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Lecturer/Assistant Professor

University of Glasgow

Geospatial Information Science; Director of the MSc in Geospatial Data Science & AI.

Research Assistant

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Spatial Computing and Data Mining Lab

Big Data Mining Engineer

Beijing Digital Union Network Technology Co., Ltd.

Department of Location-Based Service

Big Data Scientist

NASA Ames Research Center

Mountain View, California

GIS Developer Intern

Cincinnati Area Geographic Information System

Cincinnati, Ohio

PhD

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Geography

• Minor in Computer Science

MS

University of Wisconsin–Madison

GIScience and Cartography

Exchange programme

Queensland University of Technology

Urban Planning and Surveying

BS

Sun Yat-sen University

GIS and Remote Sensing

• 2+2 undergraduate programme with the University of Cincinnati

BS

University of Cincinnati

GIS and Remote Sensing

• High Degree Honors in Geography & STEM Research

Research grants and funding

• 2025 UKRI EPSRC & DT Network+ Alan Turing Institute Fund on Transport Resilience Digital Twins Research Projects (DTBOC) – “Leveraging Digital Twin and AI to Enhance Situational Awareness and Crisis Response for Glasgow’s Transportation” (£50,000, PI)
• 2025 UKRI Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) GALLANT Innovation Fund on GOTREES (Govan Tree-community for ecosystem services) (£60,000, co-I)
• 2025 University of Glasgow Early Career Rewards for Excellence on Developing Vision-Language Models Enhanced by Geospatial Intelligence (£10,000, PI)
• 2025 University of Glasgow Early Career Mobility Scheme Award (£5,000, PI)
• 2024-26 University of Glasgow College of Science and Engineering Start-up Grant on Developing GeoAI Foundation Models (£5,000, PI)
• 2024 Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) Travel Grant ($1,000)
• 2023-24 UW-Madison Capstone Ph.D. Teaching Award & Grant (Nominated, $1,000)
• 2024 AAG Travel Grant for Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure Workshop: Building High-Performance, Ethical, and Secured Geospatial Software ($650)
• 2024 & 2023 AAG Student Travel Award & Grant (Nominated, $500 each year)
• 2022 ACM SIGSPATIAL Student Travel Award & Grant ($1,000)
• 2021-2024 UW-Madison Trewartha/Odebolt Graduate Research & Travel Award ($4,000)
• 2017 University of Cincinnati High Degree Honors in Geography & STEM Research Awards ($1,000)
• 2016-2017 University of Cincinnati Undergraduate Global Scholarship ($28,000)
• 2015 National Exchange Scholarships ($9,600, Queensland University of Technology)
• 2014 Ministry of Education of China National Undergraduate Scholarship (Top 1%) ($1,600)

Teaching and supervision

Full course history and student research topics are on the teaching page.

• MSc Geospatial Data Science & AI: programme director; starts autumn 2026.
• Web and Mobile Mapping (spring 2026); Principles of Cartographic Design & Production (autumn 2024 and 2025).
• Introduction to Geospatial AI planned for spring 2027.
• Eight Master’s students supervised in 2026; nine in 2025, including one dissertation award nomination.
• New PhD students: Eleanor Downie and Yueting Wang (September 2026). Visiting PhD student: Haiyu Zhang (six-month visit from 16 August 2026).
• Incoming PhD students: Mengkun Song (October 2026) and Zeyu Xiao (January 2027).

