Blog Posts

Huan Ning, Zhenlong Li | 2025-04-13 In a recent vision paper, GIScience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda Towards Autonomous GIS, we proposed three scales of autonomous GIS agents: local, centralized, and infrastructure. Some GIS agents have been developed on local and centralized scales, such as LLM-Geo and Google Geospatial Reasoning. What…

Huan Ning | 04/09/2025 Google Research released a framework named Geospatial Reasoning, which provides a user-friendly inference for spatial analysis and visualization. By receiving users’ requests in natural language about geospatial tasks, Geospatial Reasoning can choose appropriate data sources and foundation models and then create and execute geoprocessing workflows to extract information and insights from data…

We are excited to announce our latest vision paper (preprint), “GIScience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda Towards Autonomous GIS”, a collaborative effort involving 16 leading GIScience and computer science scholars across academia, national labs, and government agencies, presents a timely research agenda for the next-generation AI-powered GIS—one that is autonomous, intelligent,…

04/02/2025 The Geoinformation and Big Data Research Lab (GIBD) at Penn State had a great presence at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), held in Detroit, Michigan, from March 24–28, 2025. Our lab organized and co-organized a total of 13 in-person sessions, centered around cutting-edge research in geospatial big data,…

Huan Ning  |  March 30, 2025 I attended the AAG Annual Meeting for the first time and gained so much from the experience. I had the chance to meet many professors, peers, and even renowned scholars whose names I had only seen in books before. One scholar I’ve long admired mentioned that our team’s article…

If you are attending AAG this year, we cordially invite you to join our 13 in-person sessions focused on geospatial big data, spatial computing, autonomous GIS, human mobility, disaster management, and public health! GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Generative AI in GIScience: Opportunities and Challenges Towards autonomous GIS Date: 3/25/2025 Time: 12:50 PM - 2:10 PM Room: 251A, Level 2,…

Huan Ning, Zhenlong Li  |   March 19, 2025 Introduction Geospatial modeling is the process of combining observations and spatial data to investigate the dynamic of phenomena over the Earth, covering physical and societal processes. Such investigations may provide explanations or predictions of phenomena (Crooks et al. 2019). Various modeling methods have been established, such as…

Task What's the association between median household income and obesity? Please generate a HTML report to include the regression analysis, r-square, p-value, and be sure to include a one paragraph report to interpret the findings. Dataset PA County shapefile Result Generated HTML report: income_obesity_regression_report Generated Python Code # The task involves analyzing the relationship between…

Spatial task Generate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of Akure from these satellite imageries. Datasets Landsat 8 imageries Akure_boundary Result

Spatial task Merge the four DEMs into a single raster and perform terrain characteristic analysis for Richland County, including slope, aspect, hillshade, terrain ruggedness index (TRI), and topographic Position Index (TPI). Datasets Four DEM datasets for Richland County (tif format) Result

Spatial task For each school in Columbia, calculate the length of sidewalks within 500 meters. Datasets Columbia sidewalk Columbia schools Result

Spatial task Generate centroids for each building feature, extract the elevation values from the DEM at each building centroid, and export the elevation data to draw a histogram with 50 bins using Seaborn. Datasets Penn State University DEM Penn State University Buildings Result

Spatial task Could you please generate a raster map with resolution of 100 meter, showing the distances from San Francisco census tracts to the nearest hospitals? Dataset San Francisco Hospitals  San Francisco census tracts Result Generated Python Code # The code is designed to rasterize hospital locations and then generate a proximity raster showing distances…

Spatial task Could you help me analyze the fast accessibility in Pennsylvania by performing the following analysis:1) Count the fast food restaurants in each county and store the result in a new field named "Count". 2) Calculate the fast food accessibility score for each county as (Count /Population) * 1,000 and store the result in…

Spatial task Generate an interactive web map using leaflet for the shown data layer. Dataset The Pennsylvania county boundaries downloaded from OpenStreetMap Result Generated interactive web map (click to open): PA_counties_map   Generated code # Importing…

Spatial task Please select an appropriate map projection for the US states layer, and reproject the data layer using the selected projection. Please also generate an HTML report to explain why you choose the projection. Dataset The states boundaries of the US downloaded from OpenStreetMap (GCS: EPSG4326) Result Reprojected map (Copilot…

Zhenlong Li   |  May 27, 2024 Call for papers for Special Issue on Harnessing the Power of Generative AI in GIScience through Autonomous Spatial Agents in the International Journal of Digital Earth Guest Editors: Dr. Zhenlong Li, The Pennsylvania State University, USA. zhenlong@psu.edu Dr. Song Gao, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. song.gao@wisc.edu Dr. Wenwen Li, Arizona…

M. Naser Lessani   |  March 18, 2024 The GIBD research lab has organized a series of virtual sessions on geospatial big data and spatial computing for the 2024 AAG Annual Meeting. The themes of these sessions are varied and cover a wide range of topics, including computing with large geospatial datasets, urban sensing through geospatial…

Zhenlong Li and Huan Ning   |  May, 2023 In our recent research, we introduced Autonomous GIS as an AI-powered GIS that leverages Large Language Models’ general abilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and coding for addressing spatial problems with automatic spatial data collection, analysis, and visualization. We envision that autonomous GIS should achieve five autonomous…

Fengrui Jing and Zhenlong Li   |  May 2, 2023 The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the unequal impact of infectious diseases on different neighborhoods, with areas of concentrated disadvantage experiencing higher death rates. However, it remains unclear whether a disadvantaged area’s higher connectivity to the outside world can result in even higher fatality rates. To address…

 Zhenlong Li  |  March 22, 2020 The whole world is now fighting the coronavirus (COVID-19). Social/physical distancing and limiting travel are effective approaches to contain the virus. Everyone’s effort counts. By analyzing world population flows through the lens of geotagged Twitter data during the COVID-19 Pandemic, this article (story map) showcases how our collective efforts…