Krzysztof Janowicz

My name is Krzysztof Janowicz. I am a professor at the University of Vienna working on Spatial Data Science and GeoAI. I am the head/chair of the Department of Geography and Regional Research, Editors-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal by SAGE (formally IOS Press), and executive board member of Uni Vienna's Data Science Network.

Before returning to Europe, I have been a (assistant, associate, and full) professor of Geoinformatics at the Geography Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA. At UCSB I was director of the Center for Spatial Studies and former program chair of UCSB's Cognitive Science Program. Before moving to the West Coast in 2011, I was an assistant professor at the GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Having spend 13 years in the United States, I remain deeply connected to the American research community at UCSB and beyond, to my collaborators in industry, and to my former local community in Goleta, California.

Prior to moving to the US, I was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster in Germany for the international research training group on Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information and the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL). I got my PhD in geoinformatics from the University of Münster in the summer of 2008. My doctoral advisor was Werner Kuhn, and more informally Martin Raubal. Together with TU Vienna's Andrew Frank they were instrumental in shaping my understanding and interest in formal (geographic) knowledge representation at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive geography.

Methodologically, my niche is the combination of theory-driven (e.g., semantics) and data-driven (e.g., data mining) techniques in the broader realm of knowledge representation including work on knowledge graphs, geo-semantics, social sensing, and representation learning (GeoAI). I am particularly interested in studying how AI systems and humans represent geographic spaces and places and how these representations, in turn, shape our interaction with the world.

At its core, representation is never epistemically neutral, at least not from a constructivist and cognitivist viewpoint, as there are many ways to construct these representations. The way individuals, societies, or nowadays artificial agents construct (abstract) concepts such as Poverty or Forest but also vague cognitive regions (such as Southern California) is a function of their experiences, cultures, age, practices, political affiliations, current context, and so on. I have always been fascinated by this diversity of meaning and how to account for it computationally.

Hence, I always been drawn to topics such as similarity (and analogy) based reasoning, ontology alignment instead of singular (top-level) ontologies, social sensing, semantic signatures (i.e., early types of embeddings) and other observation and behavioral driven ways to computationally represent the variability in human conceptualizations bottom-up, and, more lately, to research in pluralistic AI alignment and biases affecting AI systems.

• Geography according to foundation models How can we know what AI will know and how will AI representations of geography shape our future interaction with the spaces and places around us.
• Knowledge Graphs Tbd
• Semantic Signatures Tbd

I am not good at small talk and may come across as out of sync; still, I do care deeply about people, especially my students and about fostering their careers.

Over the years I have had the great privilege and pleasure of working with exceptionally gifted, thoughtful, caring, passionate, and intellectually curious students and young researchers -- whether undergraduate students, master's students, PhD students, or postdocs. Sparking their curiosity for science, strengthening their critical thinking, or encouraging them to take initiative in their lives is among the most rewarding experiences of being a professor, especially for students who might otherwise feel they do not quite belong.

I greatly enjoy hearing from them, often years after graduation. I am not entirely sure why they sometimes share their successes with me or seek my advice in difficult moments; while I rarely have the answers they might hope for, I value their trust in reaching out.

Below I list only former PhD students and postdocs whom I formally advised or (more informally) mentored. I am ommitting co-advised students at other host institutions without implying they would matter less. The list is kept short, but many others have mattered greatly to the development of STKO; finally, a list including Master's students or our many international visiting students would simply be too long.

• Ben Adams
  Professor at University of Canterbury, NZ
• Grant McKenzie
  Professor at McGill University, Canada
• Song Gao
  Professor at University of Wisconsin Madison, USA
• Yingjie Hu
  Professor at University at Buffalo, USA
• Bo Yan
  AI/ML Researcher at Google, USA
• Rui Zhu
  Senior Lecturer at University at Bristol, UK
• Ling Cai
  AI/ML Researcher at Bytedance, USA
• Gengchen Mai
  Professor at University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Zhangyu Wang
  Professor at University of Maine, USA
• Marcela Suárez
  Professor at University of New Mexico, USA
• Meilin Shi
  Senior Data Scientist at University of Liverpool, UK
• Kitty Currier
  EDM International, USA
• Shirly Stephen
  Spatial Data Scientist at National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, USA
• Ivan Majic
  Professor at Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Simon Scheider
  Professor at Utrecht University, NL (Simon was a self-funded visitor/postdoc)

I had the distinct pleasure of sharing a department floor with Werner Kuhn, Mike Goodchild, Waldo Tobler, Helen Couclelis, Martin Raubal, Dan Montello, Alan MacEachren, Keith Clarke, and many others, and I am deeply grateful for having had this opportunity.

Affiliation:
Department of Geography and Regional Research
and Data Science Network,
University of Vienna, Austria