Invited talks

• “Teaching GeoAI to Know Its SPLACE: Spatially explicit multimodal learning + PLACES evaluation,” Workshop on GeoAI for Autonomous Spatial Analysis, Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park. (14-15 Jun, 2026)
• “Geo-Foundation Models: Multimodality, Spatial-Explicitness, and Explainability,” Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Nov 7, 2025)
• “Enhancing AI’s Geospatial Intelligence: Multimodality, Spatial-Explicitness, and Explainability,” School of Geography, University of Leeds. (Oct 23, 2025)
• “Embedding Geospatial Reasoning into Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” Department of Geomatics, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. (Sep 26, 2025)
• “Towards a New Era of GeoAI: Embedding Geospatial Reasoning into Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” Center for GIS, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. (Sep 24, 2025)
• “Embedding Geospatial Reasoning into Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow. (Aug 7, 2025)
• “Towards Geo-Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” 2025 GeoAI Advancements & Applications Workshop, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (Jul 14-15, 2025)
• “AI Meets Geography: Embedding Spatial Intelligence into Vision-Language Models,” Sun Yat-sen University. (Jul 8, 2025)
• “Towards Geo-Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” School of Geography, University College Dublin, Ireland. (Jun 12-13, 2025)
• “Towards Geo-Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” Machine Learning in Science (MLiS) Colloquium, University of Glasgow. (Jun 5, 2025)
• “Generative AI and GeoVisualization,” Chair of Cartography and Visual Analytics, Technical University Munich, Germany (online). (May 22, 2025)
• “Embedding Spatial Intelligence into Vision-Language Models for Urban Analytics,” Sun Yat-sen University. (Feb 28, 2025)
• “AI Meets Geography: Embedding Spatial Intelligence into Vision-Language Models,” Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (Feb 24, 2025)
• “Bridging AI and Geography: Transforming Vision-Language Models through Spatial Intelligence,” University of Hong Kong. (Feb 19, 2025)
• “Towards GeoAI Foundation Models: Unlocking Spatial Knowledge through Vision-Language Models,” National University of Singapore. (Feb 14, 2025)
• “Towards GeoAI Foundation Models: Advancing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Intelligence,” Hong Kong University of Science and Technology - Guangzhou. (Feb 12, 2025)
• “Towards GeoAI Foundation Models: Unlocking Spatial Knowledge through Multimodal Learning,” School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow (Nov 1, 2024)
• “GeoEthics” at the GeoAI Specialist Meeting, Vienna, Austria (Oct 25-27, 2024)
• Early Career Session panelist at Spatial Data Science Symposium, Vienna, Austria (Oct 24, 2024)
• “Geo-Foundation Models,” University of Texas at Austin Department of Geography and the Environment (Oct 24, 2024)
• “Generative AI for Geospatial Science,” Generative AI Workshop, University of Glasgow (Sep 16, 2024)
• “Apply for a Job in Academia,” GISalon hosted by GISphere & CPGIS (online). (Aug 18, 2024)
• “Towards GeoAI Multimodal Foundation Models for Urban Analytics,” 2024 AGILE Workshop on Humans in the City: Artificial Intelligence Research and Urban Environments, Glasgow, UK. (Jun 4, 2024)
• “Measuring access inequality in a hybrid physical-virtual world: A case study of racial disparity of healthcare access during CoVID-19,” Salad Seminar, Department of Psychology, UW–Madison. (Sep 27, 2023)
• “From human mobility to social segregation: what insights can geospatial data provide?” Esri GeoScene and GISphere Public Talk (Online, Sep 18, 2023)
• “From human mobility to social segregation: what insights can geospatial data provide?” GIS Professional Programs Coffee Talk, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Mar 22, 2023)
• “Gap Year for a GISer – Why & How,” GISalon hosted by GISphere & CPGIS. (Online, Mar 5, 2023)
• “Measuring segregation from human-based perspective: a data-driven revolution of segregation measurement,” Spatial Data Science Symposium. (Online, Dec 13–14, 2021)

Fellow, Royal Geographical Society with IBG (RGS-IBG), 2025 - present

2024 (Spring) UW-Madison Commencement Flag bearer of College of Letters & Science for the Doctoral, MFA, and Medical Professional Degree Candidate Ceremony

2023-24 UW-Madison Capstone Ph.D. Teaching Award

2023 University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Symposium Student Paper Award (1st)

2023 AAG Geographic Information Science and Systems (GISS) Specialty Group Student Honors Paper Award (2nd)

2023 AAG Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group (CISG) Robert Raskin Student Competition (1st)

2022 AAG Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Student Competition John Odland Award (2nd)

2021 International Graduate Workshop on GeoInformatics Best Participation Award

2021 28th International Conference on Geoinformatics Best Student Paper Award (2nd)

Professional memberships

• 2025 - Present: Fellow, Royal Geographical Society with IBG (RGS-IBG)
• 2024 - Present: Member, Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE)
• 2022 - Present: Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• 2022 - Present: Member, American Geophysical Union (AGU)
• 2021 - Present: Member, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS)
• 2021 - Present: Member, The International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences (CPGIS)
• 2017 - Present: Member, American Association of Geographers (AAG)

