Welcome to the Smart, Equitable, Resilient Mobility Systems (SERMOS) Lab!

The SERMOS Lab is a transdisciplinary research lab led by Dr. Xilei Zhao, Assistant Professor in Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida. We invent and apply AI and data science methods to create smart, equitable, resilient mobility systems. Our transdisciplinary team is made up of transportation engineers, computer scientists, systems engineers, and social scientists. Our expertise includes:

• Data analytics and travel behavior modeling for innovative mobility (e.g., ridesourcing and micromobility)
• Modeling and planning evacuation
• Quantifying resilience for critical infrastructure systems, societal systems, and communities

Openings!

SERMOS Lab is always looking for talented students to join our team!! The openings are at all levels, i.e., undergraduate/graduate researchers, Ph.D. students, and postdoctoral fellows. To express your interest in joining our team, please email your complete CV and a short cover letter (up to one page) to Dr. Xilei Zhao (xilei.zhao@essie.ufl.edu). With our strong commitment to diversity in engineering education, research, and practice, we especially encourage minorities and women to apply.

Recent News!

• Jan 2025: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Simulating human behavior under earthquake early warning,” was accepted for publication in Heliyon. 
• Jan 2025: Our lab presented six papers at TRB 2025!
  • Real-Time Bus Travel Time Prediction and Reliability Quantification: A Hybrid Non-Stationary Markov Model
  • Achieving Fairness of Spatio-Temporal Travel Demand Modeling with Dynamic Weighting
  • Hurricane Evacuation Analysis with Large-Scale Mobile Device Location Data During Hurricane Ian
  • Assessing Evacuation Destination Preference During Hurricane Ian: A Gravity Model Approach with Large-Scale Mobile Device Location Data
  • Evacuation Route Choice During the 2021 Marshall Fire
  • Investigating Wildfire Evacuation Decision Using Hybrid Choice Modeling
• Dec 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Hurricane Evacuation Analysis with Large-scale Mobile Device Location Data during Hurricane Ian,” was accepted for publication in Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. 
• Oct 2024: Dr. Zhao moderated the “Transit-Oriented Developments/Transit-Oriented Communities” session in the 2024 Research-to-Practice Transit Symposium.
• Oct 2024: Our lab members, including Dr. Sangung Park (PI), Ms. Yuran Sun (co-PI), and Dr. Zhao (co-PI), won a PHEER grant, entitled “Developing a Dynamic Social Vulnerability Index for Public Health.”
• Oct 2024: Dr. Zhao (PI) won a NIST grant, entitled “Debiasing Wildfire Emergency Management (WEM) Platform to Promote Equitable Wildfire Preparedness, Response, and Recovery.”
• Sep 2024: Dr. Zhao (co-PI) won an NSF award, entitled “Collaborative Research: SAI: Safe bicycle infrastructure: Preparing for an e-bike future.”
• Sep 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Situational-aware multi-graph convolutional recurrent network (SA-MGCRN) for travel demand forecasting during wildfires,” was published in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.
• Sep 2024: Dr. Zhao and Dr. Riding gave an invited talk, entitled “AI application in pavement management,” at the 2024 Pavewise Concrete Conference, Howey-In-The-Hills, FL.
• Aug 2024: We hosted the first SERMOS Lab and JTG Lab Joint Mini Symposium at UF! 

• Aug 2024: Dr. Zhao was featured in a BBC article, entitled “Why category 1 hurricanes can be as damaging as the strongest storms.”
• Aug 2024: Dr. Zhao (PI) won an NSF award, entitled “Assessing and Mitigating Spatial Bias of Large-Scale Mobile Location Data for Human Mobility Analysis.”
• Aug 2024: Dr. Sangung Park from Purdue University joined our lab as a postdoc! Welcome!!
• July 2024: Our lab’s postdoc, Dr. Luyu Liu, left our lab to join Auburn University as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Congratulations, Luyu!
• June 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “ICN: Interactive convolutional network for forecasting travel demand of shared micromobility,” was accepted for publication in GeoInformatica.
• June 2024: Dr. Zhao and Dr. Lovreglio gave an invited talk, entitled “Wildfire Evacuation Investigations from Questionnaire Data to GPS data,” at the Seminar Series: Spring 24’ hosted by the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
• May 2024: Dr. Zhao (co-PI) won an FDOT grant, entitled “A synthesis study of electric vehicles’ costs, economic impacts, and infrastructure implications.”
• May 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Social vulnerabilities and wildfire evacuations: A case study of the 2019 Kincade fire,” was accepted for publication in Safety Science.
• May 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Real-time urban traffic monitoring using transit buses as probes,” was accepted for publication in the Transportation Research Record.
• May 2024: Dr. Zhao gave an invited presentation, entitled “Using AI to optimize emergency evacuations,” at FDOT’s Transportation Technology Research Symposium.
• Apr 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Travel Demand Forecasting: A Fair AI Approach,” was accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. 
• Apr 2024: Dr. Liu presented our lab’s work, entitled “Assessing Evacuation Behavior during Hurricane Ian with Large-scale GPS Data,” at the 2024 AAG Annual Meeting.
• Apr 2024: Dr. Zhao was selected to become a member of TRB AMR20: Standing Committee on Disaster Response, Emergency Evacuations, and Business Continuity.  
• Apr 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Destination unknown: Examining wildfire evacuee trips using GPS data,” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Transport Geography.
• Mar 2024: Dr. Zhao (PI) won the 2024 NSF CAREER Award, entitled “CAREER: An Integrated Trustworthy AI Research and Education Framework for Modeling Human Behavior in Climate Disasters.”
• Mar 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Scalable and Rapid Building Damage Detection after Hurricane Ian using Causal Bayesian Networks and InSAR Imagery,” was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 
• Mar 2024: Dr. Zhao (UF PI) won a NIST grant, entitled “WUI READY: A Serious Game for Enhancing WUI Fire Hazard Mitigation Methodology Adoption.”
• Feb 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Modeling protective action decision-making in earthquakes by using explainable machine learning and video data,” was accepted for publication in Scientific Reports. 
• Feb 2024: Dr. Zhao gave a presentation, entitled “Fusing Small and Big Data to Advance Understanding of Hurricane Evacuation,” at the 2024 Gulf of Mexico Conference.
• Feb 2024: Our lab’s paper, entitled “Predicting hurricane evacuation decisions with interpretable machine learning methods,” was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science.
• Jan 2024: Our lab’s book chapter, entitled “Digital Technologies for Fire Evacuations,” was published by Springer in Intelligent Building Fire Safety and Smart Firefighting. 
• Jan 2024: Our lab’s PhD students gave two lectern and one poster presentations at TRB 2024!