📰 News
Oct 2026
Our co-authored paper “GeoProbe: Layer-wise Probing of Core Geospatial Concepts in Large Language Models”
has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
Oct 2026
Serving as the Student Organizer of the
AAG Symposium on GIScience for Human Experience and Responsibility (GISER 2027),
held at the AAG Annual Meeting 2027 in New York, NY, February 8–12, 2027.
Oct 2026
Selected for a $500 Travel Award to attend the 34th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL 2026).
Oct 2026
Our co-authored paper “Modeling Hospital Visitation Flows Through Distance-Attractiveness Tradeoffs: Integrating Human Mobility, Hospital Attributes, and Socioeconomic Context”
has been accepted and is now available online in Transactions in GIS.
Oct 2026
Our co-authored paper “Debris-Cast: A Two-Stage Machine Learning Framework for Hurricane Debris Prediction Using Multi-Source Geospatial Data”
is now available online in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
Sep 2026
My paper “When Satellite and Street Views Disagree: Cross-View Complementarity in Disaster Damage Assessment”
(with Lei Zou) has been accepted to the GeoSearch’26 Workshop.
Sep 2026
Honored to serve as the Student Director on the newly elected Board of Directors of the
AAG Geographic Information Science and Systems (GISS) Specialty Group.
Sep 2026
Our abstract “GATES: A Geothermal Acceptance Tracking and Evaluation System Using Multi-Source Social Sensing”
has been accepted for an oral/poster presentation at the 10th Annual Texas A&M Conference on Energy
in College Station, Texas, on September 25, 2026.
Sep 2026
Our poster “Optimizing HPC Performance for CDC-Based Storage and Reconstruction of High-Resolution Imagery”
has been accepted to the SC26 Poster Session
(Chicago, November 2026), from my time as a Student Researcher at the
Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas (IDRT), Texas A&M University.
It will be on display on Tuesday, November 17, 2026 (10:00 AM–5:00 PM CST, North Pre-Function)
[Program]
[Project Page].
Sep 2026
Honored to serve on the Program Committee of
GeoSearch 2026,
the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Searching and Mining Large Collections of Geospatial Data,
held in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 on November 3, 2026.
Aug 2026
Honored to be selected as a Communications Fellow for the
GeoSAT Student Fellowship Program
for the 2026–2027 academic year.
Aug 2026
Honored to receive the 2026 Geography Graduate Student Enhancement Scholarship from the Department of Geography, Texas A&M University,
with $1,111 in scholarship support. I am grateful to the department for supporting my graduate research and academic development.
Aug 2026
Thrilled to share that our paper “RAPID: A Reproducible Multi-Agent Pipeline for Interpretable Disaster Damage Assessment from Satellite and Street-View Imagery”
has been accepted as a full Applications Track paper at the 34th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL 2026) after a highly competitive review process. Huge thanks to my collaborators, mentors, and the SIGSPATIAL reviewers.
Aug 2026
Excited to share that our short paper “BEACON: Behavioral and Semantic Enrichment of AlphaEarth Embeddings through Tri-Modal Contrastive Learning”
has been accepted as a short paper at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026.
Congratulations to Hao Tian and Heng Cai, and many thanks to the SIGSPATIAL reviewers.
Jul 2026
Honored to receive the 2026 Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS) Doctoral Scholarship Award
with $1,000 in scholarship support. I am grateful to the CaGIS Scholarship Committee for recognizing my
academic achievements and research contributions to cartography and geographic information science.
Jul 2026
The
CaGIS 2026 Conference program
lists our paper “RAPIDMap: Rapid multi-Agent Pipeline for Interpretable Disaster Mapping from Satellite and Street-view Imagery”
in Session 1B: GeoAI, Disaster Mapping, and Hydrography (Research),
scheduled for Tuesday, September 8, 2026, 2:00 pm in Rooms 352/353.
Jun 2026
On June 24, 2026, I passed my preliminary examination.
The date made the milestone especially meaningful: it is both Lionel Messi's birthday and
Dr. Heng Cai
's birthday. In the most Ph.D. way possible, I advanced from Ph.D. student to, somehow,
still Ph.D. student.
Jun 2026
Heading to the
2026 Symposium on Spatiotemporal Data Science
(August 7–8, 2026, Virginia Tech Academic Building One, Alexandria, VA): organizing the session
“Spatiotemporal AI for Urban and Environmental Intelligence: Sensing, Inference, and Human-Centered Applications,”
and presenting an accepted onsite oral talk,
“Satellite-to-Street: Synthesizing Post-Disaster Views from Satellite Imagery via Generative Vision Models.”
May 2026
The IGARSS 2026 technical program scheduled our paper
“Satellite-to-Street: Synthesizing Post-Disaster Views from Satellite Imagery via Generative Vision Models”
as Paper TH3.R6.4 in Session TH3.R6,
with presentation time Thursday, August 13, 2026, 14:30–14:45
in Washington, D.C.
May 2026
Received the Selected Travel Award for attending
I-GUIDE Summer School 2026: Spatial AI & Convergence Science
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (July 13–17, 2026),
an NSF-supported summer school.
Apr 2026
Received an IEEE GRSS Travel Grant to support my attendance and paper presentation at IGARSS 2026 in Washington, D.C., with US $500 in conference travel funding.
Apr 2026
Featured by Mosaic in the article
“How Texas A&M is Pioneering Damage Assessment Using Mosaic Imagery from Hurricane Milton”
,
highlighting my research on hyperlocal disaster damage assessment using bi-temporal street-view imagery and GeoAI.
Mar 2026
Our paper “Satellite-to-Street: Synthesizing Post-Disaster Views from Satellite Imagery via Generative Vision Models”
has been accepted for presentation at IGARSS 2026.
Mar 2026
Received the 2026 AAG-IGIF Scholarship Award from the
AAG International Geographic Information Fund (IGIF), and was awarded
2nd Place in the 2026 AAG-GISSG Student Honors Paper Competition,
recognizing contributions to GeoAI-driven disaster research and spatial intelligence.
Mar 2026
Invited by Niantic Spatial to visit its San Francisco office for an
academic exchange on GeoAI, multimodal spatial intelligence, and disaster-related spatial analytics,
with discussions focused on bridging academic research and large-scale spatial systems in industry.
[Invitation Letter]
Mar 2026
Will attend the
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2026
in San Francisco and participate in multiple GeoAI and GIScience sessions.
Mar 2026
Organized the TAMU Data Science Ambassador seminar
“From Signals to Society: Data Science for Understanding the Earth and Human Dynamics”
at Texas A&M University.
[Event Link]