Bio
Yongze Song is an Associate Professor at Curtin University and leads the Geospatial Intelligence Lab. His research advances geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), spatial statistics, and remote sensing for sustainable infrastructure and Earth-system applications.
He develops open-source spatial methods across three areas: spatial prediction and spatial machine learning; spatial heterogeneity and driver attribution; and urban analytics for spatial patterns, accessibility and decision-making. He has developed 30+ geospatial methods and 12 open-source R packages with 200,000+ downloads, and published 150+ peer-reviewed journal articles including 10 ESI highly-cited papers, advancing interpretable and reproducible spatial analysis adopted across academia, government, and industry.
He is an Australian Young Tall Poppy Science Award winner, Royal Geographical Society Fellow (UK), Harvard Spatial Data Lab Fellow (US), DAAD AInet Fellow (Germany), and IAMG Committee Member, with further honours including the Geospatial World 50 Rising Stars, Global Top 10 Young Scientist Award, Stanford World's Top 2% Scientists, and the Australian National Location Data First Prize.
He is an Associate Editor of five international journals (including 3 Q1 journals — the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, GIScience & Remote Sensing, and Geoscientific Model Development), Editorial Board Member of 17 journals, Guest Editor of 20+ special issues, Chair or Program Committee Member for 30+ conferences, reviewer for 80+ journals, and has delivered 100+ invited seminars worldwide, including at Harvard, MIT, Yale, ANU, and NUS.
Research Interests
Geospatial AI (GeoAI); spatial statistics; spatial stratified heterogeneity; explainable spatial machine learning; remote sensing; geographical detector; spatial prediction; urban analytics; sustainable infrastructure.
Journal Special Issues
Serving as Guest Editor for 20 journal special issues
2025
- Managing Guest Editor: GIScience & Remote Sensing: Special Issue "Remote Sensing of Greenhouse Gases Emission and Absorption"
- Guest Editor: Spatial Statistics: Special Issue "Dynamic Spatial Statistics for Transport Modelling and Human Mobility"
- Guest Editor: International Journal of Digital Earth: Special Issue "Integrating Multi-Source Remote Sensing and Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Changes in Surface Water Resources"
- Guest Editor: Geo-Spatial Information Science: Special Issue "Quality of Smart Multidimensional Spatial Modeling"
2024
- Managing Guest Editor: International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation: Special Issue "Foundation Models for Earth Observations"
- Managing Guest Editor: Land: Special Issue "Climate Mitigation Potential of Urban Ecological Restoration"
- Guest Editor: Big Earth Data: Special Issue "Earth Observation and GeoAI for Social Science"
- Guest Editor: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information: Special Issue "Spatial Information for Improved Living Spaces"
- Guest Editor: Remote Sensing: Special Issue "Problem-Driven Geospatial Data Acquisition, Tools and Applications in Earth Observation"
- Guest Editor: Remote Sensing: Special Issue "GIS and Remote Sensing in Ocean and Coastal Ecology"
2023
- Managing Guest Editor: Resources, Conservation and Recycling: Special Issue "Advancing geospatial methods for sustainable resource management"
- Guest Editor: Urban Climate: Special Issue "Unlocking Insights into Urban Climate with the Application of Spatio-Temporal Big Data"
- Guest Editor: Resources, Environment and Sustainability: Special Issue "Geocomputation for resources and environmental sciences"
2022
- Managing Guest Editor: iScience: Special Issue "GeoAI Shaping Earth and Cities: Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges"
- Managing Guest Editor: Remote Sensing: Special Issue "Remote Sensing for Mapping Global Land Surface Parameters"
- Guest Editor: Annals of GIS: Special Issue "Geospatial Big Data: Theory, Methods, and Applications"
- Guest Editor: Science of Remote Sensing: Special Issue "Wildfire Remote Sensing"
2021
- Managing Guest Editor: International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation: Special Issue "Recent Advances in Geocomputation and GeoAI for Mapping"
- Managing Guest Editor: Remote Sensing: Special Issue "Remote Sensing on Land Surface Albedo"
- Managing Guest Editor: Sustainable Earth: Article Collection "Earth Observation for Mapping Sustainability"
International Conferences
Serving as Chair or Committee Member for 39 international conferences
2026
