Hanyong Xu

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Nice to meet you!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Science at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT, advised by Professor Jinhua Zhao. I am a member of the JTL Urban Mobility Lab (JTL) and affiliated with the Data + Feminism Lab. I seek to leverage the power of data science, algorithms, and visualization to lead to better urban planning, public policy making, and business growth. My current research focuses on:

  • responsible data science and AI in urban science;
  • platform economy and urban form.

Prior to joining DUSP, I accumulated three years of professional experience as both a data analyst and a GIS specialist at Meituan and CityDNA Technology, orchestrating data science and web-based solutions for decision-makers in urban planning and e-commerce. I hold a Master of Urban Spatial Analytics from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and an Honors Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Architectural Design and Economics from the University of Toronto.

news

Apr 28, 2025 Hanyong and her collaborators’ research “Mitigating Spatial Disparity in Urban Prediction Using Residual-Aware Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks: A Chicago Case Study.” was presented at The International Workshop on Spatio-Temporal Data Mining from the Web WebST’25, held in conjunction with the 2025 ACM Web Conference at Sydney, Australia, and received the Best Paper Award.
Oct 23, 2024 Hanyong presented at the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting at Seattle, US for her research “Navigating Algorithmic Unfairness in Ride-Hailing: Examining Disparate Impacts of Transportation Network Company Algorithms in New York City.”
Sep 4, 2024 Hanyong presented at the Conference in Emerging Technologies in Transportation Systems (TRC-30) at Heraklion, Greece for their research “Large Language Model for Travel Behavior Prediction”.
Apr 22, 2024 Hanyong has been selected as the Design & Technology Fellow at FASPE. She will embark on a journey to Germany and Poland in May and June to study ethical considerations in the context of the Holocaust. See report here.

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