I am a Dissertator in Geography with a minor in Computer Sciences at UW-Madison. I also gained my Master’s degree here majoring in Cartography and Geographic Information Sciences (GIScience) in 2019. During 2019-2021, I worked as a Spatial Big Data Scientist at a start-up company and gained more practical experience in using GIScience techniques to solve real-world problems. The more achievements I gained from my work, the more passionate I became about going further and deeper. That is the reason why I came back to academia and started my PhD career – I enjoy the purity and independence of being a dedicated scholar and conducting research with a collaborative effort. I want to work as a researcher to exchange and implement novel ideas on GIScience, as an educator to spread the beauty of GIScience, and as a humble scholar to explore more possibilities in the power of GIScience.
Currently, my research interests focus on using Geospatial Data Science and GeoAI (e.g., spatially explicit vision-language multi-modal learning, and spatial context prompt engineering) for various geospatial applications, such as human mobility, segregation, and social (in)equity; urban informatics (e.g., mixed land use measurement, urban perception prediction, and city-level image geo-localization in a global scale); and environmental studies and justice (e.g., flood mapping, post-wildfire detection, citizen-sourced application development for rapid disaster response).
WEBSITES & PROFILE
EDUCATION
- Ph.D., Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA (2021 Spring-current, expected 2024 Spring)
- Dissertation title: A Fundamental Multi-modal Learning Framework with Spatial Knowledge
- M.S., Cartography & GIScience, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA (2017-2019)
- B.S., Geography (GIS & Remote Sensing Emphasis), University of Cincinnati, USA (2015-2017, 2+2 undergraduate program)
- B.S., GIS & Remote Sensing, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China (2013-2015, 2+2 undergraduate program)
- Exchange Program, Urban Planning & Surveying, Queensland University of Technology, Brisban, Australia (2015 Fall)
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Geospatial Data Science
- GIScience and GeoAI
- Human Mobility, Segregation, and Social (In)Equity
- Urban Informatics
- Environmental Studies and Justice
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
- DSFAS-AI: Developing an integrated deep learning model framework for county-level crop yield prediction in support of USDA NASS operation (Project No.WIS04084, National Institute of Food and Agriculture)
- Spatially explicit multi-modal deep learning for environmental change and challenges in urban environments (Project No.1940091, National Science Foundation)
- A unified framework for measuring access inequality and environmental (in)justice in a hybrid physical-virtual world (Project No. R01 DA047315, National Institutes of Health)
- Measuring racial-ethnic and income segregation in US largest cities (Project No. MSN242675, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation)
- Citizen-sourced social sensing: A case study of developing a cross-platform mobile application for rapid disaster response (Project No. 1940091, National Science Foundation)
COURSES TAUGHT
- Geog 574 Geospatial Database Design and Development, Fall 2023 & Fall 2017 (In-person; 40 graduate & undergraduate students); Spring 2019 (Online; 50 graduate students from UW-Madison GIS Professional Programs)
- Geog 170 Our Digital Globe: An Overview of GIScience and its Technology, Spring 2021 (Online; >250 undergraduate students)
- Geog 576 Web Interactive Mapping & Geovisualization, Spring 2019 (Online; 50 graduates from UW-Madison GIS Professional Programs)
- Geog 370 Introduction to Cartography, Fall 2018 (In-person; 80 graduate & undergraduate students)
- Geog 578 GIS Applications, Spring 2018 (In-person; 40 graduate & undergraduate students)
- Other responsibilities: developed exams, quizzes, discussions, and assignments; designed and updated syllabuses; coordinated grading with colleagues
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Papers in Preparation or Under Review/Revision
*Underlined name is Ph.D. Advisor.
