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Xinyue Ye

Harold L. Adams Endowed Professor of Urban Planning; Director of Center for Geospatial Sciences, Applications, and Technology
Curriculum Vitae

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Please make appointment with me by email: xinyue.ye@tamu.edu

Affiliations

  • Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning
  • Department of Computer Science & Engineering
  • Department of Multidisciplinary Engineering
  • Department of Geography
  • Department of Visual Computing and Interactive Media
  • School of Engineering Medicine
  • Center for Geospatial Sciences, Applications and Technology
  • Texas A&M Institute of Data Science: Urban AI Lab
  • Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center
  • Texas A&M Division of Research

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Biography

Dr. Xinyue Ye is the Harold Adams Endowed Professor in Urban Informatics and Stellar Faculty Provost Target Hire at Texas A&M University (TAMU). He serves as the Faculty Fellow (Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships) for The Division of Research at TAMU. His research integrates computational social science, urban data science, and geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) to address issues ranging from infrastructure resilience and climate change to social justice and community perceptions, underscoring the dynamic interplay between technology, policy, and human behavior in shaping sustainable and livable cities. His current research is centered on urban digital twins and precision public health, emphasizing real-time 3D modeling and AI-enabled participatory planning, as well as urban climate science, with a focus on downscaling climate data to the built environment scale and its relevance to human mobility.

 

According to the most recent Google Scholar Citation Global Ranking, Dr. Ye is ranked as 2nd in Urban Analytics, 5th in GeoAI, 7th in Spatial Data Science, 10th in Spatial Econometrics, and 20th in GIScience. He has been among the world’s top 2% scientists by Stanford University since 2020. ScholarGPS lists him as #15 Highly Ranked Scholar in Geography in the world and #2 in the USA for prior five-year activity.

 

Due to his innovative research integrating computer science, geography, and planning, Dr. Ye is the first scholar to be elected under the Early/Mid-Career category for a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Additionally, Dr. Ye is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

 

He won the national first-place research award from the University Economic Development Association in 2011 and received the Regional Development and Planning Emerging Scholar Award/Distinguished Scholar Award from AAG in 2012/2022. He was also the recipient of annual research awards from both computational science (New Jersey Institute of Technology) and Geography (Kent State University). Dr. Ye was named one of the top 10 young scientists by The World Geospatial Developers Conference in 2021. His work has been funded by the National Academies, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Justice, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation, Department of the Treasury, Microsoft, Baptist Health Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

 

In addition to his appointment in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Dr. Ye holds other joint appointments in the Department of Geography at the College of Arts & Sciences, the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and Department of Multidisciplinary Engineering at the College of Engineering, the Department of Visual Computing & Interactive Media at the School of Performance, Visualization, & Fine Arts, Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Bush School of Government and Public Policy, and School of Engineering Medicine.

 

Prof. Ye is the Elected President of the Spatial Decision Support Consortium and the Editor-in-Chief of Computational Urban Science, an open-access journal published by Springer. He also serves as the co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research. Dr. Ye is the Director of the Center for Geospatial Sciences, Applications, and Technology (GeoSAT) established by the Texas A&M Board of Regents, with the aim of facilitating the convergence of computing and geospatial science. Dr. Ye promotes the vision of “urban informatics+” to integrate human-centered urban and regional science research across disciplines. He leads the Urban Artificial Intelligence Lab, funded through the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science. This lab focuses on developing digital twins and virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) for multi-scaled simulations and scenarios, enabling real-time analysis of built environments and testing sustainable growth and climate action scenarios. The lab involves 55 faculty members across nine colleges at TAMU, including the Galveston campus, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, AgriLife Research, and Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Dr. Ye directs the focus of smart cities and transportation in the PhD program of Urban and Regional Science at Texas A&M University. Additionally, he was funded to develop the urban data science course series across campus.

 

The AAG Regional Development and Planning Distinguished Scholar Award (2022) recognized Dr. Ye’s contributions to the field of urban and regional science through mentorship and teaching across disciplines, from humanities to engineering. All the doctoral graduates he has advised/co-advised, spanning seven disciplines, have secured esteemed positions in academia, government, or industry at institutions and companies such as Rice University, Case Western Reserve University, Google, Amazon, among others. Dr. Ye is actively recruiting postdocs and doctoral students with strong spatial programming skills. His team offers a competitive package. For more information, please feel free to contact him directly at xinyue.ye@tamu.edu with your publications and proof of coding capabilities.

Education

Ph.D.

Geographic Information Science
University of California at Santa Barbara
2010

M.S.

Geographic Information Systems
Eastern Michigan University

M.A.

Human Geography
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

B.S.

Urban Planning
Zhejiang University

Scholarly Interests

Throughout my career, I have focused on developing innovative frameworks and tools that address critical challenges in understanding and managing urban systems and socioeconomic dynamics. One of my most significant contributions is the creation of the comparative space-time dynamics framework, which offers a new way to analyze how socioeconomic factors like crime, disaster response, and economic development evolve over time and across different regions. This framework is filling a gap in systematic comparative space-time studies. I originally developed it to study income distribution dynamics, and it has been extended to a wide range of socioeconomic processes, such as housing market, social media analytics, transportation dynamics, and urban land evolution. The open-source tool I developed alongside this framework has been instrumental for data analysts across various disciplines, enabling them to identify gaps in existing methodologies and advance their research. In addition, I have pioneered the development of Urban Digital Twins (UDTs), digital models that integrate real-time data, AI, and human-centered design to enhance infrastructure resilience. My work has been applied in high-impact projects, including digital twins for large cities, rural towns, university campuses, airports, highways, and nursing homes, demonstrating their value in improving decision-making, especially in the face of extreme weather and operational challenges. Recognized among the top 2% of scientists based on both career-long and year-specific citations globally by Stanford University, my research has significantly advanced the fields of computational social science and urban studies, and I remain committed to pushing the boundaries of these fields.