Ran Tao 陶然
Associate Professor of GIScience
School of Geosciences, University of South Florida
E-mail: rtao AT usf.edu
Let the maps speak for themselves
Concentration
Geographic Information Science | spatial interactions | spatial statistics & data mining | geovisualization | geocomputation | movement & mobility analysis | migration | smart city | urban shrinkage | conflicts & territories
Profile
Dr. Ran Tao is an associate professor at the School of Geosciences, University of South Florida. His research centers on GIScience methods and applications, especially in movement analysis, travel behaviors, and spatial interaction phenomena. So far, he has developed a series of spatial flow data analytical methods that blend the latest techniques in spatial statistics, data mining, geovisualization, and geocomputation. His research has been sponsored by NSF, USDOT, and USF Research & Innovation. His works have been published in top-tier journals, such as IJGIS, CEUS, JTRG, Geographical Analysis. Besides, he is leading or engaged in interdisciplinary research projects that exert the power of GIS and spatial analysis, such as human travel behaviors, migration forced by natural disasters, shrinking city phenomena, location optimization of key infrastructure, and disease transmission surveillance. Dr. Tao has been actively serving the professional community. He was the 2022 chair of AAG Specialty Group Cyberinfrastructure. He also serves as the NSF proposal reviewer, editorial board member of Humanities and Social Sciences Communication, and guest editor of special issues on Applied Sciences and IJGI.
Education
Ph.D. 2017. Geography and Urban Regional Analysis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
B.E. 2012. Remote Sensing Science and Technology, Wuhan University, China
Recent Publications (Selected)
Ran Tao, Jean-Claude Thill. (2025). A Reciprocal Statistic for Detecting the Full Range of Local Patterns of Bivariate Spatial Association. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2477675
Yuzhou Chen, Ran Tao*, Qiwei Ma, Mingshu Wang. (2025). Shrinking cities in China's urban network: a data-driven exploration of migration and investment flows. Applied Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2025.103664
Zhenzhi Jiao, Ran Tao*. (2025). Geographical Graph Attention Networks: Spatial Deep Learning Models Based on Spatial Similarity. Transactions in GIS. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tgis.70029
Zhenzhi Jiao, Ran Tao*. (2025). Geographical Gaussian Process Regression: A Spatial Machine Learning Model Based on Spatial Similarity. Geographical Analysis https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12423
Ran Tao, Xiankui Yang, Feng Hao, Peng Chen. (2024). Demographic Disparity and Influences in Electric Vehicle Adoption: A Florida Case Study. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. 136: 104465. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2024.104465.
Yuzhou Chen, Qiwei Ma, Ran Tao*. (2024). Addressing the Fixed Effects in Gravity Model based on Origin-Destination Pairs. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2024.2343763.
Jinwen Xu, Ran Tao*. (2024). Map Reading and Analysis with GPT-4V(ision). ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 13(4), 127. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi13040127
Qiwei Ma, Anqi Liu, Yuzhou Chen, Ran Tao*. (2024). Border Effects for Domestic Travel in China during COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Transport Geography, 116, 103857. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2024.103857
Ran Tao, Yuzhou Chen, Jean-Claude Thill. (2023). Spatiotemporal Association in Flow Data: A Space-Time Flow LISA Approach. Computer, Environment and Urban Systems. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2023.102042
Ran Tao, Jinwen Xu. (2023). Mapping with ChatGPT. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information: 12(7), 284
Yuzhou Chen, Qiwei Ma, Zhaoya Gong, Ran Tao* (2023). Exploring the Spatiotemporal Relationships Between Search Flows and Travel Flows. Transactions in GIS
Lauren Carter and Ran Tao* (2023). Evaluating COVID-19’s Impacts on Puerto Rican’s Travel Behaviors. Geo-Spatial Information Science.
Ran Tao and Yuzhou Chen. (2023). Applying Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) to Analyze Longitudinal Data: The Absolute Perspective. Geographical Analysis.