Dr Rui Zhu

Rui Zhu is a Senior Lecturer in Spatial Data Science at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. He researches on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), geospatial semantics, and spatially explicit machine learning.

Broadly speaking, Rui studies how humans and machines (AI) organise and process geospatial information. More specifically, he combines theory-informed (e.g. geography and semantics) and data-driven approaches (e.g. machine learning and spatial statistics) to address geospatial challenges such as data interoperability, spatial predictions, and spatial reasoning. His work has been applied to a wide range of applications, including urban studies, public health, environmental modelling, as well as humanitarian relief.

Rui publishes across disciplines to advance the geospatial and social awareness of AI, such as AI Magazine, International Journal of Geographic Information Science, Conference on Spatial Information Theory, ACM SIGSPATIAL, and International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

Rui received a Ph.D. in Geography from the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained a M.S. degree in Information Sciences from the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh. He has also worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Spatial Studies and Data Science, University of California, Santa Barbara and a Data Science Intern at the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

Discover more about the accelerator project Rui is working on and meet our other Smart Data Research UK accelerator teams.