Si Chen, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator · Assistant Professor, Urban and Regional Planning
School of Planning, Design and Construction, MSU
Dr. Chen works on urban informatics and data-driven decision support: computer vision applied to street-view imagery, social media analytics, and AI-enhanced participatory decision-support systems. She has taught smart cities and urban modeling to students from many backgrounds, in person and online, and developed Smart Cities, Urban Informatics and Urban Design at the University of Oklahoma before bringing related content into UP 478 at MSU.
Jie Hou, Ph.D.
Co-Principal Investigator · Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, MSU
Dr. Hou works on machine learning, deep learning, computational biology, and AI-driven workflow automation. He received the Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award at Saint Louis University and has published on teaching coding in the age of AI through ACM SIGCSE, including a hands-on tutorial on process feedback at the 2025 SIGCSE Technical Symposium. In Urban AI he designs the AI/ML components and makes sure every workflow is usable by students with no programming background.
Yijia (Ayla) Wen, Ph.D.
Co-Instructor · Language Models in Decision Support
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pulte Institute for Global Development, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Wen works on city networks and on the text-analysis methods this course teaches: social network analysis, text mining, natural language processing, econometrics, and GIS. Her research takes a relational view of urban development, building networks of innovation, transportation, migration, trade, and stakeholder communication to ask whether a city's position in them shapes its ability to grow, adapt, and recover. She received her Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from Florida State University in 2025.
Sean Tian
Graduate Teaching Assistant
School of Planning, Design and Construction, MSU
Runs the analytic labs — k-means clustering, spatial clustering, time series and text mining — including the TA demo, the breakout, and feedback on what teams produce.
Yura Gao
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, MSU
Runs the decision-support labs — risk response and the DSS AI lab — and supports teams as they build their scenario comparisons and final recommendations.
Contact
Questions about registration, accommodations, or bringing Urban AI to your student organization: contact the instructional team through the course Teams site or the School of Planning, Design and Construction.
Students who need accommodations should also contact the MSU Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities; we arrange support before the cohort begins wherever possible.