About
Fan Yao is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Statistics & Operations Research. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2025. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned a Master of Science in Computational Mathematics in 2016 and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 2013, both from Peking University. From 2023 to 2025, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on modeling human–AI interactions to better understand their societal impacts and to design interventions that promote socially beneficial outcomes with theoretical guarantees. He draws on mathematical tools from algorithmic game theory, statistical learning theory, online learning, and optimization. A central application of his work is analyzing and shaping multi-party interactions in online recommendation platforms and social media, where the behaviors of users, creators, and algorithms intertwine.
Research topics
- Geology
- Oceanography
- Environmental science
- Geography
- Biology
- Climatology
- Meteorology
- Ecology
- Water resource management
- Environmental engineering
Selected publications
Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress
Advances in Space Research · 2021 · 295 citations
In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contribut…
GIES Case Study on Feng County Burdock of the Ancient Yellow River Floodplain
GCdataPR · 2025-04-08
dataset1st authorCorrespondingUNC Libraries · 2025-08-02
articleOpen accessUNC Libraries · 2024-10-22
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLakes provide important water resources and many essential ecosystem services. Some of Earth's largest lakes recently reached record‐low levels, suggesting increasing threats from climate change and anthropogenic activities. Yet, continuous monitoring of lake levels is challenging at a global scale due to the sparse in situ gauging network and the limited spatial or temporal coverage of satellite altimeters. A few pioneering studies used water areas and hypsometric curves to reconstruct water le…
The Potential of Hydrogeodesy to Address Water‐Related and Sustainability Challenges
UNC Libraries · 2024-11-14
articleOpen accessIncreasing climatic and human pressures are changing the world's water resources and hydrological processes at unprecedented rates. Understanding these changes requires comprehensive monitoring of water resources. Hydrogeodesy, the science that measures the Earth's solid and aquatic surfaces, gravity field, and their changes over time, delivers a range of novel monitoring tools that are complementary to traditional hydrological methods. It encompasses geodetic technologies such as Altimetry, Int…
Frequent coauthors
- 66 shared
Jean‐François Crétaux
Laboratoire d’Études en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales
- 56 shared
Chao Wang
- 48 shared
Ben Livneh
University of Colorado Boulder
- 46 shared
Shuai Zhang
- 42 shared
Balaji Rajagopalan
- 42 shared
Jida Wang
- 42 shared
Kehan Yang
University of Washington
- 42 shared
Xiao Yang
Southern Methodist University
Education
- 2020
Ph.D., Department of Geography
Kansas State University
- 2015
M.S., Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
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