CHAO FAN

Howdy! I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University, supervised by Dr. Ali Mostafavi.

I am on job market this year and looking for an Assistant Professor position in a research university.

My research primarily looks into information, human and physical network dynamics in risky and uncertain situations, harnessing data and human-machine intelligence for urban resilience.

Chao Fan

Postdoctoral Research Associate
College of Engineering
Texas A&M University
12/2020 - present

Ph.D., Civil Engineering 08/2017 - 12/2020 Dissertation: Network Dynamics in Flooding Emergencies for Urban Resilience Texas A&M University
M.S., Civil Engineering 09/2016 - 06/2017 Project: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emission in Concrete Production University of California, Davis
B.Eng., Civil Engineering 09/2012 - 06/2016 China University of Mining and Technology

Research Topics

past and current

Disaster/crisis Informatics for Situational Awareness

Relevant journal publications: 3 - 6, 10 - 12.

Coupled Human-Infrastructure Modeling and Analysis

Relevant journal publications: 7 - 9, 15 - 17.

Predictive Modeling of Network Dynamics and Resilience

Relevant journal publications: 18.

Complex Mobility Systems Modeling for Urban Intelligence

Relevant journal publications: 13 - 14.

The goal of my research:
improving the intelligence, resilience and sustainability of cities
facing ever-changing conditions

Journal Papers

(Updated on November 27, 2020) (* Featured research) (12 first-author journal publications)

Most recent:

*18. Fan, C., Jiang, X., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). A network percolation-based contagion model of flood propagation and recession in urban road networks. Scientific Reports, 10, 13481. (IF: 4.00) [Link]
*17. Fan, C., Jiang, Y., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). The role of local influential users in spread of situational crisis information. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, in press. (IF: 5.37)
16. Fan, C., Esparza, M., Dargin, J., Wu., F., Oztekin, B., Mostafavi, A., (2020). Spatial biases in crowdsourced data: Social media content attention concentrates on populous areas in disasters. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 83, 101514. (IF: 4.66) [Link]
*15. Fan, C., Jiang, Y., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). Emergent social cohesion for coping with community disruptions in disasters. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 17(164), 1-10. (IF: 3.75) [Link]
14. Li, Q. , Bessel, L., Xiao, X., Fan, C., Gao, X., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). Disparate patterns of movements and visits to points of interests located in urban hotspots across U.S. metropolitan cities during COVID-19. Royal Society Open Science. in press. (IF: 2.68)
13. Ramchandani, A., Fan, C., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). DeepCOVIDNet: An interpretable deep learning model for predictive surveillance of COVID-19 using heterogeneous features and their interactions. IEEE Access, 8, 159915-159930. (IF: 3.75) [Link]
12. Yang, Y., Zhang, C., Fan, C., Mostafavi, A., & Hu, X., (2020). Towards fairness-aware disaster informatics: an interdisciplinary perspective. IEEE Access, 8, 201040 - 201054. (IF: 3.75) [Link]
*11. Fan, C., Wu, F., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). A hybrid machine learning pipeline for automated mapping of events and locations from social media in disasters. IEEE Access, 8, 10478-10490. (IF: 3.75) [Link]
10. Fan, C., Jiang, Y., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). Social sensing in disaster city digital twin: an integrated textual-visual-geo framework for situational awareness during built environment disruptions. ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering, 36(3), 04020002. (IF: 2.87) [Link]
9. Fan, C., Shen, J., Mostafavi, A., & Hu, X., (2020). Characterizing reticulation in online social networks during disasters. Applied Network Science, 5(29), 1-20. [Link]
8. Fan, C., Jiang, Y., Yang, Y., Zhang, C., & Mostafavi, A., (2020). Crowd or Hubs: information diffusion patterns in online social networks in disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 101498. (IF: 2.90) [Link]

2019:

