Dr. Chen’s research philosophy encompasses turning data into information, knowledge, and actionable insight. His research interests are in the broad area of productive uses of data, information, and knowledge for problem solving and decision-making. He has worked on various funded research projects in the field of geospatial analysis, GIS applications development, spatio-temporal data mining, predictive analytics, data streaming analysis, concept drift detection and adaptive learning, ontology and semantics, water resources, and hazards modeling and risk assessment.

His sponsors include National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Education, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), and private sectors. He received the recognition of 2016 NSF I/UCRC Industry-Nominated Technological Breakthroughs (http://www.iucrc.org/node/mapreduce-based-spatio-temporal-hotspots-detection-and-prediction ). He has been invited more than sixty times for peer reviewing for twenty-one premium journals in areas of GIS, remote sensing, water resources, and informatics.