- Program Committee Member – IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2026), 14–17 December 2026, Phoenix, AZ, USA
- Program Committee Member – The 12th International Conference on Innovative Production and Construction (IPC 2026), 19–20 November 2026, Melbourne, Australia
- Program Committee Member – The 4th ISDE Digital Earth Youth Innovation Forum, 16–19 October 2026, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China
- Program Committee Member – 3D GeoInfo | Smart Data and Smart Cities | LADM & 3D LA, 28 September – 2 October 2026, Sofia, Bulgaria
- Program Committee Member – The 24th Annual Conference of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG 2026), 23–28 August 2026, Montreal, Canada
- Program Committee Member – The 2026 Symposium on Spatiotemporal Data Science, 7–8 August 2026, Virginia Tech, Alexandria, VA, United States
- Chair – Session "Advanced Geospatial Data and Methods for Transforming Healthy Cities Delivery", The 33rd International Conference on Geoinformatics, 19–22 July 2026, National University of Singapore, Singapore
- Program Committee Member – The 2nd International Conference of Environmental Remote Sensing and GIS (ICERS 2026), 1-3 July 2026, Zagreb, Croatia
- Program Committee Member – The Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) 2026 Conference, 16-19 June 2026, Tartu, Estonia
2025
- Tutorial and Education Chair – IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 3–8 August 2025, Brisbane, Australia. (4000 attendees from 69 countries/regions)
- Chair – Session "Spatial Association", The 23rd International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) Annual Conference, 8–14 October 2025, Zhuhai, China
- Program Committee Member – The 8th ISPRS Geospatial Conference 2025, 15–17 December 2025, University of Tehran, Iran
- Program Committee Member – City+2025@Oxford: The 8th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Urban Studies, 29-30 September 2025, University of Oxford, UK
- Program Committee Member – The 20th 3D GeoInfo Conference and the 9th Smart Data and Smart Cities Conference (3D GeoInfo & SDSC 2025), 2–5 September 2025, Kashiwa Campus, University of Tokyo, Japan
- Program Committee Member – The Thirteenth International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025), 26–29 August 2025, Christchurch, New Zealand
- Program Committee Member – The 12th International Conference on Industrial Ecology (ISIE2025), 30 June – 4 July 2025, Singapore
- Program Committee Member – The Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) 2025 Conference, 10-13 June 2025, Dresden, Germany
2024
- General Chair – ISPRS Technical Commission IV Symposium 2024, 22–25 October 2024, Fremantle, Perth, Australia. (over 490 attendees from 29 countries/regions)
- Program Committee Member – City+2024@Kitakyushu International Conference, 25–28 October 2024, Kitakyushu, Japan
- Program Committee Member – The 10th International Conference on Innovative Production and Construction (IPC2024), 11–12 July 2024, Perth, Australia
- Program Committee Member – International Conference of Environmental Remote Sensing and GIS (ICERS), 11–12 July 2024, Zagreb, Croatia
- Program Committee Member – IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2024, 7–12 July 2024, Athens, Greece
- Program Committee Member – The Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) 2024 Conference, 4–7 June 2024, Glasgow, UK
- Program Committee Member – The 8th Smart Data and Smart Cities (SDSC) Conference, 4–8 June 2024, Athens, Greece
2023
- General Chair – City+2023@Perth International Conference, 15 October 2023, Perth, Australia. (over 300 attendees from 29 countries/regions)
- Chair – Session "Spatial Association", The 22nd International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) Annual Conference, 5–12 August 2023, Trondheim, Norway
- Chair – Topics Webinar EO&GEO Series: GIS in the Management of Sustainable and Smart Cities, journals of Remote Sensing, Drones, ISPRS IJGI, and Land, 9 March 2023
- Program Committee Member – GIScience 2023: The 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, 12–15 September 2023, Leeds, UK
- Program Committee Member – The ISPRS 2023 Geospatial Week, 2–7 September 2023, Cairo, Egypt
- Program Committee Member – The 22nd International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) Annual Conference, 5–12 August 2023, Trondheim, Norway
- Program Committee Member – The 26th Conference of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE), 13–16 June 2023, Delft, Netherlands
2022
- Logistics Chair – The 35th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 5–8 December 2022, Perth, Australia. (Received the Special Thanks Award)
