The Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group (GISS-SG) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) is pleased to announce the 2026 Honors Competition Finalists for Student Papers.
The purpose of this competition is to promote scholarship and outstanding written and oral presentations by students in the field of GIScience. Any paper that advances an aspect of GIS, including theoretical, conceptual, and methodological developments, or innovative applications were welcome. This year, under the theme Mapping the Future, we have an incredible lineup of 10 finalists presenting their original work across two back-to-back sessions.
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
- Location: Imperial B, Ballroom Level, Hilton, Tower 1, 2, 3 (San Francisco, California)
- Format: Hybrid (In-person, Streamed, and Recorded)
Session Agendas
Paper Competition I (2:30 PM – 3:50 PM PST)
| Presenter | University | Paper Title |
| Tao Peng | University of Connecticut | Contextual Autoencoder: A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Spatiotemporal Interpolation under Diverse Data Coverage Patterns |
| Andy Qin | The University of Texas at Austin | Leveraging Reinforcement Learning for Maternity Care Resource Reallocation |
| Junbo Wang | University of Tennessee | SounDiT: Geo-Contextual Soundscape-to-Landscape Generation |
| Meicheng Xiong | University of Minnesota Twin Cities | A graph-based deep population downscaling model on irregular spatial units |
| Qianheng Zhang | University of Wisconsin–Madison | Spatial Epistemic Collapse: A Framework for Quantifying Spatial Bias in Generative GeoAI Using Street View Imagery |
Paper Competition II (4:10 PM – 5:30 PM PST)
| Presenter | University | Paper Title |
| Qian Cao | University of Georgia | Benchmarking Generative Models for Environmental Visualization and Urban Planning Decision Support |
| Mahbub Ul Hasan | Texas A&M University | Global Assessment of Grasslands: Three Decades of Shifting Connectivity and Rising Fragmentation Across Regions and Scales |
| Yuhao Jia | Emory University | A Unified Framework for Next-Gen Urban Forecasting via LLM-driven Dependency Retrieval and GeoTransformer |
| Xin Jin | The Chinese University of Hong Kong | The Utility Gap in Human Mobility Modeling: Evidence from Environmental Exposure Assessment |
| Yifan Yang | Texas A&M University | DamageArbiter: A Disagreement-driven Arbitration Framework for Hurricane Damage Assessment from Street-View Imagery |
Join the Conversation
Get ready for #AAG2026!
— AAG Geographic Information Science & Systems (@AAG_GISS) March 6, 2026
Join the AAG GISS Specialty Group for the 2026 Honors Competition for Student Papers.
Come support the next generation of scholars under the theme Mapping the Future!
Schedule:
March 17, 2026
2:30 PM – 5:30 PM (PST)
Imperial B, Hilton, SF
(1/4) pic.twitter.com/oBQh2pZw8V
Acknowledgments
A massive thank you to our session organizers and chairs: Sisi Wang (USC), Gengchen Mai (UT Austin), and Yingjie Hu (University at Buffalo), for coordinating this fantastic showcase of student research. We also want to recognize the entire AAG GISS-SG Board for their continued support in fostering the next generation of GIS scholars.