Xinyue Ye

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 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, 6th in Spatial Data Science, and 19th in GIScience. He is also among the world’s top 2% scientists by Stanford University. 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, 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.