Canada

Visual interpretation is extremely important in human geography as the primary technique for geographers to use photograph data in identifying, classifying, and quantifying geographic and topological objects or regions. However, it is also time-consuming and requires overwhelming manual effort from professional geographers. This paper describes our interdisciplinary team&#39;s efforts in integrating computer vision models with geographers&#39; visual image interpretation process to reduce their workload in interpreting images. Focusing on the dune segmentation task, we proposed an approach featuring a deep dune segmentation model to identify dunes and label their ranges in an automated way. By developing a tool to connect our model with ArcGIS, one of the most popular workbenches for visual interpretation, geographers can further refine the automatically-generated dune segmentation on images without learning any CV or deep learning techniques. Our approach thus realized a non-invasive change to geographers&#39; visual interpretation routines, reducing their manual efforts while incurring minimal interruptions to their work routines and tools they are familiar with. Deployment with a leading Chinese geography research institution demonstrated the potential of our approach in supporting geographers in researching and solving drylands desertification.

AAAI 2024

DCV2I: A Practical Approach for Supporting Geographers’ Visual Interpretation in Dune Segmentation with Deep Vision Models

track: deployed applications

geoinformatics

multidisciplinary topics and applications

ecology and environment

human-computer interaction

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Visual interpretation is extremely important in human geography as the primary technique for geographers to use photograph data in identifying, classifying, and quantifying geographic and topological objects or regions. However, it is also time-consuming and requires overwhelming manual effort from professional geographers. This paper describes our interdisciplinary team's efforts in integrating computer vision models with geographers' visual image interpretation process to reduce their workload in interpreting images. Focusing on the dune segmentation task, we proposed an approach featuring a deep dune segmentation model to identify dunes and label their ranges in an automated way. By developing a tool to connect our model with ArcGIS, one of the most popular workbenches for visual interpretation, geographers can further refine the automatically-generated dune segmentation on images without learning any CV or deep learning techniques. Our approach thus realized a non-invasive change to geographers' visual interpretation routines, reducing their manual efforts while incurring minimal interruptions to their work routines and tools they are familiar with. Deployment with a leading Chinese geography research institution demonstrated the potential of our approach in supporting geographers in researching and solving drylands desertification.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

To address the limitations of traffic prediction from location-bound detectors, we present Geographical Cellular Traffic (GCT) flow, a novel data source that leverages the extensive coverage of cellular traffic to capture mobility patterns. Our extensive analysis validates its potential for transportation. Focusing on vehicle-related GCT flow prediction, we propose a graph neural network that integrates multivariate, temporal, and spatial facets for improved accuracy. Experiments reveal our model's superiority over baselines, especially in long-term predictions. We also highlight the potential for GCT flow integration into transportation systems.

TelTrans: Applying Multi-Type Telecom Data to Transportation Evaluation and Prediction via Multifaceted Graph Modeling

The absence of comprehensive situational awareness information poses a significant challenge for humanitarian organizations during their response efforts. We present Flood Insights, an end-to-end system that ingests data from multiple non-traditional data sources such as remote sensing, social sensing, and geospatial data. We employ state-of-the-art natural language processing and computer vision models to identify flood exposure, ground-level damage and flood reports, and most importantly, urgent needs of affected people. We deploy and test the system during a recent real-world catastrophe, the 2022 Pakistan floods, to surface critical situational and damage information at the district level. We validated the system's effectiveness through geographic regression analysis using official ground-truth data, showcasing its strong performance and explanatory power. Moreover, the system was commended by the United Nations Development Programme stationed in Pakistan, as well as local authorities, for pinpointing hard-hit districts and enhancing disaster response.

Flood Insights: Integrating Remote and Social Sensing Data for Flood Exposure, Damage, and Urgent Needs Mapping | VIDEO

Distributed ML addresses challenges from increasing data and model complexities. Peer to peer (P2P) networks in distributed ML offer scalability and fault tolerance. However, they also encounter challenges related to resource consumption, and communication overhead as the number of participating peers grows. This research introduces a novel architecture that combines serverless computing with P2P networks for distributed training. Serverless computing enhances this model with parallel processing and cost effective scalability, suitable for resource-intensive tasks. Preliminary results show that peers can offload expensive computational tasks to serverless platforms. However, their inherent statelessness necessitates strong communication methods, suggesting a pivotal role for databases. To this end, we have enhanced an in memory database to support ML training tasks.

Incorporating Serverless Computing into P2P Networks for ML Training: In-Database Tasks and Their Scalability Implications (Student Abstract)

This paper explores proposing interpreting methods from explainable artificial intelligence to address the interpretability issues in deep learning-based models for classroom dialogue. Specifically, we developed a Bert-based model to automatically detect student talk moves within classroom dialogues, utilizing the TalkMoves dataset. Subsequently, we proposed three generic interpreting methods, namely saliency, input*gradient, and integrated gradient, to explain the predictions of classroom dialogue models by computing input relevance (i.e., contribution). The experimental results show that the three interpreting methods can effectively unravel the classroom dialogue analysis, thereby potentially fostering teachers' trust.

