Hello, I'm Luo Wei, a GIScientist, Data Visualizer, Network Scientist, and Epidemologist. Before I joined in NUS, I was a Research Associate in Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I received my Master degree from Geography department at University at Buffalo and PhD degree at Penn State University. I have broad training backgrounds in Geography (GIScience), Public Health (Epidemiology), Computer Science (Visual Analytics), and Network Science. I proposed a new research area: geo-social visual analytics, which aims to integrate spatial analysis, social network analysis, and machine learning into visual analytics environments. I have designed and developed a series of geovisual analytics tools and high performance computational models for infectious disease transmission and control (i.e., COVID-19, Dengue, influenza, HIV), international trade, social media, crime analysis, climate change impacts, and water crisis. Based on the geo-social interaction area (complex system), my research at NUS has two major application research focuses: infectious disease transmission and control (i.e., disease transmission networks) and international trade and supply chain (national or firm networks). Please follow my .
I always welcome students/visiting scholars who are interested in my research to join in my lab.
Yang Zihui Liu Zhaoyin Lawrence Chew Zheng Xiong
Urban analysis and planning GIS and public health AI/ML/DL, Maritime GeoSpatial Applications, Front End Web Development for GIS
Wang Haoran Zhou Yuxuan Su Lixian
Spatial data analysis, AI,spatial modeling,Map visualization Urban planning, spatial analytics Geographic Data Mining
GIS, public health and global trade
Urban Spatial Structure, GIS Analysis, GeoAI, Spatial Statistics
Zhang Shirui He Lingfeng Mohit Chaurasiya
Consumer insights, healthcare analytics, visualization Computational Sociology GIS and ML applications in spatial data analysis
Computational Sociology
Public Policy, Public health, Environmental Economics and Climate Change
(Risk Monitoring and Renewable Energy Practices)
NUS
GE5219 Spatial Programming (2021 2022 Spring) Featured Student Group Projects: Youtube Bilibili
GE4214 Remote Sensing of Environment (2021 Spring)
GE5228 Spatial Big Data and Analytics (2021 Fall) Student Group Projects: Youtube Bilibili
GE5225 Thesis Planning and Implementation (2022 Spring)
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
ARTICLES IN JOURNAL
Luo W, Yuan M. Identifying temporal patterns of multilateral spatial interactions: Using international trades as an example. Transactions in GIS. 2021;00:1– 22. [doi]
CONFERENCE PAPERS
UNPUBLISHED REPORTS
Global Change Assessment Model(GCAM) Visual Analytics
This is a web-based geovisual analytics approach for enabling the exploration of climate scenarios from GCAM. It consists of geographical, temporal, and multidimensional spaces, which allows users to explore water scarcity in terms of geographical variations, temporal change, and scenario comparison with different future climate policies. It further implements clustering approach into a visual analytics environment to facilitate model uncertainty exploration among different climate scenarios.
GeoSocialApp
The GeoSocialApp is a visualization tool that supports the exploration of spatial-social networks among network, geographical, and attribute spaces. Using mixed methods - computational and visual, it enables discovery of complex patterns in large spatial-social network datasets in an effective and efficient way.
GeoSocialEpidemicViz
GeoSocialEpidemic allows researchers understand individual-level epidemic transmission and control scenario design. It allows the exploration of human interaction patterns and design control scenarios based on those local human interaction patterns.
Spatiotemporal Visual Analytics
We develop a visual analytics framework for exploring and comparing the impact of geographical variations for multivariate clustering. Our framework employs a variety of graphical configurations and summary statistics to explore the spatial extents of clustering. It also allows users to discover patterns that can be concealed by traditional global clustering via several interactive visualization techniques including a novel drag & drop clustering difference view.
Geovisual Analytics for Water Scarcity in Niger River Basin
This is a web-based geovisual analytics approach to explore water supply, demand, and scarcity in the Niger River Basin area under various scenarios. This tool can compare and analyze the uncertainty associated with these scenarios. This tool can also provide a collaborative environment.
VAST Challenge 2015: Grand Challenge
The VAST 2015 Grand Challenge focused on a fictional park called DinoFun World where visitors are provided with a handheld device for communicating with park patrons and registering their visits to rides. In order to facilitate this data exploration, we have created a webdeployable system that combines data wrangling, trajectory analysis, network analysis, and interactive visualizations for discovering movement and communication patterns of users and their networks. We earned the Award for Outstanding Comprehensive Submission. Here is the video link.
Senseplace2
This web-based tool provides a visual interface and display methods for query and exploration of large repositories of microblog data. The emphasis is on revealing the where, when, what, and who components of microblog data to support situational awareness in natural disasters and other emergency events. Here is the video link.
STempo
The STempo visualization environment supports the discovery and visual exploration of pattern results from space-time event data. STempo provides a wide range of coordinated view displays with which users can investiage space, time, and attribute data to uncover patterns and phenomena. Here is the video link.
CrimeViz
CrimeViz is an extensible web-based map application that supports exploration of and sensemaking about crimninal activity in space and time. Here is the video link.
PSUMobile
PSUMobile serves volunteered geographic service (VGS) on android platform. The project involves GoogleMaps API (for Android), server-client communication and linked database.
COVID-19
Dengue
Castro, L. A., N. Generous†, Luo W†, A. Pastore y Piontti, K. Martinez, M. F. C. Gomes, D. Osthus, G. Fairchild, A. Ziemann, A. Vespignani, M. Santillana, C. A. Manore & S. Y. Del Valle (2021) Using heterogeneous data to identify signatures of dengue outbreaks at fine spatio-temporal scales across Brazil. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 15, e0009392. [doi]
Influenza
This research examined the impact of geo-social interaction patterns on effective vaccination strategies in the urbanized area of Portland, Oregon. To achieve this goal, we built a large-scale two-layer locationbased social network model including an innovative location-based network to design vaccination strategies and an individual-based spatially explicit disease model to evaluate the efficacy of the above vaccination strategies. We implemented the network model in parallel algorithms to take advantage of a high performance platform of CPU to tackle the challenge of extremely intensive computation with millions of nodes and edges.
HIV
I develop the first agent-based epidemic modeling to understand how HIV self-test impacts HIV incidence among men who have sex with men MSM in different urban settings. All of my codes are open source under a big project called Statnet for the analysis, simulation and visualization of network data in HPC environment: https://github.com/statnet.
Spatial Accessibility
This project analyzes the physical access of populations to health facilities within Niger with an emphasis on the effect of seasonal conditions and the implications of these conditions in terms of availability of adequate health services, provision of drugs and vaccinations.
1. PhD students: Our lab focuses on spatio-temporal analysis, network analysis, geovisual analytics, GeoAI, epidemiology, public health, and international trade/supply chain, feel free to send me an email with your CV. We always welcome self-motivated students like you to apply for our program. We provide Reseaerch Scholarship and other merit-based scholarhips (here). The graduate student applications will be evaluated by the graduate committee. Here is the NUS Geography PhD admission procedure here.
2. Visiting students: Our lab always welcomes visiting students from other institutions. Please check our research and send me a CV to introduce your research and potential collaboration. Thanks.