Talks

2026

1. AAG

   Grammar of olfactory imagination: Linguistic and spatial logics of smell, memory, and place

   Qingqing Chen

   AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California, United States, Mar 2026

   Abs Slides

   Cities are often understood through their functional and visual dimensions, while everyday sensory experiences that shape how people feel in urban spaces remain largely underexplored. Among these, smell is a particularly understudied sense, even though it connects closely with emotion, memory and place. Historically, smells have been treated as nuisances to be removed through zoning and environmental regulations. Such practices risk the homogenization of urban environments, potentially diluting the emotional and cultural ties that link people to place. This study posits smells as an important aspect of urban wellbeing and sensory richness. To build toward this olfactory lens, the study examines over 500 visitor entries from the Scent Library at the Rubin Museum of Art, where participants recalled their smell memories through paired texts and drawings. We combined thematic and semantic coding with text mining and image analysis to identify recurring patterns in how people express smell experience. These analyses form the basis for a dual grammar of olfactory imagination—one linguistic and one spatial—that reveals the mental syntax through which smell mediates memory and attachment. Specifically, the linguistic grammar constructs a co-occurrence matrix that captures a triadic relationship among smell objects, spatial anchors and emotions, while the spatial grammar maps scene logics aligned with Lynch’s typologies of path, nodes and edges. Together, the results show how olfactory imagination produces its own cognitive syntax linking everyday experience, extending the visual discourse in urban studies and contributing another building block to the growing body of multisensory experience research.

2025

1. HeRoP Invited talk

   Making Smell Count: Invoking olfactory experience in urban wellbeing and spatial analysis

   Qingqing Chen

   Healthy Regions & Policies Lab, Virtual, Nov 2025

   Abs Poster

   Invited talk

   Smells can shape people’s perceptions of urban spaces, influencing how individuals relate to their urban environment physically and emotionally. Although the urban environment has long been conceived as a multisensory experience, research has mainly focused on the visual dimension, leaving smell largely understudied. This research introduces “olfactory thinking”, which posits smell as an important aspect of urban wellbeing and sensory richness. To begin to understand this relatively neglected sensory dimension in urban studies, this research first employs in-depth interviews with participants from nine countries to understand the everyday smell encounters that influence how people experience and interpret urban spaces. These insights reveal the nuanced roles of smell in shaping wellbeing, identity, and belonging, as well as inform potential strategies for integrating olfactory considerations into urban design and policy. The second part of this research develops a flexible and efficient bottom-up framework for capturing and classifying perceived urban smells from individuals based on geosocial media data. We take New York City as a case study and decode perceived smells by teasing out specific smell-related indicator words through text mining techniques from a long-term geotagged Twitter data. The results demonstrate that the proposed multifaceted approach, combining quantitative analysis with qualitative insights, can not only reveal “hidden” influential neighborhoods with clear spatial smell patterns, but also capture elusive smells that may otherwise be overlooked. By making perceived smells measurable and visible, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of smellscapes and people’s sensory experiences within the urban environment. Overall, this research opens up new possibilities for understanding urban spaces through an olfactory lens, contributing to the broader field of multisensory urban experience research

2. AAG

   Multisensory experiences: The connection between the smell and vision in understanding urban environments

   Qingqing Chen and Andrew Crooks

   AAG Annual Meeting, Detroit, Michigan, United States, Mar 2025

   Abs

   Smell is a crucial transversal sense, which bridges the tangible aspects of urban environments, such as exhaust and garbage, with their intangible impacts on emotions, social interactions and well-being. Despite its crucial role in our everyday life, many urban studies primarily focus on the visual dimension, potentially introducing biases in our understanding of urban spaces. This research transcends this visual-centric bias by integrating the olfactory perceptions to investigate the nuanced relationship between smell and vision in urban environments. Specifically, we utilize advanced semantic segmentation to extract visual elements from street view imagery (i.e., Mapillay) and apply casual forest analysis to examine their causal effects on smell expectations recorded from human participants. These expectations, often tied to personal experiences and/or cultural associations, are compared with real-environment smell experiences derived from geosocial media (i.e., Twitter/X). The results show that visual cues can predict smells in straightforward urban settings, such as small parks or less densely populated areas. However, in complex urban environments, the predictive power of visual cues diminishes as diverse and overlapping scents obscure specific smells, even in visually distinct areas. These findings underscore the importance of a multisensory approach in urban studies, enhancing our understanding of the complex interplay between sensory experiences and informing urban design strategies that integrate multiple senses to create more engaging and inclusive environments. This is especially important for individuals with sensory impairments, such as anosmia or visual impairments, who rely on other senses to compensate for their perception of urban environments.

