About me

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Here is Xuanyu Zhou.

I am an undergraduate student in the Urban and Rural Planning at Zhejiang University. I’m also an exchange student in the College of Environmental Design (CED) at University of California, Berkeley. My research focus on Urban Equity, Urban Mobility, Big data and Machine Learning in Urban Planning. I’m exploring LLM in Urban Planning and Urban AI.

If you are interested in any aspect of me, I am always open to discussions and collaborations. Feel free to reach out to me at — xuanyu.zhou [at] zju.edu.cn or xuanyu.zhou [at] berkeley.edu

Download my CV (Update March 2026)

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Research Interests

My research focuses on data-driven urban analytics, with emphasis on:

Built Environment and Equity: Examining how urban green spaces and thermal exposure vary across communities, using remote sensing, LiDAR, and street view imagery to advance environmental justice in underserved regions.
Urban Mobility: Developing computational frameworks for next-generation transportation systems, including Urban Air Mobility demand modeling and shared mobility optimization.
Urban Resilience and Health: Applying geospatial machine learning to investigate relationships between built environment characteristics and public health, community vitality, and post-pandemic recovery.

News and Updates

Oct 2025: Completed the MIT-UF-NEU Summer Research Camp. Check out our work here!
Sep 2025: Work accepted by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) 2026 Annual Meeting — see you in Washington, D.C.!
May 2025: Joined the MIT-UF-NEU Summer Research Camp, mentored by Dr. Xuan Jiang.
Feb 2025: Work accepted by EDRA57 — see you in Amherst, MA!
Nov 2024: Presented at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Seattle on urban green space equity in shrinking cities.
Aug 2024: Work accepted by the 2024 ACSP Annual Conference!

Along the Way

My research journey began in my sophomore year at Zhejiang University, where I was selected for the Qizhenwenxue Undergraduate Research Program. Under the guidance of Prof. Shuang Ma and Prof. Shuangjin Li, I analyzed post-pandemic urban resilience using Geographically Weighted Random Forest (GWRF), linking built environment characteristics to recovery rates (published here). I then expanded this work to investigate the interplay between public health, shared mobility, and urban form (submitted to npj Urban Sustainability).

In my junior year, I joined the Natural AI Lab led by Mingze Chen, where I spearheaded a study on Urban Green Space (UGS) and shrinking city revitalization through a time-lagged analysis of Pittsburgh, PA. This work was presented at the 2024 ACSP Annual Conference and is under review at Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.

As an exchange student at UC Berkeley, I contributed to Prof. Lu Liang’s 3M lab, collaborating with Yuye Zhou on comparing LiDAR-based Sky View Factor (SVF) with traditional imagery-based methods for microclimate analysis.

My trajectory culminated at the MIT-UF-NEU joint summer research camp, where I co-developed a framework for optimizing Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems with Prof. Jinhua Zhao and Xuan Jiang. This work has been accepted by the 2026 TRB Annual Meeting (preprint) and is under review at IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

I am eager to join a rigorous Ph.D. program to continue tackling complex urban challenges at a deeper level.