Programme

The programme may be subject to slight changes up until the conference start, so please check back regularly for updates. Select a day below and click an entry to expand or collapse for details. Prefer a different view? See the schedule in calendar layout, or use your browser's print option (Ctrl/Cmd+P) for a fully expandable, printable version of the programme.
Presentation times: Full papers, 15 min + 5 min Q&A; Short papers, 8 min + 5 min Q&A; Journal articles, 6 min + 3 min Q&A.

Full Paper     Short Paper     Journal Article

– Tuesday, 22 September

09:00 · Welcome

Welcome address and opening remarks.

09:30 – 10:30 · Session 1: Geospatial Semantics (Chair: Rui Zhu)

  From Markers to Meaning: A Cognitive–Symbolic Model of Cultural Placemaking

Maria Carolina Quintana Noriega, Christophe Claramunt

  When are geographic quantities semantically compatible with each other? Towards a constructive theory of amounts, magnitudes, and proportions

Simon Scheider, Shuai Wang, Eric Jacob Top

  Through and Through: corpus-based semantic analysis of a spatial preposition

Brandon Bennett, Maria M Hedblom

  Towards a statistical approach to humanistic-geographical place concepts

René Westerholt (DOI)

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 · Session 2: Spatial Cognition (Chair: Sara Fabrikant)

  Mapping Cycling Experience in Valence-Arousal Space: A Geometric Approach to Appraisal Heterogeneity

Ayda Grisiute, Johanna Wörle, Panagiotis Mavros, Martin Raubal

  Cognition and Computation of Minimal Viewpoints for Understanding Building Layouts

Ahmed Aly, Jakub Krukar

  Habitual use of navigation systems impairs spatial learning depending on navigation strategy

Qi Ying , Christopher Hilton, Sara Fabrikant

  Capturing Environmental-Scale Spatial Cognition in Applied Settings: A Field-Based Pilot with Firefighters

Chelsie McWhorter, Kathy Baylis, Mary Hegarty

  Context-sensitive Spatial Deixis through the Lens of Mental Models

Adwitiya Mandal, Zoe Falomir, Kai-Florian Richter

  Visual attention allocation between social and navigational cues during wayfinding

Gökçe Orlu Özen, Çağrı Imamoğlu, Elif Surer, Burçak Altay (DOI)

12:30 – 14:00 · Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided.

14:00 – 15:00 · Keynote Session – Krzysztof Janowicz

Read more about Krzysztof Janowicz and the keynote title and abstract on the speaker page.

15:00 – 15:30 · Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:00 · Session 3: Language and Foundation Models (Chair: Grant McKenzie)

  On Spatial Reasoning and Perspective Transformation in Language Models

Haotong Zhang, Ian Pratt-Hartmann

  LMM Modality Transfer: a Pre-requisite for Autonomous GIS Agents

Ivan Majic, Zexian Huang, Franziska Hübl, Krzysztof Janowicz, Meilin Shi, Mina Karimi, Zilong Liu, Alexandra Fortacz

  Structuring the Underwater Environment: A Taxonomy of Aquatic Landmarks

Eva Nuhn, Sabine Timpf

  Conceptual Vagueness as Humans and LLMs Represent: Evidence from Migration Distance Categorization

Songlin Wang, Krzysztof Janowicz, Ailin Benitez Cortes, Marion Borderon, Yingjing Huang, Mina Karimi, Zilong Liu, Annika Süß, Patrick Sakdapolrak

  GeoKG for GeoFM: Neuro-Symbolic Integration of Semantically-enriched Geospatial-Temporal Data

Kai Moltzen, Debayan Banerjee, Julian Burmester, Anna Ehrenberg, Martin Kohler, Cedric Möller, Jann Pfeifer, Tilahun Abedissa Taffa, Hanna Marlene Schulz, Aida Usmanova, Patrick Westphal, Ricardo Usbeck

  Golden Gate Bridge, as Always? Eliciting Prototypical Places From Autoregressive Large Language Models via Category Production

Zilong Liu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Mina Karimi, Meilin Shi, Ivan Majic, Alexandra Fortacz-Lazan (DOI)

17:00 – 18:00 · Poster Session

Some of the short papers accepted as posters are made publicly available in the COSIT 2026 Zenodo repository.

