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Accurate and consistent mapping of urban and rural areas is crucial for sustainable development, spatial planning, and policy design. It is particularly important in simulating the complex interactions between human activities and natural…

While informal settlements lack focused development and are highly dynamic, the quality of spatial data for these places may be uncertain. This study evaluates the quality and biases of AI-generated Open Building Datasets (OBDs) generated…

Human settlements are the cause and consequence of most environmental and societal changes on Earth; however, their location and extent is still under debate. We provide here a new 10m resolution (0.32 arc sec) global map of human…

Humanitarian actions require accurate information to efficiently delegate support operations. Such information can be maps of building footprints, building functions, and population densities. While the access to this information is…

This paper examines the recent advances and applications of AI in human geography especially the use of machine (deep) learning, including place representation and modeling, spatial analysis and predictive mapping, and urban planning and…

Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund…

We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for…

High resolution datasets of population density which accurately map sparsely-distributed human populations do not exist at a global scale. Typically, population data is obtained using censuses and statistical modeling. More recently,…

Homelessness is a humanitarian challenge affecting an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide. In the face of rising homeless populations in developed nations and a strain on social services, government agencies are increasingly adopting…

Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging…

To better understand the dynamics of human settlements, thorough knowledge of the uncertainty in geospatial built-up surface datasets is critical. While frameworks for localized accuracy assessments of categorical gridded data have been…

Up-to-date poverty maps are an important tool for policy makers, but until now, have been prohibitively expensive to produce. We propose a generalizable prediction methodology to produce poverty maps at the village level using geospatial…

Poverty maps are essential tools for governments and NGOs to track socioeconomic changes and adequately allocate infrastructure and services in places in need. Sensor and online crowd-sourced data combined with machine learning methods have…

Spatially consistent and up-to-date maps of human settlements are crucial for addressing policies related to urbanization and sustainability, especially in the era of an increasingly urbanized world.The availability of open and free…

Satellite-based slum segmentation holds significant promise in generating global estimates of urban poverty. However, the morphological heterogeneity of informal settlements presents a major challenge, hindering the ability of models…

The accuracy assessment of remote-sensing derived built-up land data represents a specific case of binary map comparison, where class imbalance varies considerably across rural-urban trajectories. Thus, local accuracy characterization of…

Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…

Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…

The major Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030, set by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), include sustainable cities and communities, no poverty, and reduced inequalities. However, millions of people live in slums or…

AI (super) alignment describes the challenge of ensuring (future) AI systems behave in accordance with societal norms and goals. While a quickly evolving literature is addressing biases and inequalities, the geographic variability of…