I am honored to have received the Best Student Presentation Award (Silver Prize) at the 9th International Conference on Integrated Land-use Transport Modeling (ILUTM-9) held in Wuhan, China.

The conference, hosted by the Wuhan University of Technology and co-hosted by the Beijing Institute of Technology, served as a premier international platform for discussing AI-powered integrated modeling and decision-making support for future urban planning.

Research Highlight: Digital Visibility, Physical Obscurity

Our award-winning presentation, titled Digital Visibility, Physical Obscurity: Uncovering the Location Strategies of Ghost Kitchens in Platform Urbanism explores the tension between digital platform presence and physical urban footprints.

By utilizing multimodal data fusion and spatial modeling, our study:

• Investigates how ghost kitchens challenge existing urban governance and regulatory frameworks.
• Demonstrates how AI can reduce information asymmetries in the digital era.
• Introduces LLM4GKID, our open-source tool that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify ghost kitchens at scale.

Collaborative Success

This project is the result of a wonderful collaboration with Yihong Tang (McGill University) and Chaofan Wang, under the expert supervision of Prof. Tianren Yang. Notably, the methodology presented has recently been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the ILUTM-9 organizing committee and the award committee for this recognition, and to my team for their invaluable contributions.

Links:

• Project Website: LLM4GKID
• Conference Event Details