Ph.D. Researcher Email: zilong.liu@univie.ac.at My motivation stems from how humans and machines understand (e.g., perceive) and impact (e.g., construct) the geographic space. Currently, I am a University Assistant (praedoc) working at Vienna International School of Earth and Space Sciences on Knowledge Graph-based GeoEnrichment for Environmental Intelligence. I am also a member of the Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Observatory. Before, I was a research associate of Center for Spatial Studies at UC Santa Barbara from 2020 to 2022. Now I am a Ph.D. student affiliated with the working group of Spatial Data Science and Geocommunication at the Department of Geography and Regional Research in University of Vienna. Advised by Prof. Krzysztof Janowicz, I am studying geographic diversity in knowledge representation and representation learning.

Education

• Ph.D., Geography, University of Vienna (09/2022 - Present) + UC Santa Barbara (03/2022 - 09/2022)
• M.A., Geography, UC Santa Barbara (09/2020 - 03/2022)
• B.S., Geographic Information Science, East China Normal University (09/2016-07/2020)

Research Interests

• AI Ethics
• Spatial Data Science
• Geo-semantics

Publications

• Liu, Z., Janowicz, K., Majic, I., Shi, M., Fortacz, A., Karimi, M., Mai, G., & Currier, K. (2025). Operationalizing Geographic Diversity for the Evaluation of AI‐Generated Content. Transactions in GIS, 29(3), e70057.
• Shi, M., Janowicz, K., Liu, Z., Karimi, M., Majic, I., & Fortacz, A. (2025). Defining Concept Drift and Its Variants in Research Data Management: A Scientometric Case Study on Geographic Information Science. Transactions in GIS, 29(3), e70058.
• Shi, M., Janowicz, K., Verstegen, J., Currier, K., Wiedemann, N., Mai, G., … & Zhu, R. (2025). Geography for AI sustainability and sustainability for GeoAI. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 1-19.
• Zhu, R., Shimizu, C., Stephen, S., Fisher, C. K., Thelen, T., Currier, K., … & Zalewski, J. (2025). The KnowWhereGraph: A Large-Scale Geo-Knowledge Graph for Interdisciplinary Knowledge Discovery and Geo-Enrichment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.13874.
• Shimizu, C., Stephen, S., Barua, A., Cai, L., Christou, A., Currier, K., … & Zhu, R. (2024). The KnowWhereGraph Ontology. Journal of Web Semantics.
• Shi, M., Janowicz, K., Liu, Z., & Currier, K. (2024). Towards Formalizing Concept Drift and Its Variants: A Case Study Using Past COSIT Proceedings (Short Paper). In 16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024). Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik.
• Liu, Z., Janowicz, K., Currier, K., & Shi, M. (2024). Measuring Geographic Diversity of Foundation Models with a Natural Language–based Geo-guessing Experiment on GPT-4. AGILE: GIScience Series, 5, 38.
• Janowicz, K., Currier, K., Shimizu, C., Zhu, R., Shi, M., Fisher, C. K., … & Stephen, S. (2023). Fast Forward from Data to Insight:(Geographic) Knowledge Graphs and Their Applications. In Handbook of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (pp. 411-426). CRC Press.
• Liu, Z., Janowicz, K., Currier, K., Shi, M., Rao, J., Gao, S., Cai, L., & Graser, A. (2023, August 26). Here Is Not There: Measuring Entailment-Based Trajectory Similarity for Location-Privacy Protection and Beyond. Fourth International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL’23), Dortmund, Germany.
• Shi, M., Currier, K., Liu, Z., Janowicz, K., Wiedemann, N., Verstegen, J., … & Mai, G. (2023). Thinking Geographically about AI Sustainability. AGILE: GIScience Series, 4, 42.
• Stephen, S., Schildhauer, M., Cai, L., Tian, Y., Currier, K., Shimizu, C., … & Huang, T. (2023). The Expertise Ontology: Modeling Expertise in the Context of Emergency Management. In JOWO.
• Shimizu, C., Stephen, S., Zhu, R., Currier, K., Schildhauer, M., Rehberger, D., … & Tian, Y. (2023). The KnowWhereGraph Ontology: A Showcase. In JOWO.
• Liu, Z., Gu, Z., Thelen, T., Estrecha, S. G., Zhu, R., Fisher, C. K., … & Hitzler, P. (2022, November). Knowledge explorer: exploring the 12-billion-statement KnowWhereGraph using faceted search (demo paper). In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (pp. 1-4). [repo] [demo] *Best Demo Runner-Up
• Goodchild, M.F., Appelbaum R., Crampton, J., Herbert, W.A., Janowicz, K., Kwan, M.-P., Michael, K., Alvarez León, L. F., Bennett, M., Cole, D.G., Currier, K., Fast, V., Hirsch, J., Kattenbeck, M., Kedron, P., Kerski, J., Liu, Z., Nelson, T., Shulruff, T., Sieber, R.E., Wertman, J., Wilmott, C., Zhao, B., Zhu, R., Nilupaer, J., Dony, C.C., Langham, G. (2022). A White Paper on Locational Information and the Public Interest. American Association of Geographers.
• Liu, Z., Janowicz, K., Cai, L., Zhu, R., Mai, G., & Shi, M. (2022). Geoparsing: Solved or Biased? An Evaluation of Geographic Biases in Geoparsing. AGILE: GIScience Series, 3, 1-13. [repo]
• Janowicz, K., Hitzler, P., Li, W., Rehberger, D., Schildhauer, M., Zhu, R., … & Currier, K. (2022). Know, Know Where, KnowWhereGraph: A densely connected, cross‐domain knowledge graph and geo‐enrichment service stack for applications in environmental intelligence. AI Magazine, 43(1), 30-39. [SPARQL endpoint]
• Liu, Z., Shi, M., Janowicz, K., Regalia, B., Delbecque, S., Mai, G., … & Hitzler, P. LD Connect: A Linked Data Portal for IOS Press Scientometrics. In European Semantic Web Conference (pp. 323-337). Springer, Cham. [repo] *Spotlight Paper
• Janowicz, K., Shimizu, C., Hitzler, P., Mai, G., Stephen, S., Zhu, R., … & Shi, M. (2022). Diverse data! Diverse schemata?. Semantic Web, 13(1), 1-3.
• Zhu, R., Cai, L., Mai, G., Shimizu, C., Fisher, C. K., Janowicz, K., … & Liu, Z. (2021, December). Providing Humanitarian Relief Support through Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 11th on Knowledge Capture Conference (pp. 285-288).

