This year, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting took place in Detroit, Michigan, providing a new venue for our lab members to engage with colleagues from around the globe.
PhD candidate Dan Qiang and Prof. Grant McKenzie represented our lab at this year’s conference. Together, they co-organized a well-attended session titled “GeoAI and Urban Mobility Analytics” as part of the GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium. This session featured four interesting presentations, attracting participation from a range of researchers interested in the latest advancements in GeoAI and urban mobility research.
Additionally, Dan Qiang presented her paper, “Mobility Vitality: Measuring urban vibrancy through active and micro-mobility modes,” as part of the Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group (GISS-SG) student paper competition. Dan’s work stood out among a strong group of submissions, earning her a spot as one of only nine nominated finalists.
Prof. Grant McKenzie received the 2025 Emerging Scholar Award from the Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group (SAM-SG). This year, two scholars were honoured with this distinction; the other recipient was Prof. Lei Zou from Texas A&M University.
Finally, Prof. McKenzie presented the findings from the recent set of geoprivacy workshops (co-organized with Eun-Kyeong Kim) in this presentation, “Geoprivacy by Design: A Research Agenda for Geoprivacy in Personalized Health,” during the “Spatial Data Science and GeoAI Ethics: Bridging Research and Education” session. This session was co-organized by former lab member, Dr. Hongyu Zhang.
Congratulations to both Dan and Grant on their contributions and recognition at AAG 2025!