Student Lead of Graduates Social Committee

• Department of Geography, UW-Madison, 2017-2019

Graduate Representatives to Faculty/Staff Meetings

• Department of Geography, UW-Madison, 2022-2024

PhD Viva Convenor

• Freya Margaret Ella Muir, “Real-time Monitoring and Modelling of Coastal Change”, 2025

Publicity and Recruitment Working Group (2026-present)

• Academic staff member, serving 50 hrs/year to facilitate student recruitment.

MSc Program Director (2024-present)

• MSc in Geospatial Data Science & AI, designing program documentation and new courses (e.g., Introduction to Geospatial AI and Big Geo-Data Analysis).

Student Director

• AAG Cyber-Infrastructure Specialty Group (CISG), 2023-2024

Glasgow Science Festival

• Global City Challenge - Image Geo-localisation Competition with AI, 2026

Manuscript Reviewer

• Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 2023-present
• ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (P&RS), 2025-present
• International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), 2023-present
• International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2021-present
• IEEE IGARSS Conference, 2020-present
• Land Use Policy, 2025-present
• Scientific Reports, 2022-present
• Transactions in GIS, 2021-present

External Examiner

• 2026 April: PhD Proposal Defense - João Daniel Silva, University of Lisbon; “Vision and Language Models for Remote Sensing Data”

Presentation Judge

• Outstanding Student Presentation Awards (OSPA) program, AGU Fall Meeting, 2022

Conference Session & Workshop Chair/Organiser

• AGILE 2026 - Geospatial AI for Urban Analytics (GeoAI4UA) with Actionable Smart Data
• The 1st International Conference on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI 2026) - Building Open Labs and Learning Activities for “Introduction to Geospatial AI”
• RGS AIC 2026 - Geographies of inequalities and bias in AI
• The 6th Spatial Data Science Symposium (SDSS 2025) - Trustworthy (Geo)AI for Population Health
• The 20th 3D GeoInfo & 9th Smart Data Smart Cities 2025
• The 2025 GeoAI Advancements & Applications Workshop – Technical Session
• LBS 2025 - GeoAI & LBS
• GISRUK 2025 - GeoAI & Large Language Models
• 2023 AAG Annual Meeting
• Symposium on Harnessing the Geospatial Data Revolution for Sustainability Solutions: Multimodal Learning with Geospatial Big Data
• Symposium on Human Dynamics Research: Exploring Social Inequality and Segregation with Geospatial Big Data
• GISphere GISalon International 2023
• Topic: Apply GIS/Cartography/Environment Graduate Programs, Jun 16, 2023
• Topic: Apply a Job with GIS/Cartography Major, Sep 14, 2023
• IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2021

Conference Program Committee

• The 33rd International Conference on Multimedia Modeling - MMM 2027 (Technical Program Committee)
• The 34th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026) – Application Track (SIGSPATIAL 2026 APP)
• The 1st International Conference on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI 2026)
• The 1st International Workshop on Geography According to Foundation Models (AGILE 2026)
• 2026 IEEE International Conference on Big Data

Grant/Fellowship Reviewer/Panellist

• Glasgow Changing Futures Collaborative Seed Fund Open Call on Sustainable Futures

Guest Editor

• Journal of City and Environment Interactions - Special issue “Next-Generation GeoAI for Sustainable Urban Development: Methods, Data, and Applications”
• Transactions in Urban Data, Science, and Technology - Special issue “Spatio-Temporal Data Mining with Social Sensing: Methods and Applications”

Executive Committee

• GIScience Research Group (GIScRG), RGS-IBG, UK
• Treasurer, 2026-present
• Website and Social Media Manager, 2025-2026

From Super-Resolution to Superior Land-Cover Detection: Cross-Channel Attention Network for Aerial Images

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. XXV ISPRS Congress (2026)

MAPSRNet: a task-oriented super-resolution network that enhances building extraction beyond raw high-resolution imagery

GIScience & Remote Sensing

LiDAR-DHMT: LiDAR-Adaptive Dual Hierarchical Mask Transformer for Robust Freespace Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

