Welcome to the Geospatial Network Analysis and Visualization (GeoNAVI) Lab. The lab is led by Dr. Yujie Hu, Associate Professor of Spatial Networks, in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida.
We are a research group with interests in studying urban–such as transportation, human mobility, and accessibility–from a geographic perspective. GIScience and Network Science are the disciplinary foundations of our research, but our research also draw on many other fields that study urban, such as transportation engineering, social networks, urban planning, public health, criminology, and environmental science and policy. We are interested in every aspect of urban, but our current research is focused on three main areas:
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- Relationships between people’s mobility within cities—including commuting, healthcare-seeking, and crime—and the urban built environment;
- Spatial accessibility to opportunities, such as jobs, healthcare, food, and transportation infrastructure, and how it is affected by natural hazards;
- Network flow analysis and optimization of travel patterns related to commuting, bike sharing, healthcare, and food delivery.
We approach the above research themes by the development and application of GIS, spatial analysis, network analysis, and visualization techniques to reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors from both ‘small’ and ‘big’ geospatial data. ‘Small’ geospatial data refer to such data as census that are self-reported survey data and are usually small in sample size but rich in attributes. One example is the Census Transportation Planning Products released by the U.S. Census Bureau. ‘Big’ geospatial data refer to a massive amount of passive data and are large in sample size but limited in attributes. Our lab has been analyzing big geospatial data associated with
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- Point patterns, such as traffic crashes and crime incidents;
- Networks, such as movement trajectory (taxi cab GPS trajectory, smart card transaction data) and origin-destination flow (commuting, bike sharing usage, and hospital inpatient discharge).
The goal of our research is to convert data into knowledge to inform and evaluate place-based policies focused on transportation, land use, public health, and community safety.