Opening the Black Box: Unraveling the Classroom Dialogue Analysis (Student Abstract)

We consider the problem of constrained multi-objective optimization over black-box objectives, with user-defined preferences, with a largely infeasible input space. Our goal is  to approximate the optimal Pareto set from the small fraction of feasible inputs. The main challenges include huge design space, multiple objectives, numerous constraints, and rare feasible inputs identified only through expensive experiments. We present PAC-MOO, a novel preference-aware multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithm to solve this problem. It leverages surrogate models for objectives and constraints to intelligently select the sequence of inputs for evaluation to achieve the target goal.

Preference-Aware Constrained Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

We present a new, simple and effective loss function for calibrating graph neural networks (GNNs). Miscalibration is the problem whereby a model's probabilities does not reflect it's correctness, making it difficult and possibly dangerous for real-world deployment. We compare our method against other baselines on a novel ID and OOD graph form of the Celeb-A faces dataset. Our findings show that our method improves calibration for GNNs, which are not immune to miscalibration in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD). Our code is available for review at https://github.com/dexterdley/CS6208/tree/main/Project.

MaxEnt Loss: Calibrating Graph Neural Networks under Out-of-Distribution Shift (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted significant interest recently since they can effectively process and analyze graph-structured data commonly found in real-world applications. However, the predicament that GNNs are difficult to train becomes worse as the layers increase. The essence of this problem is that stacking layers will reduce the stability of forward propagation and gradient back-propagation. And as the increasing scale of models (measured by the number of parameters), how to efficiently and effectively adapt it to particular downstream tasks becomes an intriguing research issue. In this work, motivated by the effect of orthogonality constraints, we propose a simple orthogonal training framework to impose the orthogonality constraints on GNNs, which can help models find a solution vector in a specific low dimensional subspace and stabilize the signaling processes at both the forward and backward directions. Specifically, we propose a novel polar decomposition-based orthogonal initialization (PDOI-R) algorithm, which can identify the low intrinsic dimension within the Stiefel Manifold and stabilize the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in multiple downstream tasks, showcasing its generality. The simple method can help existing state-of-the-art models achieve better performance.

Simple Orthogonal Graph Representation Learning (Student Abstract)

Image/video denoising in low-light scenes is an extremely challenging problem due to limited photon count and high noise. In this paper, we propose a novel approach with contrastive learning to address this issue. Inspired by the success of contrastive learning used in some high-level computer vision tasks, we bring in this idea to the low-level denoising task. In order to achieve this goal, we introduce a new denoising contrastive regularization (DCR) to exploit the information of noisy images and clean images. In the feature space, DCR makes the denoised image closer to the clean image and far away from the noisy image. In addition, we build a new feature embedding network called Wnet, which is more effective to extract high-frequency information. We conduct the experiments on a real low-light dataset that captures still images taken on a moonless clear night in 0.6 millilux and videos under starlight (no moon present, $<$0.001 lux). The results show that our method can achieve a higher PSNR and better visual quality compared with existing methods.

Contrastive Learning for Low-Light Raw Denoising (Student Abstract)

Researchers have applied knowledge graph embedding (KGE) techniques with advanced neural network techniques, such as capsule networks, for predicting drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and achieved remarkable results. However, most ignore molecular structure and position features between drug pairs. They cannot model the biomedical field's significant relational mapping properties (RMPs,1-N, N-1, N-N) relation. To solve these problems,  we innovatively propose CDHse that consists of two crucial modules: 1) Entity embedding module, we obtain position feature obtained by PubMedBERT and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN),  obtain molecular structure feature with Graphic Nuaral Network (GNN), obtain entity embedding feature of drug pairs, and then incorporate these features into one synthetic feature. 2) Knowledge graph embedding module, the synthetic feature is Householder projections and then embedded in the complex vector space for training. In this paper, we have selected several advanced models for the DDIs task and performed experiments on three standard BioKG to validate the effectiveness of CDHse.

Biomedical Knowledge Graph Embedding with Householder Projection (Student Abstract)

Seq-to-seq generative models recently gained attention for solving the relation extraction task. By approaching this problem as an end-to-end task, they surpassed encoder-based-only models. Little research investigated the effects of the output syntaxes on the training process of these models. Moreover, a limited number of approaches were proposed for extracting ready-to-load knowledge graphs following the RDF standard. In this paper, we consider that a set of triples can be linearized in many different ways, and we evaluate the combined effect of the size of the language models and different RDF syntaxes on the task of relation extraction from Wikipedia abstracts.

Well-Written Knowledge Graphs: Most Effective RDF Syntaxes for Triple Linearization in End-to-End Extraction of Relations from Texts (Student Abstract)

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