  A General Syntactic Basis for a Directed RCC

Eric Jacob Top

  Path choice is not determined at entry: a video-based analysis of path commitment

Wenjie Chen, Asya Natapov, Yasir Ali

  GeoAI for Promoting Sustainable Mobility: Overcoming the Predictive-Policy Paradox with Personalized Utility

Imene Benzaamia, Shelan Jeawak

  Space concepts in geographical information science

Franz-Benjamin Mocnik

  Which Cafe Do You Mean? Generating Textual Clues from Street View for POI Disambiguation

Miona Shimizu, Junko Hayashi, HISADA Shohei, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki, Hiroki Ouchi

  An approach for verifying terrestrial photographs via geosignatures

Ahmad Abubaka, Ajay Ajay, Tobias Brand, Moritz Denk, Tim Lehmann, Prince Oppong Boakye, Luca Venier, Samuel Yohanna, Christian Kray

  The AI's Eye for Scenic Beauty: Evaluating MLLMs' Predictive Ability and Explainability in Landscape Assessment

Shelan Jeawak

  Localizing Causal Signals for Spatial Inversion: A Comparative Study of GPT-2 and BLOOM

Danai Mylonaki, Orestis-Minas Kapopoulos, Manolis Koubarakis, Robert E. Blackwell, Anthony G Cohn

  Semantic Similarity Across Hierarchical Landform Types: A Knowledge Graph Embedding Approach

Jun Xu

  Rank-Structured Compositional Heterogeneity in Spatial Amenity Structures

Wei Chien Benny Chin, Chun-Hsiang Chan

  Generating Realistic Individual Activity Schedules via Activity Location Allocation Based on Simulated Travel Times

Tatsuya Mitomi, Yahya Gamal, Esra Suel, Gary Polhill, Daniel Konioukhov, Alison J Heppenstall

  Perceived walkability as spatial information for pedestrian accessibility

Tong Chen, Asya Natapov, Taimaz Larimian

  Neurosymbolic Reasoning about Street Networks: Graph-based RAG with Qualitative Spatial Representations

Reinhard Moratz, Niklas Daute, James Ondieki, Markus Kattenbeck, Ioannis Giannopoulos

  Flying with clarity: An eye-tracking study on the redesigned Swiss VFR aeronautical chart

Simeon Lüthi, Tumasch Reichenbacher, Armand Kapaj

  In-Context Learning to Assess Built Environment Impacts on Perceived Neighborhood Walkability Among Mobility-impaired Older Adults

Houhao Liang, Kresimir Friganovic, Joanne Kua, Noor Hafizah Ismail, Su Su, Bryan Yijia Tan, Navrag B Singh, Panagiotis Mavros

  Representing Design Intention and User Experience in Complex Buildings: A Comparative Evaluation Framework and Methodological Pipeline

Yuqin Zhong, Shamsul Azrin Jamaluddin, Lara Gregorians, Panagiotis Mavros, Christoph Hoelscher

  Beyond Proximity: An Anchor-Place Perspective on X-Minute City Local Living Through Individual Mobility Data

Bowen Zhang, Chen Zhong

  One City, Many Representations: Perspective-Driven Urban Space in Foundation Models

Mina Karimi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Omid Reza Abbasi, Zilong Liu, Yingjing Huang, Songlin Wang, Annika Süß

  Multidimensional motivations for the use of smartphone and paper maps: A web-based Evaluation Grid study

Masashi Sugimoto, Toru Ishikawa

18:00 – 20:00 · Icebreaker – York Art Gallery

Drinks and canapés will be served.

