Dr. Yeran Sun is a Professor at the Aerospace Information Research Institute,Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Dr. Sun received a Bachelor in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in 2004 from Northwest University (China) and a Master of Science in Cartography and Geographic Information Systems in 2005 from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research,Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He received a Ph.D. degree in GIScience from Heidelberg University (Germany) in 2015.

Dr. Sun has published over 60 articles and 3 book chapters, including over SCI/SSCI journal articles. He was a guest editor for several international journals, a reviewer for UK research grant applications, a Technical Program Committee Member of EAI International Conference on Big Data Technologies and Applications, a Program Committee Member of GeoExT ACM SIGSPATIAL and

ECIR GeoExT. He is currently a member of ICA Commission on Location Based Services and International Association for China Planning (IACP).

Employment:

07/2025 – Present  Professor  Aerospace Information Research Institute, CAS

05/2022 – 07/2025  Senior Lecturer  University of Lincoln

02/2020 – 05/2022  Lecturer  Swansea University

03/2019 – 01/2020  Assistant Professor  Sun Yat-sen University

03/2016 – 01/2019  Postdoctoral Research Associate  University of Glasgow

Social & Remote Sensing and Geocomputation; Social Sensing; Spatiotemporal Big Data Analytics and Mining

[1] Sun, Y., Xie, J., Wang, Y., Chan, T.O., & Sun, Z.Y. (2024). Mapping local-scale working population and daytime population densities using points-of-interest and nighttime light satellite imageries. Geo-spatial Information Science, 27(6), 1852–1867.
[2] Sun, Y., Wang, S., Zhang, X., Chan, T.O. & Wu, W. (2021). Estimating local-scale domestic electricity energy consumption using demographic, nighttime light imagery and Twitter data. Energy, 226, 120351.
[3] Sun, Y. & Thakuriah, P. (2021). Public transport availability inequalities and transport poverty risk across England. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 48(9), 2775-2789.
[4] Sun, Y., Wang, S., Xie, J., & Hu, X. (2020). Modelling local-scale violent crime rate: a comparison of eigenvector spatial filtering models and conventional spatial regression models. Professional Geographer, 73(2), 312-321.
[5] Sun, Y., Wang, S., & Wang, Y. (2020). Estimating local-scale urban heat island intensity using nighttime light satellite imageries. Sustainable Cities and Society, 57, 102125.
[6] Sun, Y., Hu, X., & Xie, J. (2020). Spatial inequalities of COVID-19 mortality rate in relation to socioeconomic and environmental factors across England. Science of the Total Environment, 758, 143595.
[7] Sun, Y., Moshfeghi, Y. and Liu, Z. (2017). Exploiting crowdsourced geographic information and GIS for assessment of air pollution exposure during active travel. Journal of Transport & Health, 6, 93-104.
[8] Sun, Y., Mburua, L. and Wang, S. (2016). Analysis of community properties and node properties to understand the structure of the bus transport network. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 450, 523-530.
[9] Sun, Y., Fan, H., Li, M. and Zipf, A. (2016). Identifying the city center using human travel flows generated from location-based social networking data. Environment and Planning B, 43(3), 480-498.
[10] Sun, Y. and Li, M. (2015). Investigation of travel and activity patterns using location-based social network data: a case study of active mobile social media users. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 4(3), 1512-1529.
[11] Sun, Y., Fan, H., Bakillah, M. and Zipf, A. (2015). Road-based Travel Recommendation Using Geo-tagged Images. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 53, 110–122.