Computational Urban Science and SDG11

Computational Urban Science and SDG11

We spoke to Xinyue Ye, Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Computational Urban Science

How does the open access journal Computational Urban Science play a role with SDG11?
Computational Urban Science focuses on the intersection of computational sciences and urban sciences in building sustainable cities and communities. The journal aims to introduce the latest results in urban computing and its applications, examine both the spatial and social dimension of urban networks and built environment, promote the cooperation between computational disciplines and the urban domain sciences, and build a bridge for scientific communication.

What is the focus of your research work?
With career experience in urban planning, economic geography, geographic information system, and computational science, my research focuses on geospatial artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and urban computing. My research projects model the space-time perspective of socioeconomic inequality and human dynamics for applications in various domains, such as economic development, disaster response, transportation and land use, public health and urban crime. My work supports the resilient design, planning, and development of sustainable infrastructure in urban communities.

What are the short- and long-term goals of your work?
I hope to promote human dynamics research integrating physical, virtual, and perceived spaces to better understand inequality, mobility, and diffusion in the cities and communities. The long-term goal is to facilitate an understanding of the complicated mechanisms of human communications and policy development in both cyberspace (online) and the real world (offline) for decision support towards sustainable cities and communities.

Which UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) does your work most closely relate to?
I have established and managed four interdisciplinary labs relevant to SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities) in the past 11 years: Regional Analysis Lab under Department of Commerce’s EDA University Center (Bowling Green State University), Computational Social Science Lab (Kent State University), Urban Informatics & Spatial Computation Lab (New Jersey Institute of Technology), and Urban Dara Science Lab (Texas A&M University). I plan to promote a human- and social-centered approach for infrastructure planning and integrated social-environment system dynamics modeling in the context of short-term disasters and long-term climate change.

What do you believe are the most effective ways of communicating your research?
I have been developing and implementing creative and innovative methodological framework integrating heterogeneous urban data and approaches in the open-source environment, benefiting a broad interdisciplinary community ranging from social science to computational science. At the same time, I co-lead an inclusive community engagement and education program of smart cities by promoting equity, accessibility, and inclusion in small towns and communities.

What advice do you have for researchers who are looking for ways to make societal impact, in other words, impact beyond their scholarly circle/academia?
Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for research in the 21st century. In addition, scholars might enhance their research strengths in three aspects: (1) comparative work on urban/regional sciences across various places, (2) ability to identify and tackle major public policy issues, and (3) mastery of computational skills. The combination of these research strengths will facilitate many large interdisciplinary and policy-relevant research, making societal impact.

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Xinyue Ye

Texas A&M University, USA

Co-Editor-in-Chief of Computational Urban Science

Dr. Xinyue Ye is Harold Adams Endowed Professor on Interdisciplinary Built Environment Science Research, Associate Professor of Stellar Faculty Provost Target Hire for Urban Computing at Texas A&M University, where he directs Urban Data Science Lab.

Computational Urban Science is an open access journal with a unique focus on the intersection of computational science and urban science. APCs are fully covered/sponsored by Jiangxi Normal University.