Cities, humanity’s greatest inventions, offer vast opportunities for innovation in science and technology. The increasing availability of big data paints a promising future for our cities. Over the past decade, my work has focused on applying AI to address real-world city challenges. Recent collaborations with city practitioners have deepened my understanding of these complexities and refined my vision for achieving city intelligence.
In this talk, I will present my work on advanced AI techniques for city transportation problems, e.g., reinforcement learning for traffic signal control. I will then expand on this to discuss the resource-centric concept of city intelligence, using real-world practices to showcase its practical applications. Finally, I will emphasize the urgent need for new cyber infrastructure, vital not only for city innovations but for all scientific disciplines driven by big data and intensive computing.
Dr. Zhenhui (Jessie) Li currently serves as the chief scientist at the Yunqi Academy of Engineering, a non-profit institution situated in Hangzhou, China. Prior to this role, she held a tenured associate professor position at Pennsylvania State University. She earned her doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research primarily focuses on advancing computing technologies to harness data for interdisciplinary studies, including those in smart city, environmental science, transportation, and ecology. For further information, you can visit her website at https://jessielzh.com/.