Xihan Yao

Xihan Yao

Ph.D. Student
UT Austin

[Award] First Place Award at CyberTraining Summer School 2025

1 minute read

Published:

I’m thrilled to share that my team won First Place at the 2025 CyberTraining Summer School Competition hosted by Texas A&M University!

Project Highlights

Project Title: Assessing Instance-based Disaster Impact Through Multimodal Geospatial Data with Damage Prediction and Demographic Attributes

Team Members: Jikun Liu, Xihan Yao (myself), Akhil Anil Rajput, and Ashritha Bugada

Our project developed a comprehensive framework for assessing disaster impacts by integrating multimodal geospatial data with machine learning models to predict building damage and analyze demographic vulnerabilities. This work demonstrates how advanced GeoAI methods and diverse geospatial datasets can support disaster preparedness and resilience planning.

Competition Experience

The CyberTraining Summer School brought together exceptional graduate students and early-career researchers from across the United States to work on challenging problems at the intersection of cyberinfrastructure and geospatial science. Over the course of the intensive program, our team collaborated to develop, test, and present our research to a panel of distinguished judges including Dr. Michael Goodchild, Dr. Shaowen Wang, and Dr. Zhenhua He.

The final presentation took place on September 24, 2025, and it was an incredible opportunity to showcase our work and receive valuable feedback from experts in the field.

Looking Forward

This award reflects the dedication and collaborative spirit of our team members. It reinforces my commitment to developing practical GeoAI solutions that address real-world challenges in disaster management and environmental resilience. I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in this program and connect with a wonderful community of researchers who share similar interests in geospatial science and cyberinfrastructure.

Looking forward to continuing this work and contributing to the broader effort of making our communities more resilient to natural hazards!

For more information about the CyberTraining program, visit the Texas A&M Cyberinfrastructure and Spatial Decision Intelligence Research Group.

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