2024

1. GU

   The Impact of COVID-19 on Urban Hotspots Vitality: An illustrative study on human footfall in Auckland through mobile location data

   I-Ting Chuang and Qingqing Chen

   The 8th International Conference on Green Urbanisum, Virtual, Oct 2024

   Abs Slides

   The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s daily lives since its outbreak, taking the discussion around urban space recovery to the forefront. Locational data streaming provides opportunities to explore how individuals utilise urban spaces while their daily routines are disrupted. In this study, we build on the transformation of social behaviours imposed by the government’s emergency policies to explore the impact and recovery of visiting patterns in urban hotspots in Auckland, New Zealand. The “urban hotspots” here refer to vital urban places that attract both dense (high frequency) and diverse (visitors from different places) visitors. To quantify the impacts, we utilised mobile location data, which consists of 85.53 million data points collected from around 323k users in 2020. We then analysed and compared the changing visiting patterns in urban hotspots before and after two stringent COVID-19 lockdowns bi-weekly. Our findings suggest that, in addition to essential services (supermarkets and medical institutions), urban parks are a well-recovered urban infrastructure that offers crucial support for people. This result provides empirical evidence of the added value of urban parks to inform the planning and rethinking of urban structure strategies as part of the city’s post-COVID-19 recovery.

2. AAG

   Mapping the Invisible: Decoding Perceived Urban Smells through Geosocial Media in New York City

   Qingqing Chen, Ate Poorthuis, and Andrew Crooks

   AAG Annual Meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, Apr 2024

   Abs

   Smells can shape people’s perceptions of urban spaces, influencing how individuals relate themselves to the environment both physically and emotionally. Although the urban environment has long been conceived as a multisensory experience, research has mainly focused on the visual dimension, leaving smell largely understudied. This paper aims to construct a flexible and efficient bottom-up framework for capturing and classifying perceived urban smells from individuals based on geosocial media data. Thus, increasing our understanding of this relatively neglected sensory dimension in urban studies. We take New York City as a case study and decode perceived smells by teasing out specific smell-related indicator words through text mining techniques from a historical set of geosocial media data (i.e., Twitter/X). The dataset consists of over 56 million data points sent by more than 3.2 million users. The results demonstrate that this approach, which combines quantitative analysis with qualitative insights, can not only reveal “hidden” places with clear spatial smell patterns, but also capture elusive smells that may otherwise be overlooked. By making perceived smells measurable and visible, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of smellscapes and people’s sensory experiences within the urban environment. Overall, we hope our study opens up new possibilities for understanding urban spaces through an olfactory lens and, more broadly, multisensory urban experience research.

3. SAP Invited lecture

   Beyond sight: Exploring urban environments through smell.

   Qingqing Chen

   School of Architecture and Planning, Auckland, New Zealand, Jul 2024

   Invited lecture

4. FCR Invited seminar

   Mapping the Invisible: Decoding Perceived Urban Smells through Geosocial Media in New York City

   Qingqing Chen

   Future Cities Research Hub & NGĀ ARA WHETŪ, Auckland, New Zealand, Jul 2024

   Abs Poster

   Invited seminar

   Smells can shape people’s perceptions of urban spaces, influencing how individuals relate themselves to the environment both physically and emotionally. Although the urban environment has long been conceived as a multisensory experience, research has mainly focused on the visual dimension, leaving smell largely understudied. This paper aims to construct a flexible and efficient bottom-up framework for capturing and classifying perceived urban smells from individuals based on geosocial media data. Thus, increasing our understanding of this relatively neglected sensory dimension in urban studies. We take New York City as a case study and decode perceived smells by teasing out specific smell-related indicator words through text mining techniques from a historical set of geosocial media data (i.e., Twitter/X). The dataset consists of over 56 million data points sent by more than 3.2 million users. The results demonstrate that this approach, which combines quantitative analysis with qualitative insights, can not only reveal “hidden” places with clear spatial smell patterns, but also capture elusive smells that may otherwise be overlooked. By making perceived smells measurable and visible, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of smellscapes and people’s sensory experiences within the urban environment. Overall, we hope our study opens up new possibilities for understanding urban spaces through an olfactory lens and, more broadly, multisensory urban experience research.

5. MIT SCL

   Where to go?

