We are thrilled to announce our latest vision paper (preprint), “GIScience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda Towards Autonomous GIS,” led by Dr. Zhenlong Li and Ph.D. candidate Huan Ning from the Geoinformation and Big Data Research Lab at Penn State. This paper, a collaborative effort involving GIScience experts across academia, national labs, and government agencies, presents a timely research agenda for the next evolutionary stage of GIS—one that is autonomous, intelligent, more accessible, and powered by AI.
This work is rooted in the lab’s ongoing innovative research on integrating AI into spatial analysis. Over the past two years, we have been developing foundational ideas and prototype systems that explore how large language models (LLMs) can serve as decision-making cores and build geoprocessing workflows in GIS applications. This vision paper builds on our earlier work, particularly the 2023 paper that formally introduced and defined the concept of Autonomous GIS (Li & Ning, 2023), by expanding the conceptual framework, demonstrates early-stage implementations, and outlines a roadmap for advancing this emerging paradigm….. Read the full post here.
You can access the preprint here and the original Autonomous GIS definition paper here.
