Chen Chu

Building wheels for next-generation GeoAI.

chuchen.jpg

Los Angeles

Hi! I am Chen Chu (初晨), I am a second-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California(USC), advised by Professor Cyrus Shahabi. I am passionate about developing SOTA AI models to solve spatial problems, which involved trajectory modeling and prediction, spatial representation learning.

Standing at the frontier that bridges spatial data science and Artificial Intelligence, I believe the next turning point of spatial AI will be brought by a unified representation learning method of space and spatial entities.

Prior to my Ph.D., I earned my Master degree from State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System(LREIS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(UCAS), where I was supervised by Professor Feng Lu and Associate Professor Hengcai Zhang.

My research interests include Human Mobility Modeling, Spatially Representation Learning, Generative AI.

Please feel free to reach out! chenchu@usc.edu

selected publications

2025

  1. Geo2Vec.png
    Geo2Vec: Shape- and Distance-Aware Neural Representation of Geospatial Entities
    Chen Chu, and Cyrus Shahabi
    arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19305, 2025
  2. SIGSPATIAL25.png
    One Model, Many Cities: A Transferable Social Relationship Inference Framework for Human Mobility Data
    Chen Chu, Cyrus Shahabi, Emmanuel Tung, and 1 more author
    ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025, 2025

2024

  1. diffusion.gif
    Simulating Human Mobility with a Trajectory Generation Framework Based on Diffusion Model
    Chen Chu, Zhang Hengcai, and Lu Feng
    International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Aug 2024

2023

  1. DeepIndoorCrowd.png
    DeepIndoorCrowd: Predicting Crowd Flow in Indoor Shopping Malls with an Interpretable Transformer Network
    Chen Chu, Zhang Hengcai, Wang Peixiao, and 1 more author
    Transactions in GIS, Jul 2023
  2. Manuscript_JATM.png
    Assessing Impacts of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict on Global Air Transportation: from the View of Mass Flight Trajectories
    Chen Chu, Zhang Hengcai, Zhang Jiayin, and 1 more author
    Journal of Air Transport Management, Dec 2023

2022

  1. JGIS.png
    Inferring Consumption Behavior of Customers in Shopping Malls from Indoor Trajectories
    Chen Chu, Zhang Hengcai, and Lu Feng
    Journal of Geo-Information Science, Dec 2022

2021

  1. light2021.png
    Assessing Light Pollution Using POI and Luojia1-01 Night-Time Imagery From a Quantitative Perspective at City Scale
    Fei Zhao(Supervisor), Chen Chu, Rui Liu, and 6 more authors
    IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, Dec 2021

Awards

Jun 30, 2024 2024 Outstanding Graduates of IGSNRR, CAS (top 5%)
Nov 16, 2023 2023 Second place at ACM SIGSPATIAL Student Research Competition graduate track
Nov 12, 2023 2023 ACM SIGSPATIAL Student Travel Grant
Oct 23, 2023 2023 First Class Director’s Scholarship of IGSNRR, CAS (top 15%)
Jun 1, 2023 2023 Merit Student of University of Chinese Academy of Science
Jan 1, 2022 2022 Outstanding Student Award of University of Chinese Academy of Science
Jul 1, 2021 2021 Principal’s Scholarship of Yunnan University (10 out of all 4000+ undergraduate students)
Dec 31, 2020 2020 Chinese National Scholarship (top 0.5%)
Jun 1, 2020 2020 Excellent Student Cadre of Yunnan Province

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