Yang Yang, PhD 杨旸 🎓
Yang Yang, PhD 杨旸

Geospatial AI | Computer Vision | Urban Analytics

About Me

I am an urban data scientist and AI engineer passionate about building innovative solutions to real-world problems using computer vision, geospatial intelligence, and deep learning. I’m also the developer of UrbanTrace, an open-source tool for urban change detection, and have experience applying LLMs and VLMs to analyze social sentiment around policy. I blend urban planning expertise with full-stack AI development to drive impact at scale.

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Interests
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Vision for Remote Sensing Data
  • Geospatial Analysis
Education
  • PhD in City Planning

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • MS Computer Science (Ongoing)

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Master of City and Regional Planning

    Univeristy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • BEng in Urban Planning

    School of Architecture, Southeast University

📚 My Research

My research centers on advancing and applying artificial intelligence techniques—particularly computer vision, deep learning, and large multimodal models (LMMs)—to analyze the urban built environment and its social implications. I am especially interested in developing AI models that can detect and classify urban changes from high-resolution imagery, such as building footprint transformations and street-level activity patterns. My work explores the use of Siamese networks, YOLO-based object detection, and LMMs to extract spatial and semantic information from satellite and street view data. I am also interested in explainable AI and spatially aware machine learning methods to better understand the relationship between urban form, policy interventions, and demographic diversity. Ultimately, my goal is to enhance the scalability, interpretability, and policy relevance of AI applications in urban planning.

I’m interested in all kinds of AI research, Please reach out to collaborate 😃

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