University of Helsinki
Pengyuan Liu started as a postdoctoral researcher in the YLLI-project (Equality in suburban physical activity environments / Yhdenvertainen liikunnallinen lähiö (YLLI)) in January 2021. He has a computer science background — He finished his BSc in Network Engineering at the Nanjing University of Post and Telecommunication in China 2011-2015, followed by his MSc in Cloud Computing at the University of Leicester in the UK 2015-2016. After his MSc, he did his PhD in Digital Geography with a specific focus on geographical artificial intelligence (GeoAI) and user-generated content (UGC) analysis at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on exploring how the content production of UGC can inform our understanding of place representations and indicate places’ socio-economic characteristics. His research interests cover the disciplines of geographic information science, GeoAI, urban analytics and quantitative human geography. In the YLLI-project, he will contribute to the social media data analysis.
Tua Nylén is a geographer originally from the University of Helsinki. For the next years, she will be working in the Strategic Research Council project CRITICAL (Technological and Societal Innovations to Cultivate Critical Reading in the Internet Era) with a large consortium extending to other Finnish universities. Her focus will be in the critical geomedia reading skills among adolescents. In addition, she will examine critical reading skills as a geographic phenomenon with spatial patterns and underlying socio-economic and demographic drivers. Tua came to this project from the University of Turku, where she worked as a university lecturer in geoinformatics, bringing the geoinformatics curriculum to the era of open science, web-GIS and online/hybrid learning.
“The new project is highly motivating, since it aims at bringing up future citizens with adequate critical reading skills, necessary for making evidence-informed decisions. The work also nicely combines my own fields of expertise, including geospatial data science and geography education.”, Tua says.