GeoAI, or geospatial artificial intelligence, has become a trending topic and the frontier for spatial analytics in Geography. Although much progress has been made in exploring the integration of AI and Geography, there is yet no clear definition of GeoAI, its scope of research, or a broad discussion of how it enables new ways of problem solving across social and environmental sciences. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of GeoAI research used in large-scale image analysis, and its methodological foundation, most recent progress in geospatial applications, and comparative advantages over traditional methods. We organize this review of GeoAI research according to different kinds of image or structured data, including satellite and drone images, street views, and geo-scientific data, as well as their applications in a variety of image analysis and machine vision tasks. While different applications tend to use diverse types of data and models, we summarized six major strengths of GeoAI research, including (1) enablement of large-scale analytics; (2) automation; (3) high accuracy; (4) sensitivity in detecting subtle changes; (5) tolerance of noise in data; and (6) rapid technological advancement. As GeoAI remains a rapidly evolving field, we also describe current knowledge gaps and discuss future research directions.
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Thinking Geographically about AI Sustainability
Abstract. Driven by foundation models, recent progress in AI and machine learning has reached unprecedented complexity. For instance, the GPT-3 language model consists of 175 billion parameters and a training-data size of 570 GB. While it has achieved remarkable performance in generating text that is difficult to distinguish from human-authored content, a single training of the model is estimated to produce over 550 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Likewise, we see advances in GeoAI research improving large-scale prediction tasks like satellite image classification and global climate modeling, to name but a couple. While these models have not yet reached comparable complexity and emissions levels, spatio-temporal models differ from language and image-generation models in several ways that make it necessary to (re)train them more often, with potentially large implications for sustainability. While recent work in the machine learning community has started calling for greener and more energy-efficient AI alongside improvements in model accuracy, this trend has not yet reached the GeoAI community at large. In this work, we bring this issue to not only the attention of the GeoAI community but also present ethical considerations from a geographic perspective that are missing from the broader, ongoing AI-sustainability discussion. To start this discussion, we propose a framework to evaluate models from several sustainability-related angles, including energy efficiency, carbon intensity, transparency, and social implications. We encourage future AI/GeoAI work to acknowledge its environmental impact as a step towards a more resource-conscious society. Similar to the current push for reproducibility, future publications should also report the energy/carbon costs of improvements over prior work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2033521
- PAR ID:
- 10460964
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AGILE: GIScience Series
- Volume:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2700-8150
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Artificial intelligence (AI) for supporting second language (L2) writing processes and practices has garnered increasing interest in recent years, establishing AI-mediated L2 writing as a new norm for many multilingual classrooms. As such, the emergence of AI-mediated technologies has challenged L2 writing instructors and their philosophies regarding computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and teaching. Technologies that can combine principled pedagogical practices and the benefits of AI can help to change the landscape of L2 writing instruction while maintaining the integrity of knowledge production that is so important to CALL instructors. To align L2 instructional practices and CALL technologies, we discuss the development of an AI-mediated L2 writing technology that leverages genre-based instruction (GBI) and large language models to provide L2 writers and instructors with tools to enhance English for research publication purposes. Our work reports on the accuracy, precision, and recall of our network classification, which surpass previously reported research in the field of genre-based automated writing evaluation by offering a faster network training approach with higher accuracy of feedback provision and new beginnings for genre-based learning systems. Implications for tool development and GBI are discussed.
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This paper assesses trending AI foundation models, especially emerging computer vision foundation models and their performance in natural landscape feature segmentation. While the term foundation model has quickly garnered interest from the geospatial domain, its definition remains vague. Hence, this paper will first introduce AI foundation models and their defining characteristics. Built upon the tremendous success achieved by Large Language Models (LLMs) as the foundation models for language tasks, this paper discusses the challenges of building foundation models for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) vision tasks. To evaluate the performance of large AI vision models, especially Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM), we implemented different instance segmentation pipelines that minimize the changes to SAM to leverage its power as a foundation model. A series of prompt strategies were developed to test SAM’s performance regarding its theoretical upper bound of predictive accuracy, zero-shot performance, and domain adaptability through fine-tuning. The analysis used two permafrost feature datasets, ice-wedge polygons and retrogressive thaw slumps because (1) these landform features are more challenging to segment than man-made features due to their complicated formation mechanisms, diverse forms, and vague boundaries; (2) their presence and changes are important indicators for Arctic warming and climate change. The results show that although promising, SAM still has room for improvement to support AI-augmented terrain mapping. The spatial and domain generalizability of this finding is further validated using a more general dataset EuroCrops for agricultural field mapping. Finally, we discuss future research directions that strengthen SAM’s applicability in challenging geospatial domains.more » « less
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Abstract Purpose of Review Artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting science and discovery across disciplines, offering new modes of inquiry that are changing how questions are asked and answered and upsetting established norms. In this paper, we review the state of the art of AI in landscape ecology and offer six areas of opportunity for landscape ecologists to capitalize on AI tools moving forward. These areas include geospatial AI (GeoAI), geometric AI, Explainable AI (xAI), generative AI (GenAI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and robotics.
Recent Findings Landscape ecology has a long history of using AI, notably machine learning methods for image classification tasks, agent-based modeling, and species distribution modeling but also knowledge representation and automated reasoning for landscape generation and spatial planning. Methods have become more diverse and complex in recent years, with a new generation of AI-based tools rapidly emerging. These new tools have potential to improve how landscape ecologists map, measure, and model landscape patterns and processes as well as improve the explainability of model outputs.
Summary There are many untapped opportunities for landscape ecologists to leverage emerging AI-based tools in research and practice including generating virtual landscapes for simulating processes such as wildfires and leveraging natural language processing to generate new insights from text data. Regardless of the application, researchers using AI tools must also consider the ethical implications of data and algorithmic biases and critically assess how these methods can be used responsibly.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5194/agile-giss-4-42-2023