   Qingqing Chen

   MIT Senseable City Lab, Boston, Massachusetts, United States, Feb 2024
6. AI & Health

   A Tale of Vaccination Debates & Public Responses: Data-driven Insights from a Multi-medium Exploration during the COVID-19 Era

   Qingqing Chen, Andrew Crooks, Adam Sullivan, and 2 more authors

   The first UB AI & Health Symposium, Buffalo, New York, United States, Feb 2024

   Poster

2023

1. ECTQG

   The variegated bias of activity spaces derived from mobility data

   Ate Poorthuis and Qingqing Chen

   European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography, Braga, Portugal, Sep 2023

   PDF
2. SDSS

   Community Resilience to Wildfires: A Network Analysis Approach by Utilizing Human Mobility Data

   Qingqing Chen, Boyu Wang, and Andrew Crooks

   The Fourth Spatial Data Science Symposium, Buffalo, New York, United States, Sep 2023

   Slides
3. I-GUIDE

   International Supply Chain Shocks in a Metacoupled World

   Kate Brandt, Qingqing Chen, Keiko Nomura, and 5 more authors

   I-GUIDE Summer School, Boulder, Colorado, United States, Aug 2023

   Video Slides
4. PIPP

   A Tale of Vaccination Debates & Public Responses: Data-driven Insights from a Multi-medium Exploration

   Qingqing Chen and Andrew Crooks

   UB PIPP Modeling Workshop, Buffalo, New York, United States, Jul 2023

   Slides
5. AAG

   Community Resilience to Wildfires: A Network Analysis Approach by Utilizing Human Mobility Data

   Qingqing Chen, Boyu Wang, and Andrew Crooks

   AAG Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, United States, Mar 2023

   Abs Video Poster Slides

   Disasters have been a long-standing concern to societies at large. With growing attention being paid to resilient communities, such concern has been brought to the forefront of resilience studies. However, there is a wide variety of definitions with respect to resilience, and a precise definition has yet to emerge. Moreover, much work to date has often focused only on the immediate response to an event, thus investigating the resilience of an area over a prolonged period of time has remained largely unexplored. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel framework utilizing network analysis and concepts from disaster science (e.g., the resilience triangle) to quantify the long-term impacts of wildfires. Taking the Mendocino Complex and Camp wildfires - the largest and most deadly wildfires in California to date, respectively - as case studies, we capture the robustness and vulnerability of communities based on human mobility data from 2018 to 2019. The results show that demographic and socioeconomic characteristics alone only partially capture community resilience, however, by leveraging human mobility data and network analysis techniques, we can enhance our understanding of resilience over space and time, providing a new lens to study disasters and their long-term impacts on society.

6. Spatial@UCSB

   Categorizing Urban Space based on Visitor Density and Diversity: A view through social media data

   I-Ting Chuang, Qingqing Chen, and Ate Poorthuis

   UCSB Spatial Lightning Talks, Zoom, Mar 2023

   Abs Video Slides

   Analyses of urban spaces have often stressed the importance of both the density and diversity of the people they attract. However, the diversity of people is a challenging concept to operationalize within the context of urban spaces, which is why many evaluations of urban space have relied primarily on density-based measures. We argue that a focus on only one of the two aspects misses important aspects of the variety of urban spaces in our cities. To address this, we design a methodology that evaluates both the density and diversity of human behavior in urban spaces based on geosocial media data. We operationalize density as the frequency of tweets from visitors to a particular location and diversity as the variety of the home neighborhoods of those visitors. Taking Singapore as a test case, we identify networks between the home neighborhoods of 28k Twitter users based on 2.2 million geolocated tweets collected between 2012 and 2016. Based on these data, we categorize the urban landscape of Singapore into four ?performance? categories, namely High-Density/High-Diversity, High-Density/Low-Diversity, Low-Density/High-Diversity, and Low-Density/Low-Diversity. Our findings illustrate that this combined indicator provides useful nuance compared to differentiation between well and less performing spaces based on density alone. By enabling a categorization of urban spaces that fits closer to the diversity of human behavior in these spaces, human mobility data sets, such as the social media data we use, open the door to a practical evaluation of the design and planning of our heterogeneous urban environment.

2022

1. AAG

   Tracking the Dynamics of Vaccination Sentiment in Large-Scale Social Media Data

   Qingqing Chen and Andrew Crooks

   AAG Annual Meeting, Zoom, Feb 2022

   Abs Poster Slides

   The COVID-19 virus has caused and continues to cause unprecedented impacts on the life trajectories of millions of people globally. Recently, to combat the transmission of the virus, vaccination campaigns around the world have become prevalent. However, while many see such campaigns as positive (e.g., protecting lives), others see them as negative (e.g., the side effects that are not fully understood scientifically), resulting in diverse sentiments towards vaccination campaigns. In addition, the diverse sentiments have seldom been systematically quantified let alone their dynamic changes over space and time. To shed light on this issue, we propose an approach to analyze vaccine sentiments in space and time by using supervised machine learning combined with word embedding techniques. Taking the United States as a test case, we utilize a Twitter dataset (approximately 11.7 million tweets) from January 2015 to July 2021 and measure and map vaccine sentiments (Pro-vaccine, Anti-vaccine, and Neutral) across the nation. In doing so, we can capture the heterogeneous public opinions within social media discussions regarding vaccination among states. Results show how positive sentiment in social media has a strong correlation with the actual vaccinated population. Furthermore, we introduce a simple ratio between Anti and Pro-vaccine as a proxy to quantify vaccine hesitancy and show how our results align with other traditional survey approaches. The proposed approach illustrates the potential to monitor the dynamics of vaccine opinion distribution online, which we hope, can be helpful to explain vaccination rates for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

