AI Everywhere!

The 2026 UCGIS Symposium brought together the GIScience community at the University of Maryland, College Park for a timely and energetic gathering focused on AI Everywhere: Geospatial Research, Education, and Society. Across workshops, plenaries, panels, paper sessions, posters, lightning talks, and informal conversations, participants explored how artificial intelligence is reshaping geospatial research and education while raising important questions about ethics, equity, institutions, and societal impact.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this year’s symposium a success, including our attendees, presenters, sponsors, student participants, session moderators, award judges, and volunteers.

Highlights from the Symposium

Workshops and Technical Sessions

The symposium opened with pre-conference workshops that gave participants opportunities to engage more deeply with emerging methods, tools, and teaching practices. Throughout the week, technical sessions showcased the breadth of current GIScience research, from advances in spatial analysis and modeling to applications in urban systems, environmental change, public policy, data justice, and geospatial AI.

Plenaries, Panels, and Featured Sessions

This year’s program featured plenary and panel sessions that invited the community to think critically about the changing role of GIScience in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. With the symposium located near Washington, DC, the program also drew on regional strengths and connections, including discussion of federal geospatial work and the broader policy context for geospatial research and practice.

Research Presentations, Posters, and Lightning Talks

Student and professional presentations were once again at the heart of the symposium. Paper sessions, lightning talks, and the poster session highlighted innovative work from across the GIScience community and created space for lively conversation, feedback, and new collaborations. The student research presentations reflected the strength and range of emerging scholarship in the field.

Student Awards

UCGIS was pleased to recognize outstanding student contributions through the 2026 student poster, paper, and lightning talk awards.

Student Poster Awards

First Place: Maxwell Gundling, Salisbury University. From Silos to Spatial Data: An Enterprise GIS for Historical Research

Second Place: Mahsa Saharkhiz, University at Buffalo. The Impact of Form-Based Zoning on Residential Values: A Geospatial Analysis of Buffalo's Green Code (2013–2024)

Third Place: Rachel Simon, Salisbury University. From Surface to Subsurface: Mapping Cemeteries in Dorchester County, Maryland

Student Paper Awards

First Place: Emily Zhou, University of California Santa Barbara. Evaluating Methodological Structure and Analytical Outcome Divergence Across Machine Learning and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Approaches in Spatial Decision Support Research

Second Place: Jon Nealon, University at Albany. Beyond the God's Eye View: The Hot Air Balloon Perspective in Geospatial Journalism

Third Place (tie): Shirin Alsadat Mahmoudian, George Mason University. Generative AI for Urban Infrastructure Auditing: A Micro-scale Evaluation of Multimodal Transit Environments

Third Place (tie): Zhongqi Zheng, University of California, Santa Barbara. Pixels to Paths: Spatially Informed Computer Vision for Road Network Topology Assessment

Student Lightning Talk Awards

First Place (tie): Zhihao Wang, University of Maryland. TreeFinder: AI Everywhere in Forest Monitoring — A National-Scale GeoAI Benchmark for Individual Tree Mortality

First Place (tie): Aleksander Berg, University of Colorado Boulder. Using Foundation Model Embeddings to Map Colorado's Built Hazard Interface for Wildfire

Third Place: Victor Irekponor, University of Maryland. Text-to-Visualization for Spatially Varying Coefficient Models: Encoding SVC Visualization Principles in Language-Driven Workflows

Congratulations to all of this year’s student award winners, and thank you to the judges who volunteered their time and expertise to support the student awards process.

Thank You

UCGIS extends sincere thanks to the University of Maryland, College Park for welcoming the symposium community and supporting the event. We are also grateful to our sponsors, presenters, moderators, judges, volunteers, and attendees for making the 2026 symposium such a productive and engaging gathering.

See You in 2027

We look forward to gathering again for the 2027 UCGIS Symposium, hosted by the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, June 7–10, 2027.

The preliminary theme for 2027 is GIScience at a Turning Point, inviting the community to reflect on how AI and other transformative forces are impacting GIScience—and where the field is heading next.

View the full program on Sched