GeoAI at ACM SIGSPATIAL: The New Frontier of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence Research
It addresses the need for improved GeoAI systems to solve societal problems, but is incremental as it reviews existing workshops and research directions.
The paper discusses the challenges in Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), such as non-standardized approaches and lack of multidisciplinary engagement, and highlights the role of the GeoAI workshop series since 2017 in fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration to address these issues.
Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) is an interdisciplinary field enjoying tremendous adoption. However, the efficient design and implementation of GeoAI systems face many open challenges. This is mainly due to the lack of non-standardized approaches to artificial intelligence tool development, inadequate platforms, and a lack of multidisciplinary engagements, which all motivate domain experts to seek a shared stage with scientists and engineers to solve problems of significant impact on society. Since its inception in 2017, the GeoAI series of workshops has been co-located with the Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The workshop series has fostered a nexus for geoscientists, computer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers, from academia, industry, and government to engage in artificial intelligence, spatiotemporal data computing, and geospatial data science research, motivated by various challenges. In this article, we revisit and discuss the state of GeoAI open research directions, the recent developments, and an emerging agenda calling for a continued cross-disciplinary community engagement.