– Wednesday, 23 September

09:00 – 10:30 · Session 4: Spatial Analysis and Modeling (Sponsored by ESRC Integrate; Chair: Lex Comber)

  An Operator Framework for Real-time Analytics of Streamed Fields

JJ Paul, Silvia Nittel

  From Feature Attribution to Spatial Information Structure: Interpreting Urban Pedestrian Flows with Explainable AI

Atakilti Kiros, Yuri Ribakov, Israel Klein, Achituv Cohen

  Spatiotemporal Adaptive Learning for Flow-based Graph Neural Networks

Fengjiao Li, Meiliu Wu, Ana Basiri

  The Same Street, Different Safety Judgments: Evaluative Context Effects in Daytime and Nighttime Street View Imagery

Tong Qin, Nico Van de Weghe, Wim Fias, Haosheng Huang

  Decision-Making Under Uncertainty in Tsunami Evacuation: Individual Differences in Information Consultation and Risk Perception

Shota Iwama, Sihwan Lee, Hong Hu, Takanori Nanahara

  Learning street view representations based on a spatiotemporal contrastive learning framework

Yong Li, Yingjing Huang, and Fan Zhang (DOI)

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 1: Indoor-vs-Outdoor Spatial Information: Similarities and Differences in Cognition and Computation

Location: The Hospitium, Museum Gardens.

Brief description: We live and navigate continuously between indoor and outdoor spaces, yet the research landscape is fragmented into separate cognitive strategies, computational models, and support systems for the indoor vs outdoor contexts. This session invites the COSIT community to reflect where the differences are truly fundamental, and where convergence across these strands is possible. The session is designed as a structured, discussion-driven workshop centered around interdisciplinary exchange between the cognitive/empirical and computational/technical groups. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Jakub Krukar, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany

Jungwon Lee, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany

Marina Smirnova, Telecom Paris, France

Panos Mavros, Telecom Paris, France

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 2: Spatial Information Theory, Spatial Cognition, and Spatial-HCI? What, Why, and Why now?

Location: Tempest Anderson Hall, Yorkshire Museum.

Brief description: The session will start with a 10-minute elaboration of the meanings of Spatial Human-Computer Interaction. It will continue with a panel discussion involving 3 panelists, each of whom is a representative of one of the three domains. Each panelist is asked to give an initial 5-minute statement about their point of view on how their topical focus relates to the other two. Subsequently, the organizers will guide the discussion among panelists. After 30-minutes of discussion among them, the session will be opened up to questions and comments from the audience. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Markus Kattenbeck, Geoinformation, TU Wien, Austria

Ioannis Giannopoulos, Geoinformation, TU Wien, Austria

12:30 – 13:30 · Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided.

13:30 – 14:30 · Keynote Session – Laura Alessandretti

Read more about Laura Alessandretti and the keynote title and abstract on the speaker page.

14:30 – 15:30 · Session 5: Spatial Search (Chair: Franz-Benjamin Mocnik)

  Much of Geospatial Web Search Is Beyond Traditional GIS

Ilya Ilyankou, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

  An Extended Qualitative Model for Reasoning about 3D Objects using Depth and Different Perspectives

Martí Ejarque, Zoe Falomir

  Document Geocoding for Inferring Spatial Familiarity within Reddit text

Paddy Smith, Ed Manley, Myles Gould

  Comparing thematic and search term-based coding in understanding sense of place in survey research

Isabel Cotton, Brooke McWherter, Thora Tenbrink, and Kate Sherren (DOI)

15:30 – 18:00 · Social Activities

Details to follow.

– Thursday, 24 September

09:00 – 10:30 · Session 6: Navigation and Wayfinding I (Chair: Ruth Dalton)

  Extending ISO-Space to Annotate Spatial Information in Route Descriptions

Samira Goudarzi Ali Akbari, Stephan Winter, Martin Tomko

  Mapinou: a Game to Assess the Skill of Using Pan-Scalar Maps

Justin Berli, Guillaume Touya

  Learning a map under positive emotions: How self-reported arousal and individual differences relate to route and survey knowledge

Veronica Muffato, Laura Miola, Francesca Pazzaglia, Chiara Meneghetti

  Representing Retail Wayfinding: A Requirement-Driven Study Design for Non-Visual Supermarket Navigation

Xiang Zhou, Sabine Timpf

  Simulating Path Integration with Continuous Attractor Neural Networks

Yulin Wu, Ed Manley

  Feeling the heat? Heat stress impairs landmark but not route knowledge in a VR navigation task

Alessandro J. Pierro, Sara Fabrikant, Armand Kapaj

  Beyond urban form: Introducing dynamic factors in agent-based simulations of pedestrian movement

Marcin Wozniak, Gabriele Filomena (DOI)

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 3: Leveraging Geospatial Innovation for Safeability

Location: Tempest Anderson Hall, Yorkshire Museum.

