Lin Chen

About Me

Hello / 你好 / 안녕하세요!

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at SUNLab, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Esteban Moro. I obtained my PhD degree as an HKPFS awardee at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), advised by Prof. Pan Hui. Previously, I was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Yong Li, and a visiting researcher at Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago, advised by Prof. James Evans.

My research interests lie in computational social science, behavioral data science, and urban science. Currently, I mainly focus on human mobility networks, urban inequality, segregation, and urban resilience. I am also actively exploring the potential of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in understanding social networks and urban phenomena!

Research Interests

My research spans several interconnected areas:

Urban Data Science: Understanding urban inequality, segregation, and urban resilience.

LLM Agent and Behavioral Data Science: Designing LLM agents for social network learning, and revealing how human-agent interactions affect collective outcomes.

Recent News

[2026-02] We're excited to host the UrbanNetAI satellite at NetSci'26! Welcome to submit your abstract and participate!

[2026-01] Our work, Invisible Walls in Cities: Designing LLM Agent to Predict Urban Segregation Experience with Social Media Content, is accepted to TheWebConf Web4Good track! [Arxiv].

[2025-10] Invited talk at the Network Science Institute, Boston.

[2025-09] I started my postdoctoral journey at SUNLab, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University!

[2025-08] Invited keynote at CCS UrbanSys, Siena, Italy.

[2025-06] New preprint: AI Agent Behavioral Science [Arxiv].

[2025-04] I defended my PhD thesis at CSE, HKUST!

[2025-01] Our perspective paper, Using human mobility data to quantify experienced urban inequalities, is now online in Nature Human Behaviour.

[2024-08] Our work, Large Language Model-driven Meta-structure Discovery in Heterogeneous Information Network, is published in KDD'24.

[2022-08] Our work, Strategic COVID-19 vaccine distribution can simultaneously elevate social utility and equity, is published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Selected Awards

Federation of Hong Kong Chiu Chow Community Organizations Fellowship, 2025

Federation of Hong Kong Chiu Chow Community Organizations, 2025

Student Travel Award

ACM SIGKDD, 2024

Rising Stars Women in Engineering

Asian Deans' Forum, 2023

Student Travel Grant

ICWSM, 2023

Overseas Research Award

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2022

Hong Kong PhD Fellowship (HKPFS)

Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, 2020-2024

Shanghai Outstanding Bachelor Graduate

Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, 2020

China National Scholarship

Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2019

China National Scholarship

Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2018

China National Scholarship

Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2017

Academic Service

Program Committee: ICWSM, IJCAI AI and Social Good

Conference Reviewer: TNSE, TheWebConf, IC2S2, IMWUT, WSDM, ICWSM, KDD, IJCAI

Journal Reviewer: EPJ Data Science, Journal of Social Computing

Administrator for 大模型智能体 (a WeChat public account sharing up-to-date LLM agent research)