GIScience for Human Experience and Responsibility

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.

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.