Research

Selected Publications

• npj Natural Hazards Li, X., Gao, S., Gao, R., & Xu, S. (2025).
  Causal spatially heterogeneous Bayesian networks with GPs and normalizing flows for seismic multi-hazard estimation.
  npj Natural Hazards, 2(1), 69.
• npj Natural Hazards Li, X., and Xu, S. (2025).
  Scalable Variational Learning for Noisy-OR Bayesian Networks with Normalizing Flows for Complex Cascading Disaster Systems.
  npj Natural Hazards, 2(1), 30.
• EQ Spectra Editor’s Choice Li, X., Yu, X., Burgi, P.B., Wald, D.J., Hu, X., and Xu, S. (2025).
  Rapid Building Damage Estimates from the M7.8 Turkey Earthquake sequence via Causality-informed Bayesian Inference from Satellite Imagery.
  Earthquake Spectra, p.87552930241290501.
• ACM BuildSys Sun, Q., Hults, G., & Xu, S. (2025).
  Decision-focused Sensing and Forecasting for Adaptive and Rapid Flood Response: An Implicit Learning Approach.
  In Proceedings of ACM BuildSys ’25. (Acceptance rate: 28%).
• ACL Main Chen, R., Wang, C., Sun, Y., Zhao, X., & Xu, S. (2025).
  From perceptions to decisions: Wildfire evacuation decision prediction with behavioral theory-informed LLMs.
  In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Main Conference), pp. 29754–29778, Vienna, Austria. (Acceptance rate: 20.8%).
• npj Natural Hazards 2024 Annual Cover Paper Yu, X., Song, Y., Li, X., Song, X., Fan, X., Wang, F., Xu, S. and Hu, X., (2024).
  Intelligent assessment of building damage of 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake by multiple remote sensing approaches.
  npj Natural Hazards, 1(1), p.3.
• IJDRR Highlighted by NOAA Wang, C., Liu, Y., Zhang, X., Li, X., Paramygin, V., Sheng, P., Zhao, X. and Xu, S. (2024).
  Scalable and rapid building damage detection after hurricane Ian using causal Bayesian networks and InSAR imagery.
  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, p.104371.
• NeurIPS He, J., Du, J., Xu, S., Ma, W. (2024).
  Preventing Model Collapse in Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis by Noise Regularization.
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). (Acceptance rate: 25.8%).
• KDD Li, X., Bürgi, P.M., Ma, W., Noh, H.Y., Wald, D.J. and Xu, S. (2023).
  DisasterNet: Causal Bayesian Networks with Normalizing Flows for Cascading Hazards Estimation from Satellite Imagery.
  In Proceedings of 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’23). (Acceptance rate: 22%).
• SHM ASME SHM Best Journal Paper Award Liu, J., Xu, S., Berges, M. and Noh, H.Y., (2023).
  HierMUD: Hierarchical Multi-task Unsupervised Domain Adaptation between Bridges for Drive-by Damage Diagnosis.
  Structural Health Monitoring Journal, 22(3), pp.1941-1968.
• Nature Comm Xu, S., Dimasaka, J., Wald, D.J. and Noh, H.Y. (2022).
  Seismic Multi-hazard and Impact Estimation via Causal Inference from Satellite Imagery.
  Nature Communications, 13(1), pp.1–13.
• MSSP ASME SHM Best Journal Paper Award Xu, S. and Noh, H.Y. (2021).
  PhyMDAN: Physics-informed knowledge transfer between buildings for seismic damage diagnosis through adversarial learning.
  Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 151, p.107374.
• IEEE TMC Xu, S., Chen, X., Joe-Wong, C., Zhang, P. and Noh, H.Y. (2019).
  iLOCuS: Incentivizing Vehicle Mobility to Optimize Sensing Distribution in Crowd Sensing.
  IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. DOI: 10.1109/TMC.2019.2915838.

Grants

Major federal and competitive grants (PI / Co-PI)

• NSF Sole PI CAREER: Open-source Probabilistic AI Infrastructure for Dynamic Cascading Disaster Impacts Modeling and Assessment.
• NSF PI Collaborative Research: FIRE-WUI: A Convergent Framework for Learning-Based Simulation of Collective Human Behavior in Wildfires.
• NSF Disaster Resilience Research Grant Lead PI Rapid, Scalable, and Joint Assessment of Seismic Multi-Hazards and Impacts: From Satellite Images to Causality-Informed Deep Bayesian Networks.
• NSF PI CLIMA / Collaborative Research: Riders on the Storm: Climate Adaptation of Housing Infrastructure for Resilient Communities in Coastal Cities.
• NSF PI Collaborative Research: SAI: Safe bicycle infrastructure – Preparing for an e-bike future.
• NIST MSE Co-PI Enhancing Wildfire Emergency Management (WEM) Platform with Near Real-Time Sensing Data and Deep Learning.
• USDOT Co-PI Tier-1 UTC Center: Rural Equitable and Accessible Transportation Center (REAT).
• USGS Earthquake Hazards Program 2023 Sole PI Integrating Satellite Imagery and PAGER Loss Modeling for Improved Building Damage Estimates.
• USGS Earthquake Hazards Program 2022 Sole PI Causal Graph-based Joint Estimation of Ground Failure and Building Damage from Satellite Images in Near-Real Time.
• OVPR / Provostial Seed Lead PI Reasoning and Mitigating Community Disparity-induced Social-technical Biases for Equitable Road Maintenance.
• U.S. Department of Education Co-PI GAANN Fellowship in Civil Engineering for Advancing Smart Infrastructure Systems.