Yao-Yi Chiang is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His current research area is spatial artificial intelligence. Chiang develops spatial explicit machine learning and data mining methods to discover useful insights from heterogeneous spatial data, including satellite imagery, scanned historical maps, knowledge graphs, natural language data, time-series data, and transportation data.
He is also an action editor of GeoInformatica (Springer) and an editorial board member for Transactions in GIS (Wiley). He has received funding from NSF, NIH, DARPA, NGA, NEH, and partners such as NTT Global Networks, BAE Systems, Conveyancing Liability Solutions, TerraGo, and Rumsey Map Collection.
Chiang was an associate professor in the University of Southern California’s Spatial Sciences Institute until 2021. He was recently a visiting researcher at Google AI and a machine learning consultant at the Spatial Computing Group at Meta. Before his PhD study, Chiang worked as a research scientist for Geosemble Technologies and Fetch Technologies in California. Geosemble Technologies was founded on a patent on geospatial data fusion techniques, and he was a co-inventor. Chiang is the founder of Kartta Foundation, a nonprofit organization providing software and services to distill and assemble geographic knowledge for the public good. Kartta Foundation currently manages Kartta Labs, a previous Google product, including re.city.
He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California and his bachelor's degree in information management from National Taiwan University.