7. Fan, C., & Mostafavi, A., (2019). Meta-network framework for performance analysis of disaster management System-of-Systems. IEEE Systems Journal, 14(1), 1265-1276. (IF: 3.99) [Link]
*6. Fan, C., & Mostafavi, A., (2019). A graph‐based method for social sensing of infrastructure disruptions in disasters. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 34: 1055–1070. (IF: 8.55) [Link]
5. Fan, C., Zhang, C., Yahja, A., & Mostafavi, A., (2019). Disaster City Digital Twin: a vision for integrating artificial and human intelligence for disaster management. International Journal of Information Management, 102049. (IF: 8.21) [Link]
4. Zhang, C., Fan, C., Yao, W., Hu, X., & Mostafavi, A., (2019). Social media for intelligent public information and warning in disasters: an interdisciplinary review. International Journal of Information Management, 49, 190-207. (IF: 8.21) [Link]
3. Yang, Y., Zhang, C., Fan, C., Yao, W., Huang, R., & Mostafavi, A., (2019). Exploring emergence of influential users on social media during natural disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 38, 101204. (IF: 2.90) [Link]

2018 and before:

2. Fan, C., & Miller, S. A. (2018). Reducing greenhouse gas emissions for prescribed concrete compressive strength. Construction and Building Materials, 167, 918-928. (IF: 4.42) [Link]
1. Dong, Z., Xia, J., Fan, C., & Cao, J. (2015). Activity of calcined coal gangue fine aggregate and its effect on the mechanical behavior of cement mortar. Construction and Building Materials, 100, 63-69. (IF: 4.42) [Link]

Conference Papers

Most recent:

7. Fan, C., Jiang, Y., & Mostafavi, A., (2020, March). Integrated natural language processing and meta-network analysis for social sensing of location-event-actor nexus in disasters. In the Proceedings of Construction Research Congress (CRC2020). [PDF] [Link]
6. Fan, C., Farahmend, H., & Mostafavi, A., (2020, January). Rethinking infrastructure resilience assessment with human sentiment reactions on social media in disasters. In 53rd HAWAII International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-53). ScholarSpace. [PDF] [Link]

2019:

5. Fan, C., Jiang, Y., & Mostafavi, A., (2019, June). Seeding strategies in online social networks for improving information dissemination of built environment disruptions in disasters. In International Conference of Computing in Civil Engineering (i3ce). ASCE. [PDF] [Link]
4. Fan, C., Mostafavi, A., Yao, W., & Huang, R., (2019, January). A graph-based approach for detecting critical infrastructure disruptions on social media in disasters. In 52nd HAWAII International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52) (Best Paper Nomination). ScholarSpace. [PDF] [Link]

2018:

3. Fan, C., & Mostafavi, A. (2018, April). Establishing a framework for disaster management system-of-systems. In 2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), (pp.1-7). IEEE. [PDF] [Link]
2. Fan, C., Mostafavi, A., Gupta, A., & Zhang, C. (2018, June). A system analytics framework for detecting infrastructure-related topics in disasters using social sensing. In Workshop of the European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE), (pp. 74-91). Springer, Cham. [PDF] [Link]
1. Fan, C., Zhang, C., & Mostafavi, A. (2018, June). Meta-network framework for analyzing disaster management system-of-systems. In 13th System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE 2018), (pp.1-7). IEEE. [PDF] [Link]

Teaching & Mentoring

Guest Lecturer - CVEN 641 (Module: Network Dynamics of Project Organizations) (Graduate course) - TAMU - 2020 Spring
Graduate mentor - ENGR 491-509 (Undergraduate course) - TAMU - 2017 Fall - 2020 Spring.
Research mentor - Honor undergraduate and graduate students from computer science and civil engineering - TAMU - 2018 Summer - present.
Reader - ENG 104 (Mechanics of Materials) - UC Davis - 2017 Winter
Reader - ENG 035 (Statics) - UC Davis - 2017 Spring