- Wu M., Huang Q., 2023. Leveraging ChatGPT-4-V and Spatial-Context Prompts to Build a Vision-Language Geo-Foundation Model for Urban Analytics. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. (Abstract accepted by IJGIS Special Issue on Geo-Foundation Model in Sep, 2023)
- Wu M., Huang Q., Gao, S., Lee Y., 2023. Towards spatially-explicit multi-modal learning for understanding urban environments. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. (To be submitted in Dec, 2023)
- Wu M., Huang Q., 2023. Towards non-pairwise multi-modal learning informed by Laws of Geography for understanding urban environments. Environmental Science & Technology. (To be submitted in Feb, 2024)
- Wu M., Huang Q., Huang X., 2024. Segregated pleasure: Measuring racial-ethnic and income segregation in the entertainment and recreational POIs in US largest cities. Sustainable cities and society. (To be submitted in Apr, 2024)
- Wu M., Huang Q., 2024. Citizen-sourced social sensing: A case study of developing a cross-platform mobile application for rapid disaster response. Environmental Modelling and Software. (To be submitted in Jun, 2024)
Papers Under Review/Revision
- Wu M., Wong D., Huang Q., 2023. Segregation: what is in a name? A review of segregation measurement and a prospective framework. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. (Under the 2nd review with minor revisions)
- Qiu Y., Wu M., Kang Y., Huang Q., 2023. Predicting neighbourhood wealthiness based on street view images and Swin Transformer. Cities. (Under revision)
- Tang S., Huang Q., Wu M., 2023. BiAu-Net: Wildfire Burnt Area Detection based on Bi-temporal Sentinel-2 Images and U-Net with attention mechanism. International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. (Under review)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles, Conference Papers and Book Chapters
Journal Articles
- Wu M., Huang Q., Gao S., Zhang Z., 2023. Mixed Land Use Measurement and Mapping with Street View Images and Spatial Context-Aware Prompts via Zero-shot Multimodal Learning. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. DOI:10.1016/j.jag.2023.103591 [PDF]
- Wu M., Liu X., Qin Y., Huang Q., 2023. Revealing racial-ethnic segregation with individual experienced segregation indices based on social media data: A case study in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 104 (2023): 102008 – 102021. DOI: 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2023.102008 [PDF]
- Vongkusolkit J., Peng B., Wu M., Huang Q., Andresen CG., 2023. Near Real-Time Flood Mapping with Weakly Supervised Machine Learning. Remote Sensing. DOI: 10.3390/rs15133263 [PDF]
- Liu X., Wu M., Peng B., Huang Q., Graph-based representation for identifying individual travel activities with spatiotemporal trajectories and POI data. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19441-9 [PDF]
- Wu, M. Huang, Q., 2022. Human movement patterns of different racial-ethnic and economic groups in U.S. top 50 populated cities: What can social media tell us about isolation? Annals of GIS, 28 (2):161-183. DOI: 10.1080/19475683.2022.2026471. [PDF]
Refereed Conference Papers (Full-length, equivalent to journal articles)
- Wu M., Huang Q., Gao S., 2023. Measuring access inequality in a hybrid physical-virtual world: A case study of racial disparity of healthcare access during CoVID-19. In Proceedings of 2023 30th International Conference on Geoinformatics, Jul 19-21, 2023 London, UK, pg.1-10. DOI: 10.1109/Geoinformatics60313.2023.10247690 [PDF]
- Wu M., Huang Q., 2022. IM2City: Image geo-localization via multi-modal learning. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI ’22), ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022, Nov 1-4, Seattle, WA, USA, pg.1-10. DOI: 10.1145/3557918.3565868 [PDF]
- Liu X., Huang Q., Li Z., Wu M., 2017. The impact of MTUP: Explore online trajectories for human mobility studies. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Prediction of Human Mobility, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017, Nov 7-10, Redondo Beach, CA, USA, pg.1-9. DOI:10.1145/3152341.3152348 [PDF]
Refereed Conference Papers (Short paper,6 pages)
- Wu M.D., Huang Q., Sui T., Wu M., Pixel-wise Wildfire Burn Severity Classification with Bi-temporal Sentinel-2 Data and Deep Learning. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Big Data Technologies (ICBDT 2023) Conference, Sep 22-24, 2023, Qingdao, China, pg.1-6. DOI: 10.1145/3627377.3627433 [PDF]
Refereed Book Chapters
- Huang Q., Wu M., 2023. Database Fundamentals. In Xia J., Huang Q., Tu W., and Gui Z., eds. Open GIS. Springer (Under publication)
- Huang Q., Wu M., 2023. Relational Databases. In Xia J., Huang Q., Tu W., and Gui Z., eds. Open GIS. Springer (Under publication)
Semi-Refereed (Abstracts only) Conference Papers
- Sui T., Huang Q., Wu M., Wu M., “Empowering Urban Wildfire Burnt Area Detection with Deep Learning,” Global Smart Cities Summit cum The 3rd International Conference on Urban Informatics (GSCS & ICUI 2023), Aug 20-23, Hong Kong.