- Chair – Session "Ethical Artificial Intelligence", The 35th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 5–8 December 2022, Perth, Australia
- Chair – Session "Spatial Associations", The 21st International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) Annual Conference, 29 August – 3 September 2022, Nancy, France
- Chair – Session "Symposium on Scale in Spatial Analytics and Modeling: Scale and Spatial Associations", 2022 AAG Annual Meeting, American Association of Geographers, 25 February – 1 March 2022, New York City, United States
- Program Committee Member – 7th Smart Data and Smart Cities Conference & 17th 3DGeoInfo Conference, 19–21 October 2022, Sydney, Australia
- Program Committee Member – Geospatial Conference 2022, ISPRS International Joint Conferences, 15–18 October 2022, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
- Special Issue Coordinator – World Building Congress (WBC2022) and The 9th International Conference on Innovative Production and Construction (IPC2022), Joint Conference, 27–30 June 2022, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
- Keynote Speaker – The Fifth International Workshop on Environment and Geoscience (IWEG2022), 16–18 July 2022, China
- Program Committee Member – The 7th International Conference on Civil, Structural and Transportation Engineering (ICCSTE'22), 5–7 June 2022, Niagara Falls, Canada
- Program Committee Member – Symposium on Scale in Spatial Analytics and Modelling, 2022 AAG Annual Meeting, American Association of Geographers, 25 February – 1 March 2022, New York City, United States
2021
- Special Issue Coordinator – Pacific Islands GIS & RS Conference 2021 (PGRSC-2021), The Pacific GIS & Remote Sensing Council, 22–23 November 2021, Port Vila, Vanuatu
- Program Committee Member – The 24th Conference of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE), 8–11 June 2021, Crete, Greece
Reviewer
Providing peer review for over 80 international academic journals
- Annals of GIS
- Annals of the American Association of Geographers
- AIMS Mathematics
- Applied Intelligence
- Applied Sciences
- Asian Geographer
- Austrian Journal of Statistics
- Automation in Construction
- Big Earth Data
- BMC Ecology and Evolution
- Buildings
- Built Environment Project and Asset Management
- Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing
- Cities
- Complexity
- Computers and Geosciences
- Discover Cities
- Energies
- Engineering
- Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management
- Environmental and Sustainability Indicators
- Environmental Earth Sciences
- Environmental Impact Assessment Review
- Environmental Research
- Environmental Research Communications
- Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability
- Environmental Science & Technology
- Environmental Science and Ecotechnology
- Environmental Science and Pollution Research
- EPJ Data Science
- Geo-spatial Information Science
- Geography and Sustainability
- Geomatica
- GIScience & Remote Sensing
- Health and Place
- Heliyon
- Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
- IEEE Access
- IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
- IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
- IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
- Information Geography
- Information Sciences
- International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
- International Journal of Construction Management
- International Journal of Digital Earth
- International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
- International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology
- International Journal of Geographical Information Science
- International Journal of Green Energy
- International Journal of Pavement Research and Technology
- International Journal of Sustainable Transportation
- iScience
- ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
- Journal of Biogeography
- Journal of Cleaner Production
- Journal of Environmental Management
- Journal of Hydrology
- Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization
- Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
- Journal of Safety Science and Resilience
- Mathematical Geosciences
- Nature Cities
- Nature Communications
- npj Heritage Science
- PLOS One
- R Journal
- Remote Sensing
- Remote Sensing of Environment
- Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
- Resources, Conservation & Recycling
- Science of Remote Sensing
- Science of The Total Environment
- Science Advances
- Sensors
- Sustainability
- Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure
- Sustainable Cities and Society
- Sustainable Earth Reviews
- Transactions in GIS
- Urban Climate