Brief description: The UK’s Safer Streets Mission aims to reduce serious harm and increase public confidence in policing and criminal justice system. Integral to the mission is the ambition to half knife crime and violence against women and girls (VAWG) within a decade. The US have their own programmes that focus similar missions (e.g., Project Safe Neighourhoods, or regional examples such as LA’s Operation Safe Cities). The challenge faced by law officers and agencies is that many are also having their budgets reduced, requiring them to achieve more with much less resources. The adoption of technology is increasingly seen as a force-multiplier and a way to assist law officers and agencies in meeting their objectives. Our thematic session focuses on the important role that spatial information theory will play. Specifically, this thematic session will focus on how the COSIT community can come together to address the concept of safeability. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Zena Wood, University of Exeter, UK

Jacqueline Christmas, University of Exeter, UK

Kathleen Stewart, University of Maryland, USA

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 4: Generated Geography: Responsible GeoAI in the Era of Foundation Models

Location: The Hospitium, Museum Gardens.

Brief description: The proposed thematic session will explore how today's emerging multi-modal AI systems represent and reason about geographic spaces and places. While these models are being increasingly applied to geospatial problems by industry, research, and even individuals, the implications for geographic theory, spatial representation, cognition, and ethics more broadly remain largely unexplored. While a lot of work has gone into understanding the accuracy (correctness, so to speak) of these systems, representation has received little attention. Put differently, while we understand the abilities of these systems to, for instance, infer topological relations, we do not know how distorted their latent geographic representations are and whether these distortions matter for everyday use. This is a substantial problem, as first research is showing that frontier models form strong geographic prototypes (called defaults). Therefore, we will focus on issues of bias, robustness, trust, and AI alignment but address them from a uniquely geographic perspective. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna, Austria

Grant McKenzie, McGill University, Canada

Alexandra Fortacz, University of Vienna, Austria

Andrea Ballatore, King's College London, UK

Rui Zhu, University of Bristol, UK

Annika Süß, University of Vienna, Austria

12:30 – 14:00 · Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided.

14:00 – 15:00 · Keynote Session – Hugo Spiers

Read more about Hugo Spiers and the keynote title and abstract on the speaker page.

15:30 – 17:00 · Doctoral Mentoring Programme Session (Chair: Crystal Bae)

Details to follow.

19:00 – 22:00 · Banquet – National Railway Museum

Conference banquet at the National Railway Museum. Details to follow.

– Friday, 25 September

09:00 – 10:30 · Session 7: Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (Chair: Nico Van de Weghe)

  Qualitative Space of Material Documents

Mark Bell, John G. Stell

  RCC-8 as a Benchmark for Diagrammatic Reasoning in Multimodal Foundation Models

Robert E. Blackwell, Anthony G Cohn

  Georeferencing Non-Gazetteered Place Names using Biological Specimen Records

Aneesha Fernando, Surangika Ranathunga, Kristin Stock, Raj Prasanna, Christopher B. Jones

  From Trajectories to Relations: Interpreting Overtake Manoeuvres with Large Language Models and Qualitative Spatial Representations

Jana Verdoodt, Changbo Zhang, Lars De Sloover, Nico Van de Weghe, Haosheng Huang

  Limits of Spatial Reasoning using LLMs

Varis Ithivatana, Brandon Bennett

  A Cross-Linguistic Evaluation of Cardinal Direction Reasoning in LLMs

Panagiota Gyftou, Robert E. Blackwell, Manolis Koubarakis, Anthony G Cohn

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:00 · Session 8: Navigation and Wayfinding II (Chair: Asya Natapov)

  From sequential decisions to concurrent processes: advancing human navigation models for simulation

Sabine Timpf, Franziska Klügl

  Using Social Cues for Wayfinding: An Eye-Tracking Study of Attention Allocation and Evidence Accumulation in a Virtual Reality T-Intersection

Yu Qiao, Carlo Campagnoli, Ed Manley

  Towards a Validation Taxonomy for Agent-Based Models of Pedestrian Movement in Cities

Marcin Wozniak, Gabriele Filomena

  Predicting spatial familiarity by exploiting head and eye movements during pedestrian navigation in the real world

Markus Kattenbeck, Ioannis Giannopoulos, Negar Alinaghi, Antonia Golab, Daniel R. Montello (DOI)

12:00 – 12:30 · Awards and Closing

Award announcements and closing remarks for COSIT 2026.

