My name is Rui Zhu, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. My major is Geographic Information Science (GIScience) with emphases on spatial statistics and geospatial semantics. I work with Dr. Krzysztof Janowicz and Dr. Phaedon Kyriakidis. I am a member of Space and Time Knowledge Organization Lab (STKO). My current research focuses on revisiting fundamentals in spatiotemporal analysis (e.g., high-order spatial interactions and direction effect), and adopting spatiotemporal thinking into deep learning in order to explore complex spatial structures of geographic information (e.g., remotely sensed images, points of interest in urban cities, and the simulation of cellular automata). The semantics of extracted patterns are further investigated to uncover meaningful knowledge. Another research topic I am working on is to apply spatial statistics to understand the semantics of geospatial concepts in a data-driven approach; one example is to answer the classic geographic question what is a mountain and what is a hill? Furthermore, I also have experiences researching on household travel behaviors, spatiotemporally enriched knowledge graphs, geospatial question answering, urban dynamics and so on.