Biography

I will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Computing, Southern Illinois University (SIU), Carbondale, Illinois, starting from Fall 2026. I'm building a new research group at the intersection of AI, ML, and spatial science. I'm actively recruiting motivated Ph.D. students to work with me, please send your CV to yijunlinnn AT gmail DOT com if you are interested.

I graduated from the University of Minnesota. I was working with Prof. Yao-Yi Chiang in the Knowledge Computing Lab at the University of Minnesota (UMN) Department of Computer Science & Engineering. Before that, I studied at the University of Southern California (USC), advised by Prof. Yao-Yi Chiang and Prof. José Luis Ambite.

My research lies in the areas of AI, machine learning, and spatial science. The overarching goal of my work is to understand how human-environment interactions evolve across space and time. A major focus of my work is on building machine learning approaches that embed spatial principles into data-driven models to generate reliable predictions and extract useful knowledge from sparse, heterogeneous, and multimodal data. My research is highly interdisciplinary, combining insights from computer science and domain expertise to solve challenging real-world problems with high societal impact.

Specific topics include:

  • Spatial prediction from sparse and irregular point observations
  • Spatiotemporal forecasting
  • Geospatial knowledge extraction from heterogeneous spatial data

Collaboration domains: environmental science, geospatial science, soil science, public health, physics and remote sensing, digital humanities, and library and information science.

More information is available in my CV and on our Lab website.

News

🎉 I defended my dissertation on June 1st, 2026.

🎉 My paper Fine-Scale Soil Mapping in Alaska with Multimodal Machine Learning is accepted by SIGSPATIAL2025 as an oral presentation.

🎉 My paper Fine-Scale Soil Mapping in Alaska with Multimodal Machine Learning is accepted by SIGSPATIAL2025 as an oral presentation.

🎉 My paper LIGHT: Multi-Modal Text Linking on Historical Maps is accepted by ICDAR2025 as an oral presentation.

💡 I am co-teaching with Jina Kim on UMN CSCI 5523 - Introduction to Data Mining in Spring 2025.

🎉 I was awarded Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship , 2024–2025, UMN Graduate School

🎉 I was awarded the UMN DSI-ADC Fellowship, 2022–2024

🎉 We won the first place, Map Feature Extraction Challenge, AI for Critical Mineral Assessment Competition, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Online. Weiwei Duan, Zekun Li, Fandel Lin, Yijun Lin, Tanisha Shrotriya, Craig A. Knoblock, and Yao-Yi Chiang

My Cats

Junbao

Junbao · 君宝

Yuanyuan

Yuanyuan · 圆圆

Junbao and Yuanyuan

Junbao & Yuanyuan