Academic Salon: Urban Fractal Phenomena and Multi‑Agent Modeling – Lecture by Prof. Li Yong
In a June 1 online salon hosted by the Tsinghua‑Meituan Digital Life Joint Research Institute, Prof. Li Yong presented a novel multi‑agent urban mobility model that links individual movement and social interaction to reproduce city‑scale fractal laws such as Zipf’s distribution, super‑linear scaling, and negative‑exponential population patterns, illustrating a new bridge between micro‑level behavior and macro‑level urban evolution.
The Tsinghua‑Meituan Digital Life Joint Research Institute hosts an academic salon series that started in March 2022. The salon regularly invites scholars and industry experts to share frontier technologies and industrial practice across multiple technical fields, aiming to promote industry‑academia‑research collaboration and drive scientific innovation.
Topic Overview
Cities are spatial aggregations of people and resources, providing conditions for large‑scale social collaboration and infrastructure reuse, thereby significantly enhancing socio‑economic efficiency. Over long time scales, city development exhibits notable fractal phenomena, three major laws: the Zipf’s law of city‑area distribution, the super‑linear relationship between city area and population, and the negative‑exponential spatial distribution of population. The microscopic mechanisms and evolutionary models behind these macroscopic regularities are a long‑standing interdisciplinary challenge in urban science, involving physics, informatics, and behavioral science.
This talk introduces an innovative approach that transforms the traditional “model‑driven” and “simulation‑based” research paradigm. It proposes a human mobility model for urban environments that simultaneously captures social interaction mechanisms and memory‑based movement, and builds a multi‑agent city evolution model on top of it. Theoretical analysis and high‑efficiency simulation demonstrate that the model can accurately predict the fractal phenomenon and the three development laws, providing a theoretical bridge between macro‑level urban evolution and micro‑level individual mobility.
Speaker Biography
Li Yong, Associate Professor (Long‑term appointment) in the Department of Electronics, Tsinghua University.
He is a doctoral supervisor, a Ministry of Education Changjiang Scholar, and a principal investigator of national key R&D projects. Li has been engaged in data science and intelligence research, publishing over 100 papers in top‑tier conferences (KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, UbiComp) and Nature sub‑journals, with more than 14,300 citations. He has received six best‑paper awards/nominations, ten papers listed as ESI highly‑cited, and numerous honors including IEEE ComSoc Asia‑Pacific Outstanding Young Scholar, Ministry of Education’s First‑Class Scientific and Technological Progress Award, and the Wu Wen‑jun Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Youth Award.
Schedule
Date: June 1 (Wednesday) 10:00‑11:00
Venue: Online via Tencent Meeting (Meeting ID: 726-532-231)
Notes
1. Scan the QR code below to join the event WeChat group for reminders.
2. Please download the Tencent Meeting app in advance and use the meeting ID 726-532-231 to enter the reservation room.
Signed-in readers can open the original source through BestHub's protected redirect.
This article has been distilled and summarized from source material, then republished for learning and reference. If you believe it infringes your rights, please contactand we will review it promptly.
Meituan Technology Team
Over 10,000 engineers powering China’s leading lifestyle services e‑commerce platform. Supporting hundreds of millions of consumers, millions of merchants across 2,000+ industries. This is the public channel for the tech teams behind Meituan, Dianping, Meituan Waimai, Meituan Select, and related services.
How this landed with the community
Was this worth your time?
0 Comments
Thoughtful readers leave field notes, pushback, and hard-won operational detail here.