09:00 · Welcome

Welcome address and opening remarks.

09:30 – 10:30 · Session 1: Geospatial Semantics (Chair: Rui Zhu)

  From Markers to Meaning: A Cognitive–Symbolic Model of Cultural Placemaking

Maria Carolina Quintana Noriega, Christophe Claramunt

  When are geographic quantities semantically compatible with each other? Towards a constructive theory of amounts, magnitudes, and proportions

Simon Scheider, Shuai Wang, Eric Jacob Top

  Through and Through: corpus-based semantic analysis of a spatial preposition

Brandon Bennett, Maria M Hedblom

  Towards a statistical approach to humanistic-geographical place concepts

René Westerholt (DOI)

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 · Session 2: Spatial Cognition (Chair: Sara Fabrikant)

  Mapping Cycling Experience in Valence-Arousal Space: A Geometric Approach to Appraisal Heterogeneity

Ayda Grisiute, Johanna Wörle, Panagiotis Mavros, Martin Raubal

  Cognition and Computation of Minimal Viewpoints for Understanding Building Layouts

Ahmed Aly, Jakub Krukar

  Habitual use of navigation systems impairs spatial learning depending on navigation strategy

Qi Ying , Christopher Hilton, Sara Fabrikant

  Capturing Environmental-Scale Spatial Cognition in Applied Settings: A Field-Based Pilot with Firefighters

Chelsie McWhorter, Kathy Baylis, Mary Hegarty

  Context-sensitive Spatial Deixis through the Lens of Mental Models

Adwitiya Mandal, Zoe Falomir, Kai-Florian Richter

  Visual attention allocation between social and navigational cues during wayfinding

Gökçe Orlu Özen, Çağrı Imamoğlu, Elif Surer, Burçak Altay (DOI)

12:30 – 14:00 · Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided.

14:00 – 15:00 · Keynote Session – Krzysztof Janowicz

Read more about Krzysztof Janowicz and the keynote title and abstract on the speaker page.

15:00 – 15:30 · Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:00 · Session 3: Language and Foundation Models (Chair: Grant McKenzie)

  On Spatial Reasoning and Perspective Transformation in Language Models

Haotong Zhang, Ian Pratt-Hartmann

  LMM Modality Transfer: a Pre-requisite for Autonomous GIS Agents

Ivan Majic, Zexian Huang, Franziska Hübl, Krzysztof Janowicz, Meilin Shi, Mina Karimi, Zilong Liu, Alexandra Fortacz

  Structuring the Underwater Environment: A Taxonomy of Aquatic Landmarks

Eva Nuhn, Sabine Timpf

  Conceptual Vagueness as Humans and LLMs Represent: Evidence from Migration Distance Categorization

Songlin Wang, Krzysztof Janowicz, Ailin Benitez Cortes, Marion Borderon, Yingjing Huang, Mina Karimi, Zilong Liu, Annika Süß, Patrick Sakdapolrak

  GeoKG for GeoFM: Neuro-Symbolic Integration of Semantically-enriched Geospatial-Temporal Data

Kai Moltzen, Debayan Banerjee, Julian Burmester, Anna Ehrenberg, Martin Kohler, Cedric Möller, Jann Pfeifer, Tilahun Abedissa Taffa, Hanna Marlene Schulz, Aida Usmanova, Patrick Westphal, Ricardo Usbeck

  Golden Gate Bridge, as Always? Eliciting Prototypical Places From Autoregressive Large Language Models via Category Production

Zilong Liu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Mina Karimi, Meilin Shi, Ivan Majic, Alexandra Fortacz-Lazan (DOI)

17:00 – 18:00 · Poster Session

Some of the short papers accepted as posters are made publicly available in the COSIT 2026 Zenodo repository.

