Bing Zhou (he/him)
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography and Sustainability
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Research Interests
About
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My research sits at the intersection of GeoAI, Responsible GIScience, and disaster resilience, leveraging large language models, social media, and geospatial big data to support smart disaster response and equitable community recovery.
Prior to joining UTK, I was an Assistant Teaching Professor at Pennsylvania State University and completed my Ph.D. at Texas A&M University under the advisement of Prof. Lei Zou. I also bring more than six years of applied geospatial engineering experience from industry.
Recent News
- 2026 Co-chairing three AAG 2026 symposia on GeoAI Ethics and Disaster Resilience, San Francisco.
- 2025 New paper published in Annals of the AAG — rapid disaster response with LLMs and social media.
- 2025 Joined University of Tennessee, Knoxville as Assistant Professor.
- 2025 Guest lecture at UT Austin: Geospatial Data Science for Climate Resilience.
- 2024 Received Geography Graduate Student Excellence in Research Award, Texas A&M.
- 2024 Ph.D. conferred from Texas A&M University. Dissertation: Step Toward Responsible GIScience.
Education & Appointments
Academic Degrees
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
Research: GeoAI in Disaster Management; Responsible GIScience; Computational Mental Health; Cyberinfrastructure
Dissertation: Step Toward Responsible GIScience: Paradigms, Challenges, and Applications
Tongji University, Shanghai, China
Research: Multi-sensor integration and localization
Thesis: Realization of Mobile Mapping System and Data Collection
Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Research: GNSS positioning
Thesis: Research of Ionospheric Delay Interpolations and Their Performance Comparison
Professional Appointments
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Pennsylvania State University
Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University
Central Southern China Electric Design Institute, Wuhan
Multiple roles including Survey Engineer, Software Development Engineer, and Certified UAV Pilot (top 0.01% national contest)
Tongji University, Shanghai
Leica Geosystem, Shanghai
Publications
27+ journal articles · 3 book chapters · Manuscripts available upon request
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Rapid Disaster Response and Damage Estimation with Social Media and Pretrained Large Language Models: Insights from Multiple Hurricanes.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–23.
DOIHyperlocal disaster damage assessment using bi-temporal street-view imagery and pre-trained vision models.
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 121, 102335.
DOIWhere are GIScience faculty hired from? Analyzing faculty mobility and research themes through hiring networks.
Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 1–25.
DOIGISphere Knowledge Graph for Geography Education: Recommending Graduate GIS/Science Programs.
Transactions in GIS, 29(1), e13283.
DOIProgress in understanding human-COVID-19 dynamics using geospatial big data: a systematic review.
Annals of GIS, 1–21.
DOIPRIME: A CyberGIS Platform for Resilience Inference Measurement and Enhancement.
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 114, 102197.
DOIUnveiling community adaptations to extreme heat events using mobile phone location data.
Journal of Environmental Management, 366, 121665.
DOIDeciphering spatial-temporal dynamics of flood exposure in the United States.
Sustainable Cities and Society, 108, 105444.
DOIUnderstanding the disparate impacts of the 2021 Texas winter storm and power outages through mobile phone location data and nighttime light images.
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 103, 104339.
DOIOverlooked Voices under Strict Lockdown: Mapping Humanitarian Needs in 2022 Shanghai COVID-19 Outbreak.
Cartography and Geographic Information Science.
DOITopoBERT: a plug and play toponym recognition module harnessing fine-tuned BERT.
International Journal of Digital Earth, 16(1), 3045–3063.
DOIVictimFinder: Harvesting rescue requests in disaster response from social media with BERT.
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 95, 101824.
DOISensing the Pulse of the Pandemic: Geovisualizing the Demographic Disparities of Public Sentiment toward COVID-19 through Social Media.
Cartography and Geographic Information Science.
Algorithmic Uncertainties in Geolocating Social Media Data for Disaster Management.
Cartography and Geographic Information Science.
DOISocial media for emergency rescue: An analysis of rescue requests on Twitter during Hurricane Harvey.
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 85, 103513.
DOIRevealing the linguistic and geographical disparities of public awareness to Covid-19 outbreak through social media.
International Journal of Digital Earth, 15(1), 868–889.
DOISpatial–Temporal Land Loss Modeling and Simulation in a Vulnerable Coast: A Case Study in Coastal Louisiana.
Remote Sensing, 14(4), 896.
