Description
Xilei Zhao, Engr ’17 (PhD), associate professor and director of artificial intelligence initiatives in the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment at the University of Florida, will present “Advancing Wildfire Evacuation Understanding and Modeling Through Big Data and Behavioral Theory-Informed AI,” hosted by the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering.
Abstract:
Increasing frequency and severity of wildfires have led to growing impacts on human lives, civil infrastructure, and the economy. Building wildfire resilience requires a deep understanding and robust modeling of human behavior before, during, and after wildfire events. Research on harnessing big data and AI to enhance wildfire evacuation analysis and modeling is emerging but still in its infancy. To address this research gap, this presentation first introduces an analytical framework that systematically extracts individuals’ evacuation behaviors (including whether, when, where, and how to evacuate) from large-scale mobile location data. It then presents a behavioral theory-informed AI framework for modeling human behavior in disasters. This framework is demonstrated through two applications: (1) A situational-aware deep learning model for real-time travel demand forecasting during wildfires, and (2) a large language model-based approach to modeling evacuees’ decision-making processes in wildfires.
