Dr. Vivian W. H. Wong
AI Initiative, College of Design, Construction and Planning
M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management (50%)
Department of Urban and Regional Planning (50%)
My research connects sensing, AI, and simulation to help people and engineering systems adapt to changing conditions.
Recent Updates
New preprint, "Measuring Decision-Scale Use in Tool-Augmented LLMs", introducing a contrastive urban benchmark for tool-augmented language models, posted to arXiv. Update: Accepted to the COLM 2026 AI Measurement Science (AIMS) Workshop (non-archival).
New preprint, "Do VLMs See What Sensors Feel?", on expert-guided wheelchair accessibility assessment from street view, posted to arXiv. Update: Accepted to IEEE/CVF WACV 2027.
Guest speaker at Montgomery Blair High School on "Modeling and Learning Manufacturing and Facility Management: A Spatio-Temporal Graph Approach."
Paper on spatio-temporal crowd forecasting with adjacency information ("ST-DIF") accepted to ACM BuildSys 2026.
New preprint, "CRoPE", on efficient parametrization of rotary positional embedding, posted to arXiv.
Invited talk at the Transportation Seminar at University of South Florida.
Paper on RL-based resource-constrained scheduling for post-disaster housing reconstruction in Lombok, Indonesia accepted to Construction Research Congress 2026.
Poster abstract on dynamic mobility barrier detection accepted to ACM BuildSys'25 (Golden, CO).
Invited talk at the "Nigiwai: Placemaking Driven by Human Behavior" workshop at Stanford University.
Awarded the UF Research Opportunity Seed Fund (ROSF) as Lead PI for "Sensing for Empathetic Built Environments".
Paper on post-earthquake housing reconstruction simulation + RL accepted to ASCE i3CE 2025 (New Orleans, LA).
Paper on data-driven predictive modeling of pedestrian crowd flow accepted to IEEE Big Data 2024 (Washington, DC).
Research Areas
Sensing, AI, and simulation for adaptive decisions in physical and socio-technical systems, connecting observations to timely responses as conditions and resource availability change.
My research focuses on two connected areas:
Smart manufacturing, operations, and logistics
Graph representations, reinforcement learning, and simulation for manufacturing dispatch, resource allocation, and post-disaster reconstruction.
Human mobility and accessible built environments
Multimodal sensing and machine learning for wheelchair accessibility assessment, pedestrian crowd forecasting, and understanding how physical conditions shape human movement.
Publications
- Workshop Measuring Decision-Scale Use in Tool-Augmented LLMs: A Contrastive Urban Benchmark
- Conf ST-DIF: A Spatio-Temporal Framework Integrating Adjacency Information in Crowd Forecasting
- Conf Resource-Constrained Scheduling for Post-Disaster Housing Reconstruction: A Reinforcement Learning-Based Simulation Study in Lombok, Indonesia
- Conf Do VLMs See What Sensors Feel? A Scalable Expert-Guided Design for Wheelchair Accessibility Assessment from Street View
- Preprint CRoPE: Efficient Parametrization of Rotary Positional Embedding
- Conf Dynamic Mobility Barrier Detection Using Wheelchair-mounted Sensors
- Conf PyRebuild: A Python-Based Simulator For the Dynamic Post-Earthquake Housing Reconstruction Problem
- Conf Enhancing Data-Driven Predictive Modeling of Pedestrian Crowd Flow with Spatial Priors
- Journal Identification and Interpretation of Melt Pool Shapes in Laser Powder Bed Fusion with Machine Learning
- Journal Generating Dispatching Rules for the Interrupting Swap-Allowed Blocking Job Shop Problem
- Journal Fusion of CCTV Video and Spatial Information for Automated Crowd Congestion Monitoring
- Conf Explainability of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Melt Pool Classification Using Deep Learning
- Conf Modeling Crowd Data and Spatial Connectivity as Graphs for Crowd Flow Forecasting
- Journal Segmentation of Additive Manufacturing Defects Using U-Net
- Conf Anomaly Detection of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Melt Pool Images
- Conf Segmentation of Additive Manufacturing Defects Using U-Net
- Conf An Assistive Learning Workflow on Annotating Images for Object Detection
Teaching
I believe in providing students with an adaptable, interdisciplinary skillset through hands-on labs and intuitive understanding of engineering systems, and quantitative input-output analysis.
AI in the Built Environment (DCP 4300)
Fall 2025 | University of Florida
View Student Final ProjectsIntro to Planning Information Systems (URP 4273)
Fall 2025 | University of Florida
Intro to Planning Information Systems (URP 4273/6270)
Fall 2024 | University of Florida
Academic Service
- Publication Chair: ACM BuildSys 2025
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE TNNLS, Engineering Applications of AI, Automation in Construction, Optimization Letters.
Research Team
Support Student Research & Innovation
Gifts directly fund student researchers, assistantships, equipment, and conference travel. All contributions are processed through the University of Florida Foundation, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization.
Donate to the Integrated Learning Systems Fund →Status: I am not currently hiring for Ph.D. researcher positions. If you are curious about research and want to learn more about it, please email me. Self-funded postdoctoral scholars interested in research with either Rinker or URP may also email me.
Current Advisees
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Ao He (Ph.D. Student)
Research: Bicyclist safety, behavior, and flow patterns; computer vision.
aohe@ufl.edu -
Qianchen Yu (Ph.D. Student)
Research: Post-disaster rebuild modeling and simulation; reinforcement learning.
Website | yu.qianchen@ufl.edu -
Isabelle Gatmaitan (Undergraduate)
Research: Empathetic built environment and sensing.
igatmaitan@ufl.edu
Miscellaneous
Personal
I was born in the lovely city of Toronto, Canada and a permanent resident of the U.S.. I also spent a delightful amount of my childhood in Hong Kong and Beijing.
Table Tennis
I am a passionate competitive table tennis player. Beyond playing, I serve the community as:
- Tournament Director: Ocala Table Tennis Club. I organize tournaments and manage the club's web presence.
- Faculty Advisor: University of Florida Table Tennis Club.
- Formerly player for Stanford Table Tennis Team (2022-2024).
Curriculum Vitae
Education
-
Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (2024)
Stanford University | Advisor: Kincho H. Law -
M.S. in Civil Engineering (2019)
Stanford University -
B.S. in Civil Engineering (2017)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Academic Appointments
-
Assistant Professor (2024 - Present)
University of Florida
Industry Experience
Developed models for evaluating brands in Softlines Discovery.
Contributed to large-scale urban data initiatives for city management.