Dr. Xinyue Ye is an Endowed Shelby Distinguished Professor of GeoAI (Geospatial AI) at the University of Alabama. He is the Founding Director of ALA-GAINS (Alabama Geospatial AI & Information Science) Hub, and also serves as the Co-Director of Alabama Center for the Advancement of AI (https://ai.eng.ua.edu/people/). Dr. Ye is the Founding Director of the Future of AI Lecture Series. He serves as the AI for Social Impact Core Lead for the Institute for Social Science Research, the Chief AI and Digital Twin R&D Officer for the Alabama Transportation Institute, and the Director of AI for CONSERVE at the Alabama Water Institute. His research integrates GeoAI with disciplines spanning the humanities to engineering, addressing challenges such as infrastructure resilience, extreme weather preparedness, urban revitalization, and community perceptions. This work highlights the dynamic interplay between technology, policy, and human behavior in shaping sustainable and livable cities. His research focuses on urban digital twins and precision public health, emphasising real-time 3D modeling and AI-enabled participatory planning. Additionally, he investigates urban environmental science, with a focus on understanding the impacts of weather extremes on the built environment and human mobility.

Dr. Ye was elected as a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 2022. He received the AAG Distinguished Scholar Award in 2025. Dr. Ye was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2025. According to the most recent Google Scholar Citation Global Rankings, he is ranked 2nd in Urban Analytics, 4th in GeoAI, 5th in Spatial Data Science, 9th in Spatial Econometrics, and 16th in GIScience. Since 2020, he has been listed among the top 2% of scientists globally, based on citation data compiled by Stanford University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Before joining the University of Alabama, Dr. Ye held several roles at Texas A&M University (TAMU), including Harold Adams Endowed Professor in Urban Informatics, Chancellor EDGES Fellow, and Stellar Faculty Provost Target Hire. He directed the Center for Geospatial Sciences, Applications, and Technology (GeoSAT), which was established by the Texas A&M Board of Regents, and served as the first Faculty Fellow for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships in the Division of Research.

Dr. Ye received the national first-place research award from the University Economic Development Association in 2011. He received the Emerging Scholar Award (2012) and Distinguished Scholar Award (2022) from the AAG Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group, and the AAG Distinguished Scholar Award in 2025. He has also received faculty research awards in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning (TAMU, 2023), Computational Science (New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2019), and Geography (Kent State University, 2016). In 2024, he received the J. Thomas Regan Interdisciplinary Prize from TAMU for his research and teaching in the built and virtual environment disciplines. His paper, “Developing Campus Digital Twin Using Interactive Visual Analytics Approach,” received the Best Paper Award from Frontiers of Urban and Rural Planning (FURP), published by Springer. Dr. Ye has received the Top 10 Most Cited Paper honor from Transactions in GIS twice. In 2021, he was named one of the top 10 young scientists by the World Geospatial Developers Conference.

His work has been funded by the National Academies, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Justice, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation, Department of the Treasury, Microsoft, Baptist Health Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Prof. Ye is the Elected President of the Spatial Decision Support Consortium, the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Computational Urban Science (Both ESCI and EI Indexed), and Editor-in-Chief of Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy (SSCI Indexed). He also serves as the associate editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, npj Natural Hazards, and Stochastic Environmental Research & Risk Assessment. Since 2011, he has been a co-editor of Annual Proceeding of International Conference on Geoinformatics supported by IEEE GRSS.

The AAG Regional Development and Planning Distinguished Scholar Award (2022) recognized Dr. Ye’s contributions to the field of urban and regional science through mentorship and teaching across disciplines, from humanities to engineering. All the doctoral graduates he has advised/co-advised, spanning seven disciplines, have secured esteemed positions in academia, government, or industry at institutions and companies such as Rice University, Case Western Reserve University, Houston Methodist, Google, Amazon, among others. Dr. Ye is actively recruiting postdocs and doctoral students with strong spatial programming skills. Please contact him directly at xye10@ua.edu with your publications and proof of coding capabilities.