Posters

• Liu, Z., Janowicz, K., Currier, K., & Shi, M. (2024). Uncovering Regional Defaults from Photorealistic Forests in Text-to-Image Generation with DALL·E 2. 16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024). *Best Poster Candidate
• Liu, Z.. A Glimpse into Geographic Diversity of Generative AI with Scale-based Evaluation. [Presented at the International Semantic Web Research Summer School 2024]

Provocations

• Liu, Z., Currier, K., & Janowicz, K. (2024). Making Geographic Space Explicit in Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Cultural Subjects. [Presented at the Global AI Cultures workshop in ICLR 2024]

Committee Service

• Student organizer, Planet Earth Day@Uni Wien, 2025
• Student organizer, Vienna Daughters’ Day 2025, 2025
• Student organizer, Sociotechnical Foundations of GeoAI and Spatial Data Science, 2024
• Student organizer, Spatial Data Science Symposium, 2022-2024
• Student organizer, GIS Day@univie, 2022-2024
• Program committee member, AGILE 2024
• Leading tutorial organizer, Knowing Where via Knowledge Graph-based GeoEnrichment, the 22^nd International Semantic Web Conference
• Student organizer, Seminar Talk on KnowWhereGraph, Knowledge Graphs, and GeoAI [GEO@ECNU] [LREIS@CAS]
• Student organizer, Geography according to ChatGPT
• Note taker and participant, the GeoEthics Summit

Peer Reviewer

• 2025 CVPR Workshop on Demographic Diversity in Computer Vision
• International Journal of Geographical Information Science
• Geography according to ChatGPT
• The ACM Web Conference 2024
• 2023 NeurIPS Workshop on Computational Sustainability
• AGILE 2022 & 2023

Teaching

• Principles and Methods of Application Development - Geographic Information Retrieval, University of Vienna (2023W & 2024W, Co-instructor) [course website]
• Open GIS and Open Data in Geoinformation, University of Vienna (2023S & 2024S, Co-instructor)
• Introduction to Spatial Data Science, University of Vienna (2024W, Co-instructor)
• Field Trip: Spatial Data Science and the City: A (North) American Perspective, University of Vienna (2023S, Co-instructor)
• GEOG 176B, Technical GIS, UC Santa Barbara (Winter 2021, Teaching Assistant)
• GEOG 176A, Geographic Information Systems and Science, UC Santa Barbara (Fall 2020, Teaching Assistant)

Awards

• VISESS Research Funds, University of Vienna (July 2024)
• FGGA Early-stage Researchers Programme, University of Vienna (May & July 2024)
• Financial Assistance, ICLR Global AI Cultures Workshop (2024)
• AGILE Grant, ESRI and AGILE (2022, 2024)
• US2TS Travel Grant, US2TS (2022)
• Jack and Laura Dangermond Travel Scholarship, UC Santa Barbara (Spring 2022)
• Jack and Laura Dangermond Scholarship, UC Santa Barbara (Spring 2021)
• China National Scholarship, East China Normal University (2017)

Experimental Visualizations (Projects from UCSB MAT 259)

• Place Names in the Semantic Space [repo]
• Hazard Entity Rainfall in KnowWhereGraph [repo]

Volunteer Projects

• UC Santa Barbara Global Engagement Map [demo]
• Chinese Tutorial for Mapbox Developers [repo]

Undergraduate Projects

• Analysis of Students’ Familiarity with UCSB Campus, spatial@ucsb.local2019: Spatial Data for Smarter Cities [poster]