Winston Yap

Winston Yap leads AI for Cities day to day — setting the research roadmap, building the group's modelling and data infrastructure, and mentoring the student leads across each workstream.

He holds a doctorate in urban analytics from the National University of Singapore, where his work at the NUS Urban Analytics Lab centred on urban analytics and 3D city modelling for the planning process. He is the author of Urbanity, an open, feature-rich global network dataset and toolkit for city-scale analysis, and contributed to Global Streetscapes, a dataset of ten million street-level images across 688 cities, and VoxCity, a framework for generating semantic 3D city models from open geospatial data. Before his doctorate he was a research associate at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, working on age-friendly planning and citizen science in Southeast Asian cities.

At Cornell he built Heatscape NYC, the group's first public tool: a 250-metre grid over New York City that scores every populated cell for heat risk and matches it to the cooling intervention its context actually supports.