To advance research in computational social science, the Computational Social Science Workshop organized by Faculty of Social Sciences regularly invites scholars in relevant fields to share their research findings. The workshop welcomes its first speaker of this academic year–Prof. Dong Liu from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen). He introduced his recent study on “15-Minute City” using Hong Kong as an example.
Proposed by Carlos Moreno in 2016, the concept of the “15-minute city” defines an area of essential daily facilities, such as supermarkets, healthcare facilities, schools, entertainment venues, and public transportation, within 15 minutes through active travel modes like walking and cycling. In this study, Prof. Liu constructed a nuanced, weighted accessibility index that synthesizes a diverse array of multi-source geospatial and social sensing big data, e.g., census records, POI database that identifies essential urban functions, and geotagged Sina Weibo check-ins, to empirically derive and assign evidence-based weights calibrating POI attractiveness across essential urban functions. This study provided a transferable, data-driven framework for quantitatively assessing the 15-minute city development status and delivers actionable insights to guide equitable urban policy and targeted infrastructure investment.
Prof. Liu currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Computational Social Science, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research applies advanced geospatial analysis technologies and focuses on areas such as urban mobility, location accessibility, travel behavior, physical activity, and environmental health. He has published more than 50 papers in renowned SCIE/SSCI journals, with a total citation count of over 1,500 and an H-index of 21.
