Urban patterns. Measured w. GeoAI. Grounded in evidence.

I study urban patterns that have traditionally been difficult to measure systematically, and develop new methods to collect and quantify them using imagery, mobility data, sensors, and other emerging data sources.

SELECTED EXPLORATION

  • What can we learn about a city by looking at its streets?

    Street imagery | Computer vision | PNAS

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  • We share the same city, but do we share same experience?

    Social Segregation | Travel Survey | Graph Neural Network | Nature Cities

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  • Are we just passing through?

    Public Realm | Computer vision | PNAS

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  1. Fan, Zhuangyuan, Becky PY Loo, Fabio Duarte, Carlo Ratti, and Esteban Moro. "Hidden patterns of urban mixing across five global cities." Nature Cities (2026): 1-11.

  2. Fan, Zhuangyuan, and Becky PY Loo. "Urban visual clusters and road transport fatalities: A global city-level image analysis." Communications in Transportation Research 5 (2025): 100193.

  3. Fan, Zhuangyuan, Fan Zhang*, Becky P.Y. Loo and Carlo Ratti (2023) “Urban visual intelligence: Uncovering hidden city profiles with street view images.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, PNAS 120 (7): e2220417120. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220417120

  4. Salazar-Miranda, Arianna+, Zhuangyuan Fan+, Michael Baick, Keith N. Hampton, Fabio Duarte, Becky PY Loo, Edward Glaeser, and Carlo Ratti. "Exploring the social life of urban spaces through AI." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS 122, no. 30 (2025): e2424662122.

  5. Fan, Zhuangyuan*, Tianyu Su, Maoran Sun, Ariel Noyman, Fan Zhang, Alex ‘Sandy Pentland, and Esteban Moro. "Diversity beyond density: Experienced social mixing of urban streets." PNAS nexus 2, no. 4 (2023): pgad077.

  6. Fan, Zhuangyuan, Fan Zhang, and Becky PY Loo. "Rhythm of transit stations-uncovering the activity-travel dynamics of transit-oriented development in the US." IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 23, no. 8 (2021): 12503-12517.

  7. Fan, Zhuangyuan, and Fan Zhang. "Connect the last mile-textual entailment identify efforts in bridging the digital divide." Urban Informatics 1, no. 1 (2022): 10.

  8. Fan, Zhuangyuan, and Becky PY Loo. "Street life and pedestrian activities in smart cities: opportunities and challenges for computational urban science." Computational urban science 1 (2021): 1-17.

  9. Loo, Becky PY, Zhuangyuan Fan*, and Esteban Moro. "Residential and experienced social segregation: the roles of different transport modes, metro extensions, and longitudinal changes in Hong Kong." Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, no. 1 (2024): 1-13.

  10. Loo, Becky PY, and Zhuangyuan Fan*. "Social interaction in public space: Spatial edges, moveable furniture, and visual landmarks." Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 50, no. 9 (2023): 2510-2526.

  11. Loo, Becky PY, Zhuangyuan Fan*, Ting Lian, and Feiyang Zhang. "Using computer vision and machine learning to identify bus safety risk factors." Accident Analysis & Prevention 185 (2023): 107017.