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Courses - Spring 2026
GEOG
Geographical Sciences Department Site
GEOG377
Artificial Intelligence for Spatial Data
Credits: 3
Grad Meth: Reg, P-F, Aud
Credit only granted for: GEOG398E or GEOG377.
Formerly: GEOG398E.
Covers the basics of deep learning and expand to a variety of network architectures widely used for spatio-temporal data including convolutional networks, recurrent networks, transformers, generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, etc. with tasks on classification, segmentation, estimation, forecasting, generation, clustering and more. Covers training strategies, transfer learning, domain adaptation, meta-learning, self-supervised learning, knowledge-guided learning, spatial-aware learning, etc. Recent advances such as large foundation models, with discussions on both general-purpose and geospatial-focused foundation models, and ethics aspects such as fairness. The techniques will be discussed in the context of spatial and spatio-temporal data. The implementation side will be based on Python. Students will do projects based on research topics or interests, with applications (domain-driven) or technically innovative (general methodology-driven).
An introductory course to spatial artificial intelligence (AI), providing a big picture of spatial AI applications (e.g., Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, Earth observation, smart cities, autonomous vehicles), techniques, platforms, trends, debates, etc. The course will cover basics of AI, identify challenges faced by AI techniques in the context of spatial data and applications, and introduce spatial-aware AI methods to address them. AI topics include but are not limited to: spatial data models and representation, machine learning, deep learning, navigation/planning, trends including large language models and foundation models for geospatial data, etc. Students are expected to have a broad understanding of spatial AI concepts, develop intuitions and insights to AI techniques, and have hands-on experience with Python at the end of the course.