Distinguished Seminar Series on Data Science & Artificial Intelligence - "Urban Computing: Enabling Spatio-temporal Intelligences in Cities"
Research Seminar
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Date
30 Mar 2026
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Organiser
Department of Computing
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Time
15:00 - 16:00
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Venue
Online via Zoom / HJ302
Speaker
Dr Yu Zheng
Summary
Urban computing aims to tackle the challenges that cities face in the physical world, where tasks and data are naturally endowed with spatial and temporal properties. Affected by many complex factors, urban spaces are massive, dynamic, high-dimensional and nonlinear, and thus are difficult to model. Urban computing creates a data-centric computing framework, which connects urban sensing, urban data management, urban data analytics and providing services into a recurrent process to unlock the power of urban big data (particularly spatial and spatio-temporal data), for an unobtrusive and continuous improvement of people’s lives, city operating systems, and the environment. This talk will present unique properties of spatio-temporal data and the framework that can enable spatio-temporal intelligences. In each layer of urban computing, we will discuss its key research challenges, such as capturing spatio-temporal properties in AI models and cross-domain multimodal data fusion in the physical world, and introduce fundamental methodologies to tackle these challenges. Real-world deployments of urban computing will be also presented at the end of this talk.
Keynote Speaker
Dr Yu Zheng
Vice President and Chief Data Scientist of JD.COM
President of JD Intelligent Cities Research
China
Dr Yu Zheng is the Vice President and Chief Data Scientist of JD.COM, and the president of JD Intelligent Cities Research. Before Joining JD.COM, he was a senior research manager at Microsoft Research. He is also a chair professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an adjunct professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Zheng had published over 200 quality papers at prestigious conferences and journals and received over 6,7000 citations (H-index 117). He founded the research field of urban computing, which had been widely followed by world-class scientists. His monograph published by MIT Press becomes the first text book of this field. He was the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (2015-2021) and had served as the program co-chair of ICDE 2014 and CIKM 2017. He was a keynote speaker of AAAI 2019, KDD 2019 Plenary Keynote Panel and IJCAI 2019 Industrial Days. He received SIGKDD Test-of-Time Award twice (in 2023 and 2024) and SIGSPATIAL 10-Year-Impact Award four times (in 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2024). He was named one of the Top Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review (TR35), an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2016), an IEEE Fellow (2020) and an ACM Fellow (2026), for his contributions to spatio-temporal data mining and urban computing. After joining JD.COM, he has served over 70 cities with his technology, generating a revenue over 1 billion USD.
