the effectiveness of social media for disaster communication

NLP for Resilience Planning Documents

Examples of how natural language processing can be applied for reading resilience plans

Social Vulnerability in COVID-19

Studies that examine the resilience and social vulnerability of communities during the pandemic

Extreme Heat

Projects that examine the effects of extreme heat on human society and health

Publications