- Wu M., Huang Q., Gao S., 2022. “Mixed land use detection via vision-language multi-modal learning,” 2022 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Dec 12-16, Chicago, IL, USA. ESS Open Archive. DOI: 10.22541/essoar.167252584.47036748/v1.
- Huang Q., Peng B., Wu M., Vongkusolkit J., Liu X., Scheele C., 2022. “Big data and GeoAI for natural hazard,” 2022 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Dec 12-16, Chicago, IL, USA.
UNDERGRADUATES ADVISED
- Mingda Wu. Pixel-wise Wildfire Burn Severity Classification with Bi-temporal Sentinel-2 Data and Deep Learning. 2022/09 – present.
- Tang Sui. Empowering Urban Wildfire Burnt Area Detection with Deep Learning. 2022/08 – present.
- Yang Qiu. Using deep learning to predict neighborhood wealthiness based on street view images. 2022/05 – present.
- Yuehan Qin. Big data mining on social media (tweets) for human mobility using unsupervised machine learning – Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model. 2018/08 – 2019/05
FELLOWSHIPS & WORK EXPERIENCE
Big Data Mining Engineer, Beijing Digital Union Network Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, 08/2019 – 01/2021
- Designed a hybrid positioning system (GPS + Wi-Fi + base station) for a nationwide location-based service with stream data processing frameworks
- Predicted activity zones based on the trajectories of mobile devices
Big Data Scientist, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA, 06/2018 – 08/2018
- 2018 NASA Ames Internship Symposium: Wu, M., Sorek-Hamer, M., Just, A., Nemani, R. Exploring Diurnal Variations in the Correlation between PM2.5 and Aerosol Optical Depth (Presentation link)
- Responsibility: Big data analysis and statistical modelling; Satellite image processing; Data visualization using geographic point clouds; UI design using R-Studio Shiny
PROFESSIONAL & COMMUNITY SERVICES
Session Chair
- 2023 AAG Annual Meeting
- GISphere GISalon International 2023
- IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2021
Presentation Judge
- Outstanding Student Presentation Awards (OSPA) program, AGU Fall Meeting, 2022
Student Director
- AAG Cyber-Infrastructure Specialty Group (CISG), 2023-2024
Manuscript Reviewer
- International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), 2023
- Scientific Reports, 2022-2023
- International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2021-2023
- Transactions in GIS, 2021-2023
- IEEE IGARSS Conference, 2020-2023
Graduate Representatives to Faculty/Staff Meetings
- Department of Geography, UW-Madison, 2022-present
Student Lead of Graduates Social Committee
- Department of Geography, UW-Madison, 2017-2019
MEMBERSHIP & OUTREACH
- 2017 – Present: Member, American Association of Geographers
- 2021 – Present: Member, The International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences
- 2021 – Present: Member, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science
- 2022 – Present: Member, American Geophysical Union
- 2022 – Present: Member, Association for Computing Machinery
AWARDS & HONORS
- 2024 & 2023 AAG Student Travel Award & Grant (Nominated, $500 each year)
- 2023 University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Symposium Student Paper Award (First Place)
- 2023 AAG Geographic Information Science and Systems (GISS) Specialty Group Student Honors Paper Award (Second Place)
- 2023 AAG Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group (CISG) Robert Raskin Student Competition (First Place)
- 2022 ACM SIGSPATIAL Student Travel Award & Grant ($1,000)
- 2022 AAG Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Student Paper Competition John Odland Award (Second Place)
- Trewartha/Odebolt Graduate Research Award & Travel Grant ($3,500 in total) – University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2021/01 – 2024/05
- 2021 International Graduate Workshop on GeoInformatics Best Participation Award
- 2021 28th International Conference on Geoinformatics Best Student Paper Award (Second Place)
- Dean’s List for Excellent Graduate Students (Top 10%) – University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017 – 2019
- High Degree Honors in Geography & STEM Research Awards ($1,000) – University of Cincinnati, 2017
- Undergraduate Global Scholarship ($28,000) – University of Cincinnati, 2016 – 2017
- National Full-funded Exchange Scholarships ($9,600) – Queensland University of Technology, 2015
- National Scholarship for Excellent Students (Top 1%) ($1,600) – Ministry of Education of China, 2013 – 2014