Related papers: Uncovering large inconsistencies between machine l…

A substantial share of the Earth's land surface is managed by humans, with cities representing the most extreme form of anthropogenic land use. There are zillion ways in which settlements can be arranged across a given area, and their…

The field of human settlement construction encompasses a range of spatial designs and management tasks, including urban planning and landscape architecture design. These tasks involve a plethora of instructions and descriptions presented in…

Researchers are constantly leveraging new forms of data with the goal of understanding how people perceive the built environment and build the collective place identity of cities. Latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence…

Habitats integrate the abiotic conditions, vegetation composition and structure that support biodiversity and sustain nature's contributions to people. Most habitats face mounting pressures from human activities, which requires accurate,…

Humanitarian crises demand timely and accurate geographic information to inform effective response efforts. Yet, automated systems that extract locations from text often reproduce existing geographic and socioeconomic biases, leading to…

Surprisingly a number of Earth's waterways remain unmapped, with a significant number in low and middle income countries. Here we build a computer vision model (WaterNet) to learn the location of waterways in the United States, based on…

Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, particularly in recognizing geographic information from images. However, VLMs still show regional biases in this task. To systematically evaluate these…

Country instability is a global issue, with unpredictably high levels of instability thwarting socio-economic growth and possibly causing a slew of negative consequences. As a result, uncertainty prediction models for a country are becoming…

In recent years, the rapid development of high-precision map technology combined with artificial intelligence has ushered in a new development opportunity in the field of intelligent vehicles. High-precision map technology is an important…

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,…

Poverty maps derived from satellite imagery are increasingly used to inform high-stakes policy decisions, such as the allocation of humanitarian aid and the distribution of government resources. Such poverty maps are typically constructed…

Any policy-level decision-making procedure and academic research involving the optimum use of resources for development and planning initiatives depends on accurate population density statistics. The current cutting-edge datasets offered by…

We present a semi-supervised approach that disaggregates refugee statistics from administrative boundaries to 0.5-degree grid cells across 25 Sub-Saharan African countries. By integrating UNHCR's ProGres registration data with…

Online social networks contain a constantly increasing amount of images - most of them focusing on people. Due to cultural and climate factors, fashion trends and physical appearance of individuals differ from city to city. In this paper we…

Biases in large-scale image datasets are known to influence the performance of computer vision models as a function of geographic context. To investigate the limitations of standard Internet data collection methods in low- and middle-income…

Advances in Artificial Intelligence are challenged by the biases rooted in the datasets used to train the models. In image geolocation estimation, models are mostly trained using data from specific geographic regions, notably the Western…

About half of the world population already live in urban areas. It is projected that by 2050, approximately 70% of the world population will live in cities. In addition to this, most developing countries do not have reliable population…

Geospatial datasets derived from remote sensing data by means of machine learning methods are often based on probabilistic outputs of abstract nature, which are difficult to translate into interpretable measures. For example, the Global…

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the…

Today 7.2 billion people inhabit the Earth and by 2050 this number will have risen to around nine billion, of which about 70 percent will be living in cities. Hence, it is essential to understand drivers, dynamics, and impacts of the human…