Yunfan Kang is a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working at the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), with a research focus on spatial analysis and big spatial data management. His current work centers on geospatial GeoAI and generative AI, and he is the lead developer of the I-GUIDE platform’s user environment. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from The University of Hong Kong and has received multiple honors and awards for his academic excellence and research contributions.

News

• Apr 2026: New journal paper “Progressive and Scalable Hotspot Detection through Local K-Function in Spatial Networks” published in ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems.
• Jan 2026: New journal paper “IMS: Incremental Max-P Regionalization with Statistical Constraints” published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
• Jul 2025: Presented “I-GUIDE Platform for Geospatial Data-intensive Convergence Research and Education” at PEARC ‘25.
• Oct 2024: “Pyneapple-L: Scalable Expressive Learning-based Spatial Analysis” appeared at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2024.
• May 2024: “Pyneapple-R: Scalable and Expressive Spatial Regionalization” appeared at IEEE ICDE 2024.