Dr. Xinyue Ye (Ph.D., University of California at Santa Barbara and San Diego State University, USA) is Associate Professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA. Dr. Ye integrates urban science and computational science towards smart cities and spatial social network research. He models the space-time perspective of socioeconomic inequality and human dynamics for applications in various domains, such as economic development, disaster response, transportation and land use, public health, and urban crime. He was elected chair of the American Association of Geographers (AAG)’s Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group in 2014. He also served as president of the International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Science from 2016 to 2017. Since 2011, he has been serving as Associate Editor of Stochastic Environmental Research & Risk Assessment, a leading SCI journal in spatial and environmental statistical modeling. Dr. Ye has published over 150 journal articles. He won the national first-place research award from University Economic Development Association in 2011 and received the Regional Development and Planning emerging scholar award from AAG in 2012. Dr. Ye’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Energy.Dr. Hui Lin (Ph.D., University at Buffalo, USA) is Professor and Dean at the School of Geography and Environment of Jiangxi Normal University (JXNU), Nanchang, China. He is also Emeritus Professor at the Department of Geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He was the founding director of Institute of Space and Earth Information Science of CUHK (2005-2019) and the founding president of International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences (CPGIS) in 1992. Dr. Lin’smajor research interests include environmental remote sensing, virtual geographic environments (VGE), and spatially integrated humanities and social sciences. He has authored or co-authored over 300 journal papers, 12 books and 1 atlas. He was honoured as guest professorships from universities in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, and USA. Dr. Lin received CPGIS Distinguished Scholar Award in 2015, the Outstanding Contribution Award from Asia Association of Remote Sensing (AARS) in 2009 and 2019, and the E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award from American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 2017. He was elected the academician of International Eurasian Academy of Sciences (IEAS) in 1995, Member of Scientific Committee of the International Center on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage (WHIST), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011, and Vice Chairman, China National Committee of International Society of Digital Earth in 2012.
