Yan Wang

University of Florida | UF · Department of Urban and Regional Planning

Curb spaces are important assets to cities. They are often used by travelers to switch transportation means, visitors to access curbside properties, and municipalities to place roadside infrastructure. The promotion of multi-modal transportation and the emergence of new mobility services have complicated both curb environments and their management....

Although the effects of the social norm on mitigating misinformation are identified, scant knowledge exists about the patterns of social norm emergence, such as the patterns and variations of social tipping in online communities with diverse characteristics. Accordingly, this study investigates the features of social tipping in online communities a...

The high infection rate of SARS-CoV-2 makes it urgent to promote vaccination among the public. Previous studies found that people tend to follow the behaviors desired in descriptive social norms, which exist in both social media (e.g., Twitter) and physical-world communities. However, it remains unclear whether and to what extent the descriptive so...

Disaster management agencies have increasingly adopted online tools (e.g., social media platforms) for risk messaging, but the disparities in acquiring and comprehending risk information disseminated in online channels may influence the adoption of risk mitigation actions and exacerbate the rooted vulnerability of marginalized populations. However,...

Climate change and rapid urban development have intensified the impact of hurricanes, especially on the Southeastern Coasts of the United States. Localized and timely risk assessments can facilitate coastal communities’ preparedness and response to imminent hurricanes. Existing assessment methods focused on hurricane risks at large spatial scales,...

The rapid urbanization progress has placed large populations and expensive civil infrastructure at locations exposed to climatic and weather-related hazards (e.g., wind storms and floods), which demands informed and effective planning approaches that help human communities adapt to these adverse events. Emerging research highlights the importance o...

As an essential transportation infrastructure, high-speed rail (HSR) plays an important role in improving connections and economic efficiency among cities which has been proved by numerous studies. In turn, the cities’ economic development levels also influence the planning and construction of HSR. Several qualitative studies pointed out that some...

Cities in many countries are witnessing an era of transformative innovations in vehicular technologies and mobility-on-demand (MoD) services in the context of global initiatives of smart and connected cities. However, the advance in the built environment where vehicles operate has not kept pace. The new MoD especially burdens curb environments in u...

During COVID-19, misinformation on social media has affected people's adoption of appropriate prevention behaviors. Although an array of approaches have been proposed to suppress misinformation, few have investigated the role of disseminating factual information during crises. None has examined its effect on suppressing misinformation quantitativel...

Crowdsourcing the public’s perceptions of the built environment in real time enables more responsive and agile infrastructure and land use planning. Social media has emerged to be an effective platform for citizens, engineers, and planners to communicate opinions and feelings transparently. However, a comprehensive terminological resource of the pe...

Building energy simulation is a powerful tool for developing sustainable and low-emission urban built environments. The conventional simulation model relies on the climate conditions of the entire city that are measured by few weather stations. However, due to urban morphologies, natural conditions, and man-made structures, microclimate conditions...

Current disaster impact assessments are conducted within days after an event and usually with limited workforce and resources. Although many recognize the valuable information attainable in this way, the evidence is likely to be disturbed, and collecting information rapidly is critical for timely disaster response. Many proposed approaches use eith...

This research intends to answer: how do (i) generation frequency and (ii) retweeting count of health agencies' messages impact the exposure of the general users to vaccine-related misinformation on Twitter? We creatively employed a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) System Dynamics paradigm to model interactions between message dissemination of 1...

Severe tropical cyclones impose threats on highly populated coastal urban areas, thereby, understanding and predicting human movements plays a critical role in evaluating disaster resilience of human society. However, limited research has focused on tropical cyclones and their influence on human mobility resilience. This preliminary study examined...

The increasing frequency and intensity of hurricane hazards have raised the urgency of improving hurricane warning effectiveness, especially in terms of motivating the evacuation of people living in high-risk areas. Traditional warnings for hurricanes have limitations of sending a general message for coarse spatial scales (e.g., county level) and d...

The increasing accessibility to digital traces of human whereabouts in cities has offered numerous new opportunities for exploring patterns of human mobility in urban spaces. Prior research pointed out that there exist two distinct subpopulations in cities, namely returners and explorers, whose mobility patterns differ in the extent to which their...

During COVID-19, misinformation on social media affects the adoption of appropriate prevention behaviors. It is urgent to suppress the misinformation to prevent negative public health consequences. Although an array of studies has proposed misinformation suppression strategies, few have investigated the role of predominant credible information duri...