  A General Syntactic Basis for a Directed RCC

Eric Jacob Top

  Path choice is not determined at entry: a video-based analysis of path commitment

Wenjie Chen, Asya Natapov, Yasir Ali

  GeoAI for Promoting Sustainable Mobility: Overcoming the Predictive-Policy Paradox with Personalized Utility

Imene Benzaamia, Shelan Jeawak

  Space concepts in geographical information science

Franz-Benjamin Mocnik

  Which Cafe Do You Mean? Generating Textual Clues from Street View for POI Disambiguation

Miona Shimizu, Junko Hayashi, HISADA Shohei, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki, Hiroki Ouchi

  An approach for verifying terrestrial photographs via geosignatures

Ahmad Abubaka, Ajay Ajay, Tobias Brand, Moritz Denk, Tim Lehmann, Prince Oppong Boakye, Luca Venier, Samuel Yohanna, Christian Kray

  The AI's Eye for Scenic Beauty: Evaluating MLLMs' Predictive Ability and Explainability in Landscape Assessment

Shelan Jeawak

  Localizing Causal Signals for Spatial Inversion: A Comparative Study of GPT-2 and BLOOM

Danai Mylonaki, Orestis-Minas Kapopoulos, Manolis Koubarakis, Robert E. Blackwell, Anthony G Cohn

  Semantic Similarity Across Hierarchical Landform Types: A Knowledge Graph Embedding Approach

Jun Xu

  Rank-Structured Compositional Heterogeneity in Spatial Amenity Structures

Wei Chien Benny Chin, Chun-Hsiang Chan

  Generating Realistic Individual Activity Schedules via Activity Location Allocation Based on Simulated Travel Times

Tatsuya Mitomi, Yahya Gamal, Esra Suel, Gary Polhill, Daniel Konioukhov, Alison J Heppenstall

  Perceived walkability as spatial information for pedestrian accessibility

Tong Chen, Asya Natapov, Taimaz Larimian

  Neurosymbolic Reasoning about Street Networks: Graph-based RAG with Qualitative Spatial Representations

Reinhard Moratz, Niklas Daute, James Ondieki, Markus Kattenbeck, Ioannis Giannopoulos

  Flying with clarity: An eye-tracking study on the redesigned Swiss VFR aeronautical chart

Simeon Lüthi, Tumasch Reichenbacher, Armand Kapaj

  In-Context Learning to Assess Built Environment Impacts on Perceived Neighborhood Walkability Among Mobility-impaired Older Adults

Houhao Liang, Kresimir Friganovic, Joanne Kua, Noor Hafizah Ismail, Su Su, Bryan Yijia Tan, Navrag B Singh, Panagiotis Mavros

  Representing Design Intention and User Experience in Complex Buildings: A Comparative Evaluation Framework and Methodological Pipeline

Yuqin Zhong, Shamsul Azrin Jamaluddin, Lara Gregorians, Panagiotis Mavros, Christoph Hoelscher

  Beyond Proximity: An Anchor-Place Perspective on X-Minute City Local Living Through Individual Mobility Data

Bowen Zhang, Chen Zhong

  One City, Many Representations: Perspective-Driven Urban Space in Foundation Models

Mina Karimi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Omid Reza Abbasi, Zilong Liu, Yingjing Huang, Songlin Wang, Annika Süß

  Multidimensional motivations for the use of smartphone and paper maps: A web-based Evaluation Grid study

Masashi Sugimoto, Toru Ishikawa

18:00 – 20:00 · Icebreaker – York Art Gallery

Drinks and canapés will be served.

09:00 – 10:30 · Session 4: Spatial Analysis and Modeling (Sponsored by ESRC Integrate; Chair: Lex Comber)

  An Operator Framework for Real-time Analytics of Streamed Fields

JJ Paul, Silvia Nittel

  From Feature Attribution to Spatial Information Structure: Interpreting Urban Pedestrian Flows with Explainable AI

Atakilti Kiros, Yuri Ribakov, Israel Klein, Achituv Cohen

  Spatiotemporal Adaptive Learning for Flow-based Graph Neural Networks

Fengjiao Li, Meiliu Wu, Ana Basiri

  The Same Street, Different Safety Judgments: Evaluative Context Effects in Daytime and Nighttime Street View Imagery

Tong Qin, Nico Van de Weghe, Wim Fias, Haosheng Huang

  Decision-Making Under Uncertainty in Tsunami Evacuation: Individual Differences in Information Consultation and Risk Perception

Shota Iwama, Sihwan Lee, Hong Hu, Takanori Nanahara

  Learning street view representations based on a spatiotemporal contrastive learning framework

Yong Li, Yingjing Huang, and Fan Zhang (DOI)

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 1: Indoor-vs-Outdoor Spatial Information: Similarities and Differences in Cognition and Computation

Location: The Hospitium, Museum Gardens.

