CityUHK Department of Data Science Celebrates Three Faculty Publications in Nature Family Journals

The Department of Data Science (DS) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) is proud to highlight three recent Nature family journal publications led by DS faculty members Prof. Minghua CHEN, Prof. Ye WEI and Prof. Jiaman WU. These works reflect DS’s growing international research impact at the intersection of AI, optimization, networks, and sustainable infrastructure, and demonstrate how data science can deliver both methodological breakthroughs and real-world societal benefits.

In Nature Communications, Prof. Minghua CHEN and his team present a scalable framework for carbon-optimized long-haul e-truck operations that jointly plans routing, speed, and charging under time constraints, achieving an additional 25% reduction beyond electrification’s 36%—for a total 61% carbon reduction in U.S. highway simulations—and enabling comparable reductions about 9 years earlier than adoption alone. In Nature Computational Science, Prof. Ye WEI and collaborators introduce DANTE, a data-efficient deep active optimization pipeline that combines a neural surrogate with tree exploration to find superior solutions in complex, high-dimensional problems (demonstrated up to 2,000 dimensions). Also in Nature Communications, Prof. Jiaman WU and collaborators show that incorporating spatial social networks into plug-in EV diffusion models can substantially change long-term projections—yielding 2050 forecasts around one-third of benchmark predictions while better capturing observed spatial patterns important for charging and grid planning.

DS congratulates Prof. Chen, Prof. Wei, and Prof. Wu and their collaborators on these outstanding achievements.