During COVID-19, social media has played an important role for public health agencies and government stakeholders (i.e. actors) to disseminate information regarding situations, risks, and personal protective action inhibiting disease spread. However, there have been notable insufficient, incongruent, and inconsistent communications regarding the pa...

Cities worldwide are vulnerable to unpredictable extreme events such as disasters and public health crises. Urban big data and data-driven technologies have played an increasingly important role in building smart and resilient cities that can respond rapidly to these perturbations. However, many existing approaches had limited capabilities for proc...

Hurricanes are one of the most frequent and destructive disasters in the United States. The events are large scale and have relatively long-term impacts. Social networking platforms such as Twitter can provide real-time information for disaster managers and affected populations during large-scale disasters (e.g., hurricanes), but extracting useful...

During disaster response and recovery stages, stakeholders including governmental agencies collect disaster’s impact information to inform disaster relief, resource allocation, and infrastructure reconstruction. The damage data collected using field surveys and satellite imagery are often not available immediately after a disaster while rapid infor...

The massive crowdsourced data generated on social networking platforms (e.g. Twitter and Flickr) provide free, real-time data for damage assessment (DA) even during catastrophes. Recent studies leveraging crowdsourced data for DA mainly focused on analyzing textual formats. Crowdsourced images can provide rich and objective information about damage...

Improving urban resilience to disasters becomes well-recognized in both industry and academia, but resilience remains challenging to be operationalized, especially in the complex urban contexts. Currently, longitudinal empirical studies on measuring resilience at fine-grains of space and time are lacking. Few methods can quantify resilience at an u...

The complex dynamics of the human-centered natural and built environment (HNBE) have been characterized by emerging and diverging conceptions of resilience (e.g., climate resilience, disaster resilience, social-ecological resilience). Each resilience modifier has produced rich bodies of literature, drawing on distinctive meanings of the term "resil...

Modern cities are facing critical environmental and social problems that are difficult to solve using conventional planning approaches due to the cities' magnitude and complexity. Recent developments in sensing technologies and urban computing, however, integrate new data resources and technologies to tackle these challenges. Popular social network...

The complex dynamics of the human-centered natural and built environment (HNBE) have been characterized by emerging and diverging conceptions of resilience (e.g., climate resilience, disaster resilience, social-ecological resilience). Each resilience modifier has produced rich bodies of literature, drawing on distinctive meanings of the term “resil...

The transportation system in urban areas plays a critical role in evacuation and resource supply during disasters. Transportation diversity, i.e., the availability and distribution of transportation modes across a community, impacts the mode complementarity, which can affect population movements and connectivity among spatial units—especially durin...

Drivers’ behaviors and decision making on the road directly affect the safety of themselves, other drivers, and pedestrians. However, as distinct entities, people cannot predict the motions of surrounding vehicles and they have difficulty in performing safe reactionary driving maneuvers in a short time period. To overcome the limitations of making...

Social networking platforms have been widely employed to detect and track physical events in population-dense urban areas. They can be effective tools to understand what happens and when and where it happens, either retrospectively or in real time. Correspondingly, a variety of approaches have been proposed for detecting either targeted or general...

Understanding population dynamics during natural disasters is important to build urban resilience in preparation for extreme events. Social media has emerged as an important source for disaster managers to identify dynamic polarity of sentiments over the course of disasters, to understand human mobility patterns, and to enhance decision making and...

Increasing frequency of extreme winter storms has resulted in costly damages and a disruptive impact on the northeastern United States. It is important to understand human mobility patterns during such storms for disaster preparation and relief operations. We investigated the effects of severe winter storms on human mobility during a 2015 blizzard...

Fitting parameters of truncated power law and comparison results for daily radii of gyration. (DOC)

Daily data volume of tweets in the studied area from December 29, 2014 to February 8, 2015. (DOC)

Fitting parameters of lognormal distribution for daily displacements and comparison results with other distributions. (DOC)

Number of displacements in different ranges from January 5 to February 8, 2015. (DOC)

Binary logistic regression results for examining the impact of the winter storm on percentages of different displacements. (DOC)

Kolmogorov-Smirnov test between the distributions of MTW-based radii of gyration during distinct weeks. (DOC)

The success of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) largely depends on the performance of tendering processes. This research aims to conduct a comparative analysis of critical factors affecting the effectiveness and efficiency of PPP tendering in Australia and China. A triangulation of literature review, semi-structured interviews and questionnaire s...