Brief description: We live and navigate continuously between indoor and outdoor spaces, yet the research landscape is fragmented into separate cognitive strategies, computational models, and support systems for the indoor vs outdoor contexts. This session invites the COSIT community to reflect where the differences are truly fundamental, and where convergence across these strands is possible. The session is designed as a structured, discussion-driven workshop centered around interdisciplinary exchange between the cognitive/empirical and computational/technical groups. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Jakub Krukar, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany

Jungwon Lee, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany

Marina Smirnova, Telecom Paris, France

Panos Mavros, Telecom Paris, France

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 2: Spatial Information Theory, Spatial Cognition, and Spatial-HCI? What, Why, and Why now?

Location: Tempest Anderson Hall, Yorkshire Museum.

Brief description: The session will start with a 10-minute elaboration of the meanings of Spatial Human-Computer Interaction. It will continue with a panel discussion involving 3 panelists, each of whom is a representative of one of the three domains. Each panelist is asked to give an initial 5-minute statement about their point of view on how their topical focus relates to the other two. Subsequently, the organizers will guide the discussion among panelists. After 30-minutes of discussion among them, the session will be opened up to questions and comments from the audience. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Markus Kattenbeck, Geoinformation, TU Wien, Austria

Ioannis Giannopoulos, Geoinformation, TU Wien, Austria

12:30 – 13:30 · Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided.

13:30 – 14:30 · Keynote Session – Laura Alessandretti

Read more about Laura Alessandretti and the keynote title and abstract on the speaker page.

14:30 – 15:30 · Session 5: Spatial Search (Chair: Franz-Benjamin Mocnik)

  Much of Geospatial Web Search Is Beyond Traditional GIS

Ilya Ilyankou, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

  An Extended Qualitative Model for Reasoning about 3D Objects using Depth and Different Perspectives

Martí Ejarque, Zoe Falomir

  Document Geocoding for Inferring Spatial Familiarity within Reddit text

Paddy Smith, Ed Manley, Myles Gould

  Comparing thematic and search term-based coding in understanding sense of place in survey research

Isabel Cotton, Brooke McWherter, Thora Tenbrink, and Kate Sherren (DOI)

15:30 – 18:00 · Social Activities

Details to follow.

09:00 – 10:30 · Session 6: Navigation and Wayfinding I (Chair: Ruth Dalton)

  Extending ISO-Space to Annotate Spatial Information in Route Descriptions

Samira Goudarzi Ali Akbari, Stephan Winter, Martin Tomko

  Mapinou: a Game to Assess the Skill of Using Pan-Scalar Maps

Justin Berli, Guillaume Touya

  Learning a map under positive emotions: How self-reported arousal and individual differences relate to route and survey knowledge

Veronica Muffato, Laura Miola, Francesca Pazzaglia, Chiara Meneghetti

  Representing Retail Wayfinding: A Requirement-Driven Study Design for Non-Visual Supermarket Navigation

Xiang Zhou, Sabine Timpf

  Simulating Path Integration with Continuous Attractor Neural Networks

Yulin Wu, Ed Manley

  Feeling the heat? Heat stress impairs landmark but not route knowledge in a VR navigation task

Alessandro J. Pierro, Sara Fabrikant, Armand Kapaj

  Beyond urban form: Introducing dynamic factors in agent-based simulations of pedestrian movement

Marcin Wozniak, Gabriele Filomena (DOI)

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 3: Leveraging Geospatial Innovation for Safeability

Location: Tempest Anderson Hall, Yorkshire Museum.

