GeoAI 2019 workshop report: The 3nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on GeoAI: AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery

Abstract

Nowadays artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing tremendous opportunities and challenges to geospatial research. Big data enable computers to observe and learn the world from many different perspectives, while high performance machines support the development, training, and deployment of AI models within reasonable amount of time. Recent years have witnessed significant advances in the integration of geospatial study and AI in both academia and industry. There have already been many successful studies for both physical environment and human society. Focusing on modeling the physical nature, research has shown that deep learning can improve the representation of clouds that are smaller than the grid resolutions of climate models. Examining the human society, AI and natural language processing methods, such as word embeddings, help quantify changes in stereotypes and attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities over 100 years in the United States. There are also many other applications that effectively integrate AI with problems in geospatial studies, such as vehicle trajectory prediction, high-definition mapping and navigation, historical map digitizing, gazetteer conflation, geographic feature extraction, and place understanding. The 3nd International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI 2019) builds on the success of the previous workshops in 2017 and 2018. GeoAI is bringing together geoscientists, computer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and decision makers from academia, industry, and government to discuss the latest trends, successes, challenges, and opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence for data mining and geographic knowledge discovery.