Spatially-Weighted CLIP for Street-View Geo-localization

GeoAI 2026

GeoAI for Urban Analytics: Opportunities and Challenges

Big Earth Data

Cube Kernel: A Novel Approach to Enable Local Gradient Flow Across Channels in CNNs

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. XXV ISPRS Congress (2026)

Spatially Explicit Graph Neural Networks for Epidemic Forecasting: Evidence from Socioeconomic Embeddings

GeoAI 2026

Spatiotemporal Adaptive Learning for Flow-based Graph Neural Networks

COSIT 2026

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology With Environmental Exposures

Allergy

Identifying the Semantic Neighbourhoods within London's Airbnb Properties

AGILE 2026

Towards GeoAI Foundation Models: A Multimodal Learning Framework with Spatial Knowledge

Geography according to ChatGPT

Grounded open-vocabulary 3D LiDAR AI for natural resource surveying

The Innovation Informatics

An Integrated Web-Based Cyber Platform for County-Level Crop Yield Prediction Using Deep Learning in Support of USDA NASS

IGARSS 2026

Accepted

Leveraging Depth and Language for Open-Vocabulary Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation

The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Semantic4Safety: Causal Insights from Zero-shot Street View Imagery Segmentation for Urban Road Safety

Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery

Stronger, Steadier & Superior: Geometric Consistency in Depth VFM Forges Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Towards A New Era of Geo-Foundation Models: Expert-Guided Multimodal Alignment and Geospatial Context Awareness

Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems

Large-Scale Pseudo-Label Supervised 3D Segmentor with Image Priors

IGARSS 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium

Mobility vs. Contiguity: Spatially Explicit Graph Neural Networks for COVID-19 Forecasting

The Sixth Spatial Data Science Symposium (SDSS 2025)

Do You Know Your Neighborhood? Integrating Street View Images and Multi-task Learning for Fine-Grained Multi-Class Neighborhood Wealthiness Perception Prediction

Cities

Urban visual-spatial intelligence: linking human and sensor perception for sustainable urban development

npj Urban Sustainability

Advancing vision-language models with spatial-context prompt tuning: a case study in GeoAI-empowered image geo-localization

Journal of Location Based Services

From Human Mobility to Social Segregation: What Insights Can Social Media Data Provide?

Urban Human Mobility

Advancing Mixed Land Use Detection by Embedding Spatial Intelligence into Vision-Language Models

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences

Segregation: What is in a Name? A Review of Segregation Measurement and a Prospective Framework

Spatial Demography

Advancing Self-Supervised Learning for Building Change Detection and Damage Assessment: Unified Denoising Autoencoder and Contrastive Learning Framework

Remote Sensing

Advancing smart disaster response by leveraging social sensing and mobile technology

Geo-spatial Information Science

Occupation prediction with multimodal learning from tweet messages and Google Street View images

AGILE: GIScience Series

BiAU-Net: Wildfire burnt area mapping using bi-temporal Sentinel-2 imagery and U-Net with attention mechanism

International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation

Database Fundamentals

Open GIS

Relational Databases

Open GIS

Near real-time flood mapping with weakly supervised machine learning

Remote Sensing

Measuring Access Inequality in A Hybrid Physical-Virtual World:: A Case Study of Racial Disparity of Healthcare Access During CoVID-19

2023 30th International Conference on Geoinformatics

Mixed land use measurement and mapping with street view images and spatial context-aware prompts via zero-shot multimodal learning

International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation

Pixel-wise Wildfire Burn Severity Classification with Bi-temporal Sentinel-2 Data and Deep Learning

Proceedings of the 2023 6th International Conference on Big Data Technologies

Revealing racial-ethnic segregation with individual experienced segregation indices based on social media data: A case study in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim

Computers, Environment and Urban Systems

Graph-based representation for identifying individual travel activities with spatiotemporal trajectories and POI data

Scientific Reports

Human movement patterns of different racial-ethnic and economic groups in US top 50 populated cities: What can social media tell us about isolation?

Annals of GIS

Im2city: image geo-localization via multi-modal learning

Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery

The impact of MTUP to explore online trajectories for human mobility studies

Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Prediction of Human Mobility