Brief description: The UK’s Safer Streets Mission aims to reduce serious harm and increase public confidence in policing and criminal justice system. Integral to the mission is the ambition to half knife crime and violence against women and girls (VAWG) within a decade. The US have their own programmes that focus similar missions (e.g., Project Safe Neighourhoods, or regional examples such as LA’s Operation Safe Cities). The challenge faced by law officers and agencies is that many are also having their budgets reduced, requiring them to achieve more with much less resources. The adoption of technology is increasingly seen as a force-multiplier and a way to assist law officers and agencies in meeting their objectives. Our thematic session focuses on the important role that spatial information theory will play. Specifically, this thematic session will focus on how the COSIT community can come together to address the concept of safeability. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Zena Wood, University of Exeter, UK

Jacqueline Christmas, University of Exeter, UK

Kathleen Stewart, University of Maryland, USA

11:00 – 12:30 · Thematic Session 4: Generated Geography: Responsible GeoAI in the Era of Foundation Models

Location: The Hospitium, Museum Gardens.

Brief description: The proposed thematic session will explore how today's emerging multi-modal AI systems represent and reason about geographic spaces and places. While these models are being increasingly applied to geospatial problems by industry, research, and even individuals, the implications for geographic theory, spatial representation, cognition, and ethics more broadly remain largely unexplored. While a lot of work has gone into understanding the accuracy (correctness, so to speak) of these systems, representation has received little attention. Put differently, while we understand the abilities of these systems to, for instance, infer topological relations, we do not know how distorted their latent geographic representations are and whether these distortions matter for everyday use. This is a substantial problem, as first research is showing that frontier models form strong geographic prototypes (called defaults). Therefore, we will focus on issues of bias, robustness, trust, and AI alignment but address them from a uniquely geographic perspective. Read the full session description.

Organizers:

Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna, Austria

Grant McKenzie, McGill University, Canada

Alexandra Fortacz, University of Vienna, Austria

Andrea Ballatore, King's College London, UK

Rui Zhu, University of Bristol, UK

Annika Süß, University of Vienna, Austria

12:30 – 14:00 · Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided.

14:00 – 15:00 · Keynote Session – Hugo Spiers

Read more about Hugo Spiers and the keynote title and abstract on the speaker page.

15:30 – 17:00 · Doctoral Mentoring Programme Session (Chair: Crystal Bae)

Details to follow.

19:00 – 22:00 · Banquet – National Railway Museum

Conference dinner at the National Railway Museum. Details to follow.

09:00 – 10:30 · Session 7: Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (Sponsored by ESRC Integrate; Chair: Nico Van de Weghe)

  Qualitative Space of Material Documents

Mark Bell, John G. Stell

  RCC-8 as a Benchmark for Diagrammatic Reasoning in Multimodal Foundation Models

Robert E. Blackwell, Anthony G Cohn

  Georeferencing Non-Gazetteered Place Names using Biological Specimen Records

Aneesha Fernando, Surangika Ranathunga, Kristin Stock, Raj Prasanna, Christopher B. Jones

  From Trajectories to Relations: Interpreting Overtake Manoeuvres with Large Language Models and Qualitative Spatial Representations

Jana Verdoodt, Changbo Zhang, Lars De Sloover, Nico Van de Weghe, Haosheng Huang

  Limits of Spatial Reasoning using LLMs

Varis Ithivatana, Brandon Bennett

  A Cross-Linguistic Evaluation of Cardinal Direction Reasoning in LLMs

Panagiota Gyftou, Robert E. Blackwell, Manolis Koubarakis, Anthony G Cohn

10:30 – 11:00 · Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:00 · Session 8: Navigation and Wayfinding II (Chair: Asya Natapov)

  From sequential decisions to concurrent processes: advancing human navigation models for simulation

Sabine Timpf, Franziska Klügl

  Using Social Cues for Wayfinding: An Eye-Tracking Study of Attention Allocation and Evidence Accumulation in a Virtual Reality T-Intersection

Yu Qiao, Carlo Campagnoli, Ed Manley

  Towards a Validation Taxonomy for Agent-Based Models of Pedestrian Movement in Cities

Marcin Wozniak, Gabriele Filomena

  Predicting spatial familiarity by exploiting head and eye movements during pedestrian navigation in the real world

Markus Kattenbeck, Ioannis Giannopoulos, Negar Alinaghi, Antonia Golab, Daniel R. Montello (DOI)

12:00 – 12:30 · Awards and Closing

Award announcements and closing remarks for COSIT 2026.