DOIBook Chapters
Integrating Natural Language Processing in Human Geography.
GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 43–61.
Empowering Smart Disaster Response with GeoAI.
Handbook of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence. CRC Press.
DOIDevelopment and Tests of Low Cost MMS.
Principle and Application Progress in Location-Based Services. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham.
DOITeaching
"Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think. It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."
— Albert Einstein
Teaching Interests
Courses Taught
Invited Talks & Guest Lectures
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2025
Geospatial Data Science for Climate Resilience Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin
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2024
Rapid Disaster Damage Estimation with Social Media Data Department of Environmental Science, Emory University
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2024
Capstones in GeoAI GEOG 695 Frontiers in GIScience, Texas A&M University
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2023
GeoAI in Natural Disaster Management and Application of Geodatabase GEOG 659 Geodatabase, Texas A&M University
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2022
Improving Disaster Management with Social Media and AI Texas Sea Grant Community Outreach, Weslaco, Texas (Invited Talk)
Student Mentorship
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2025–
Junbo Wang — Master Student Multimodal GenAI research
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2025
Shelton Simmons — Penn State Online Program (GEOG600 Thesis) An Attention Model for Remote Sensing Landcover Classification
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2023
Jeffery Pike — Undergraduate Research Assistant, Texas A&M
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2023
Edward Zhao — High School Student (UCGIS Research Competition) Digital Footprints of the 2023 Turkey Earthquake: Evidence from Social Media — 2nd Prize
Research Funding
Grants, projects, and proposals
Selected Honors & Awards
Proposals Under Review (as PI)
HazardWeave: An AI-supported unified platform for smart disaster management
AI-Tennessee THRIVE Program · $25,000
CausalNet: A Human-AI Causal Inference System for Co-occurring Hazards Smart Decision Support
UTK Ascent Program · $50,000
Does moving to areas with cleaner air slow cognitive decline? A longitudinal spatiotemporal study
NIH R21 · PI: Ensheng Dong · $400,000
Active & Completed Projects (as Co-PI)
Characterizing and Promoting Cartography and GIS Graduate Programs through Research Theme Discovery and Online Seminars
CaGIS Rising Grant · Student PI: Yuhao Kang
Research Participation Projects
Climate-LEAD: Climate effects on localized environmental health disparities in overburdened Texas communities
NASEM Gulf Research Program · PI: Lei Zou · $1,499,990
HNDS-I: A Cyberinfrastructure for multiscale human dynamics and resilience research
NSF Human Networks and Data Science · PI: Nina Lam · $1,096,902
EAGER: SAI-E: Synchronizing decision-support via human- and social-centered digital twin infrastructures for coastal communities
NSF EAGER · PI: Xinyue Ye · $298,982
Reducing the human impacts of flash floods: development of microdata and causal model
NSF HDBE Program · PI: Nasir Gharaibeh · $350,000
Disaster city digital twin: integrating machine and human intelligence to augment flood resilience
TAMU-X Grant · PI: Ali Mostafavi · $1,000,000
Leveraging geospatial big data and AI to enhance disaster resilience in vulnerable communities
PVAMU & TAMU Panther RISE Grant · PI: Lei Zou · $40,000
AAG Summer Workshop Series: Spatial data science for social media analytics
PI: Lei Zou · $1,750
Spatial data science: advances and applications (GeoAI section)
TAMIDS Course Development Grant · PI: Heng Cai · $15,000
Professional Service
Journal Peer Review
Reviewer of >30 manuscripts for the following journals:
Conference & Program Review
- TRB Annual Meeting
- University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS)
Organized Conference Sessions
Committee & Leadership Service
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2024–2025
Committee Member — Penn State GEOINT Graduate Selection Committee Evaluate graduate program applicants
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2023–2025
BOD Member — AAG Spatial Analysis & Modeling Specialty Group Attending BOD meetings; organizing Student Travel Award; website updates
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2021–2025
Chair & BOD Member — GISphere Project Non-profit organization empowering GIS education; coordination, funding, research collaboration
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2022
Invited Panelist — AutoCarto 2022 Student Success in Empowering Social Goods with Cartography and GIScience
Contact
Office
Department of Geography and Sustainability
College of Arts and Sciences
1000 Phillip Fulmer Way
Knoxville, TN 37996
Online Profiles
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Send a Message
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
AAG 2026
San Francisco, California · March 17–21, 2026