Portrait of Yuankun Jiao

Yuankun Jiao

Ph.D. student in Computer Science, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

GeoAI LLM Spatial Reasoning Data Mining Spatial Humanities

About Me

I am a GISer, GeoAI practitioner, Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, advised by Prof. Yao-Yi Chiang. I am recently working on cartographical reasoning capability of Large Language Models and I am interested in Web-based Geographic Information System developing. In my spare time, I enjoy learning geography, philosophy, social science, playing music, and staying with my cat.

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Google ScholarScholar
GitHub@36N120E

Selected Publications

  1. Augmenting Human-Centered Racial Covenant Detection and Georeferencing with a Plug-and-Play NLP Pipeline
    Pyo, Jiao, Chiang, Corey. In preparation, 2025.
  2. Performance Evaluation of Different Detection Technologies for Signalized Intersections in Minnesota (MN 2024-10)
    Grossman, Jiao, Hu, Hourdos, Chiang. Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2024.
  3. Travel changes and equitable access to urban parks in the post COVID-19 pandemic period: Evidence from Wuhan, China
    Zhang, Li, Gao, Liu, Jiao, Zeng, Gao, Wang. Journal of Environmental Management, 2022.
  4. Incorporating Geographic Information for Building a Location-based Recommendation System
    Jiao, Chiang. ACM SIGSPATIAL, 2021.

Research Projects

Map Reasoning Benchmark with Vision-Language Models

Designing a cartographic reasoning benchmark for VLMs to evaluate human-like interpretation of maps, including legend decoding and spatial reasoning.

Mapping Prejudice

Built plug-and-play NLP pipelines for restrictive covenant detection and georeferencing in historical deeds; improved recall and reduced false positives.

Street Name Evolution Analysis

Automated spatio-temporal semantic analysis of street names across 2,600+ US counties using transformer-based embeddings.

Location Recommendation

Content-based recommendation system that incorporates geographic context for improved ranking quality.

Urban Parks Accessibility (COVID-19)

Analyzed mobility changes and equitable access to parks during the pandemic period.