An AAG Symposium bringing together researchers advancing human-centered and responsible GIScience — from GeoAI and sensing technologies to ethics, privacy, and geospatial data science.
Recent advances in GIScience — including geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), emerging sensing technologies, and large-scale geospatial data — are rapidly transforming how we study human experience of place and human–environment relationships. Researchers increasingly leverage geotagged texts and images to map emotion and place identity, use street-view imagery to model built environments and perceived safety, and develop new GeoAI methods that support human creativity in map-making and urban design.
Collectively, this work highlights a shift toward a more human-centered, humanistic GIScience that contextualizes spatial activity with subjective experience, cultural meaning, and social context.
At the same time, the ethical implications of these technologies have become impossible to ignore: geoprivacy risks, bias amplification, limited transparency of black-box models, and uncertainty in AI-generated answers. Integrating responsible thinking into GIScience is both timely and imperative — shaping how we frame geospatial questions, choose data and algorithms, interpret results, and anticipate misuse.
In this symposium, we have multiple sessions broadly contributing to human-centered and responsible GIScience, with emphasis on understanding human–environment interactions, promoting quality of life, and prioritizing human values in geospatial data science.
We welcome topics including, but not limited to, the following areas:
For questions, please email the symposium organizers.