Dr. Kurte of IIIT Hyderabad

Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), the convergence of geospatial sciences and artificial intelligence, has rapidly emerged as one of the most dynamic and influential areas within spatial data science and geography. Understanding how this field has evolved is essential for anticipating its future trajectory. In this talk, I will walk through key milestones in AI and highlight how these advances have shaped geospatial research over time. The core of the session will focus on six real-world use cases drawn from my past and current work, along with a few notable examples from the literature, illustrating how AI can meaningfully address complex, practical challenges. While the discussion will lean more toward applications involving raster data, I will also point to compelling examples where AI has been effectively applied to vector-based problems, ensuring a balanced perspective across data types.

Biography:

Kuldeep Kurte is an Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. Prior to this, he served as a Research Scientist at Reliance New Solar Energy, Reliance Industries Limited. Before joining Reliance, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Computational Urban Sciences Group (CUSG) within the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), USA. He earned his Ph.D. in Spatial Image Information Mining from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2017. In January 2018, he joined ORNL as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Scalable Geo-Computation Group. Throughout his research career, he has focused on applied AI and large-scale computing to address a wide range of urban-centric challenges. Kuldeep’s AI/ML expertise spans knowledge representation and reasoning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and geo-semantics. He has substantial experience using high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, including GPUs, for large-scale geospatial analytics. At ORNL, his first project involved developing a scalable end-to-end human settlement detection workflow from satellite imagery and deploying it on the TITAN supercomputer (ranked #1 globally in 2013). His applied interests include disaster situational awareness, decarbonization, and energy optimization. As part of CUSG, he also worked on urban applications related to transportation and building energy systems. Kuldeep is an active member of ACM and IEEE. He has served as a reviewer for several leading journals, including IEEE JSTARS, TGRS, GRSL, Applied Energy, Energy, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, and the Journal of Supercomputing. He has also contributed as a reviewer or program committee member for major conferences and workshops such as ACM SIGSPATIAL, IEEE IGARSS, IEEE InGARSS, FOSS4G Asia, IEEE BigData, and EarthVision (a CVPR workshop).

Address:IIIT Hyderabad, , Hyderabad, Telengana, India, 500032