Zeping Liu
I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Dr. Gengchen Mai. My research focuses on Geospatial AI and Intelligent Earth Observation, with an emphasis on geo-foundation models, spatial representation learning, and efficient large-scale high-resolution mapping. My research is supported by the Amazon AI PhD Fellowship Program (2025–2027).
Selected Publications 13 entries
- 2026 IJGIS 26
International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2026.
- 2026 P&RS 26
ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2026.
- 2025 NeurIPS 25
- 2025 JAG 25
Towards the Next Generation of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence
International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2025.
- 2024 NeurIPS 24
TorchSpatial: A Location Encoding Framework and Benchmark for Spatial Representation Learning
NeurIPS 2024 Datasets & Benchmarks.
- 2024 RSE 24
Four Seasonal Composite Sentinel-2 Images for Large-Scale Building Story Estimation
Remote Sensing of Environment, 2024.
- 2024 STOTEN 24
CALIPSO-Based Aerosol Extinction Profile Estimation from MODIS and MERRA-2 with Transformer + CNN
Science of The Total Environment, 2024.
- 2023 ESSD 23
China Building Rooftop Area: A Multi-Annual High-Resolution Dataset (2016–2021)
Earth System Science Data, 2023.
- 2023 GS&RS 23
National-Scale Mapping of Building Footprints with Feature Super-Resolution Segmentation
GIScience and Remote Sensing, 2023.
- 2023 RS 23
- 2022 TGRS 22
- 2021 RS 21
Sequential Delineation of Rooftops with Holes from VHR Aerial Images
Remote Sensing, 2021.
- 2021 PRCV 21
AFM-RNN: A Sequence Prediction Model for Delineating Building Rooftops
Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, 2021.
For complete records, please see my Google Scholar.
Industry Experience
Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon
Jun – Sep 2026 · Full-timeSDE Intern, Esri Inc.
Aug – Nov 2025 · Part-timeContinued work on the Spatial Co-Scientist project.
SDE Intern, Esri Inc.
May – Aug 2025 · Full-timeDeveloped Spatial Co-Scientist with the Esri Generative AI Toolkit, combining RAG, LLM reasoning, and ArcGIS Pro workflows for practical spatial analysis; collected expert interview insights and designed guided analysis flows.
Selected Awards
- IGIF Scholarship Award2026
- Amazon AI PhD Fellowship2025–2027
- UT Austin Dean's Prestigious Supplement Fellowship2025, 2026
- Second Place, UT GIS Day Student Presentation2024
- Outstanding Graduate Student of Beijing2024
- Zhou Tingru Geography Youth Award2024
- First Prize, National Remote Sensing Bulletin Forum2023
- National Scholarship, Ministry of Education (China)2022, 2023
Reviewer Service
Conferences
- ICLR 2025
- KDD 2026 (AI for Science Track)
Journals
- ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
- Transactions in GIS
- Scientific Reports
- Earth Science Informatics
- Int'l Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
- Signal, Image and Video Processing
- Geocarto International
- Frontiers in Remote Sensing
- Geo-spatial Information Science
Last updated: August 19, 2026