2021

1. SIGSPATIAL

   Delineating a ‘15-Minute City’: An Agent-based Modeling Approach to Estimate the Size of Local Communities

   Qingqing Chen and Andrew Crooks

   ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021 International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation, Zoom, Nov 2021

   Abs Video Slides

   With progressively increased people living in cities, and lately the global COVID-19 outbreak, human mobility within cities has changed. Coinciding with this change, is the recent uptake of the ‘15-Minute City’ idea in urban planning around the world. One of the hallmarks of this idea is to create a high quality of life within a city via an acceptable travel distance (i.e., 15 minutes). However, a definitive benchmark for defining a ‘15- Minute City’ has yet to be agreed upon due to the heterogeneous character of urban morphologies worldwide. To shed light on this issue, we develop an agent-based model named ‘D-FMCities’ utilizing realistic street networks and points-of-interest, in this instance the borough of Queens in New York City as a test case. Through our modeling we grow diverse communities from the bottom up and estimate the size of such local communities to delineate 15-minute cities. Our findings suggest that the model could be helpful to detect the flexibility of defining the extent of a ‘15-minute city’ and consequently support uncovering the underlying factors that may affect its various definitions and diverse sizes throughout the world.

2. Urban E-Planing

   Identifying Meaningful Locations of Social Media Users

   I-Ting Chuang and Qingqing Chen

   5th International Conference ‘Urban E-Planning’, Zoom, Sep 2021

   Abs Slides

   The global COVID-19 outbreak has deeply affected everyone’s daily life and constrained human mobility behaviors by the preventive measures put in place to mitigate the transmission. Different mass media channels and live location data streaming techniques have contributed to tracking the spread and predicting the trajectory of the pandemic developments. Moreover, the human mobility patterns hidden in these digital datasets – if properly interpreted- can document and reflect how people cope with the ‘paradoxical’ daily activities when public life and social encounter are prohibited. In this research, we utilize the mobile location data collected from January 2019 to date within Auckland city, New Zealand, to explore the social impacts on urban ‘hotspots’ concerning the transformation of social behaviors. The urban ‘hotspots’ here refer to user-defined urban spaces with crowded human mobility and intensive social and economic activities regardless of their designated urban programs. We first construct the human-geographical networks and compare the pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic human mobility patterns with respect to visitors’ density and diversity. By mapping the density and diversity patterns, we can capture and derive insights from urban ‘hotspots’ spatial distribution changes to identify the adoptable urban space typologies that are quintessential places during the disruptive crisis. The research findings provoke rethinking on our urban spaces design and planning strategies and contribute to better-informed decisions towards resilient urban life environment while countries worldwide are slowly resuming normalcy.

3. Dynamic Modeling

   Human Mobility Simulation: Investigating the impact of urban vitality inidcators on human movements

   Qingqing Chen

   Dynamic Modeling, Zoom, Apr 2021

   Slides

2019

1. GSES & GeoAI-UC

   Identifying Meaningful Locations of Social Media Users

   Qingqing Chen and Ate Poorthuis

   Geoinformatics Week 2019 GSES & GeoAI-UC, Guangzhou, China, Nov 2019

   Abs Slides

   This conference presentation discusses an ensemble approach for meaningful location identification from geotagged social media content through a developed R package. Extracting such ‘meaningful’ locations from geotagged data traces is a cutting-edge research area. However, this field is currently using mostly bespoke, custom approaches that are difficult to verify and/or reproduce. To bring clarity and consistency to this field, we present an easy-to-use software package (written within the R ecosystem, which is one of the industry-standard software/languages for this type of analysis) that allows users to either use several built-in algorithms or easily define their own algorithms. This also enables users to choose an ensemble approach (i.e. using multiple algorithms) to increase the reliability of the extracted locations.Extracting such locations is an essential step in the analysis of geotagged data traces and is most often used to extract home and office locations based on the spatio-temporal behavior of users. Although we use social media data in this presentation, the same methods can be applied to other data sources such as cell phone data or mobile app data that have similar characteristics. Once home locations are extracted, these datasets can then be used to analyze and predict urban mobility patterns, for different groups of people and for different neighborhoods.