Zhicheng Deng

About Me

I am a PhD student at SpaceTimeLab, University College London, supervised by Prof. Tao Cheng and Dr. Konstantin Klemmer. I develop spatiotemporal AI methods for better modelling human mobility and understanding urban systems.

News

Oct 2026Started my PhD at SpaceTimeLab, University College London.
Jul 2026Our paper on delineating hierarchical activity space from urban mobility flows is published in Journal of Transport Geography.
Jun 2026Graduated from Peking University as an Excellent Graduate.
Dec 2025Our paper on fine-tuning LLMs for multi-city human mobility prediction is published in the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025 proceedings.

Selected Publications

For the full list, please see Google Scholar. * corresponding author, † equal contribution.

JTRG2026

Delineating hierarchical activity space from high-resolution urban mobility flows

Deng, Z.†, Gong, Z.†, Thill, J.-C., & Delmelle, E. C.

Paper ↗arXiv ↗ BibTeX

@article{deng2026delineating,
  title   = {Delineating hierarchical activity space from high-resolution urban mobility flows},
  author  = {Deng, Zhicheng and Gong, Zhaoya and Thill, Jean-Claude and Delmelle, Elizabeth C.},
  journal = {Journal of Transport Geography},
  volume  = {135},
  pages   = {104744},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2026.104744}
}

SIGSPATIAL2025

Simple Yet Effective: Supervised Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Multi-City Human Mobility Prediction

Deng, Z., & Gong, Z.

Paper ↗ BibTeX

@inproceedings{deng2025simple,
  title     = {Simple Yet Effective: Supervised Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Multi-City Human Mobility Prediction},
  author    = {Deng, Zhicheng and Gong, Zhaoya},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems},
  pages     = {1254--1257},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1145/3748636.3771320}
}

SIGSPATIAL-W2025

AskNearby: An LLM-Based Application for Neighborhood Information Retrieval and Personalized Cognitive-Map Recommendations

Niu, L.†, Deng, Z.†, Li, B., Huang, N., Liu, R., & Zhang, W.

Paper ↗arXiv ↗ BibTeX

@inproceedings{niu2025asknearby,
  title     = {AskNearby: An LLM-Based Application for Neighborhood Information Retrieval and Personalized Cognitive-Map Recommendations},
  author    = {Niu, Luyao and Deng, Zhicheng and Li, Boyang and Huang, Nuoxian and Liu, Ruiqi and Zhang, Wenjia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery},
  pages     = {22--32},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1145/3764912.3770813}
}

IJGIS2025

Uncovering human behavioral heterogeneity in urban mobility under the impacts of disruptive weather events

Gong, Z., Deng, Z.*, Tang, J., Zhao, H., Liu, Z., & Zhao, P.

Paper ↗Code ↗ BibTeX

@article{gong2024uncovering,
  title   = {Uncovering human behavioral heterogeneity in urban mobility under the impacts of disruptive weather events},
  author  = {Gong, Zhaoya and Deng, Zhicheng and Tang, Junqing and Zhao, Hongbo and Liu, Zhengying and Zhao, Pengjun},
  journal = {International Journal of Geographical Information Science},
  volume  = {39},
  number  = {5},
  pages   = {951--974},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.1080/13658816.2024.2372783}
}

IJGI2022

Identification of Urban Functional Zones Based on the Spatial Specificity of Online Car-Hailing Traffic Cycle

Deng, Z., You, X., Shi, Z., Gao, H., Hu, X., Yu, Z., & Yuan, L.

Paper ↗ BibTeX

@article{deng2022identification,
  title   = {Identification of Urban Functional Zones Based on the Spatial Specificity of Online Car-Hailing Traffic Cycle},
  author  = {Deng, Zhicheng and You, Xiangting and Shi, Zhaoyang and Gao, Hong and Hu, Xu and Yu, Zhaoyuan and Yuan, Linwang},
  journal = {ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information},
  volume  = {11},
  number  = {8},
  pages   = {435},
  year    = {2022},
  doi     = {10.3390/ijgi11080435}
}

Bio

I am a first-year PhD student at UCL SpaceTimeLab. My research investigates how people move through cities and how urban systems evolve, using data-driven and AI-based approaches to generate insights that can meaningfully inform urban planning and policy. I analyze patterns of human mobility and travel behavior to reveal the underlying dynamics of urban life. I also develop advanced AI models that incorporate spatial and temporal structures to better understand and predict complex urban processes. By integrating multiple urban data sources, ranging from traffic flows to earth embeddings, I aim to uncover how different parts of a city function, how residents organize their daily activities, and how people interact with the environment.

Before UCL, I received my M.Sc. in Geography from Peking University in 2026, and my B.Sc. in Geographic Information Science from Nanjing Normal University in 2023, with an exchange semester at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2021–22).