News | Geospatial Intelligence and Mapping Lab

2024

December 5: Zhengsen Xu successfully passed his PhD Comprehensive examination with his PhD thesis proposal “Wildfire Risk Prediction with Deep Learning Techniques”. The examining committee consisted of the external examiner, Prof. David Clausi from the Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, internal examiners, Prof. Grant Gunn and Prof. Michael Chapman as well as his supervisors, Prof. Jonathan Li and Prof. Lincoln Xu. Congratulations to Zhengsen!
October 5: PhD students at GIM Lab published their work in top remote sensing journals in 2024.Congratulations to Lanying (Bella) Wang, Jing Du, and Weikai Tan published their first authored papers in Remote Sensing of Environment (Top #1), and Jing Du’s first-authored paper in ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Top #2), respectively:
- Wang, Lanying et al., 2024. Individual tree species classification using low-density airborne multispectral LiDAR data via attribute-aware cross-branch transformer, DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2024.114456.
- Du, Jing et al., 2024. Weather-Aware Autopilot: Domain generalization for point cloud semantic segmentation in diverse weather scenarios, DOI: 10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2024.09.006.
- Tan, Weikai et al., 2024. A rapid high-resolution multi-sensory urban flood mapping framework via DEM upscaling, DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2023.113956.
September 16: Prof. Jonathan Li is distinguished on Stanford University's prestigious World’s Top 2% Scientists list for both career-long citation impact and single-year citation impact. He has been recognised for the 4th consecutive year as leading experts in the fields of both “Geological and Geomatics Engineering” and “Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing”. This annual ranking identifies the most influential scientists worldwide based on the impact of their work, which is measured by citation metrics, extracted from Elsevier's Scopus database. Being listed among the Top 2% of scientists is a prestigious recognition of a researcher’s contribution to science and research excellence. Congratulations to Prof. Li! (Source: https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/7).
September 1: Welcome three new master’s students, Shirley Yishan Li, Wenyi Shen, Jianing Xu to join our GIM Lab to start their MES Program in Geomatics. All of them completed their BES Honour’s degree in Geomatics at the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo. Welcome!
July 7: IGARSS 2024 was held in Athens, Greece during 7 - 12 July 2024. Dr. Hongjie He, Zhengsen Xu, Wentao Sun and Prof. Jonathan Li participated in this flagship conference and present their papers. The GIM Lab alumni, Prof. Haiyan Guan, Prof. Saied Pirasteh, A/Prof. Xin Tian, A/Prof. Yiping Chen, and A/Prof. Lingfei Ma also attended this event and presented their papers.
June 29: A GIM Lab meeting was held in Room EV1-132. This regular monthly meeting featured presentations from three students: Sarah Fatholahi for "Point Cloud Upsampling Using Deep Learning in an Indoor Parking Lot"; Leah Xiaoyue Lyu for "Overview of Research and Recent Developments in SLAM and 3D Gaussian Techniques"; Jing Du for "Domain Generalization for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation in Diverse Weather Scenarios". The meeting was chaired by Dr. Hongjie He and showcased the innovative research efforts of the GIM Lab students, reflecting their contributions to advancing techniques in point cloud processing and 3D modeling.
June 11: Congratulation to five graduate students in our GIM Lab to receive their degree certificates during the University Waterloo Spring 2024 Convocation http://surl.li/lljaic. They are: Jingyi (Kristie) Hu (MSc in Geomatics), Tirthaben Harshilkumar Gajjar (MES in Geomatics), Lisa Tang (MA in Geography (Water), Haochen (Henry) Zhou (MES in Geomatics), Xuanchen (Willow) Liu (MSc in Geomatics). Congratulations and wish them all the success for their future endeavors!
May 26: A GIM Lab meeting was held in Room EV1-132. This regular monthly gathering featured presentations from two PhD students who shared their recent research advancements: Kyle Gao for "3D Urban Scene Reconstruction and Point Cloud Extraction Using Google Earth Imagery and Gaussian Splatting”; Dening Lu for "Efficient Transformer for Large-scale Point Cloud Segmentation”. The meeting was chaired by Hongjie He and highlighted the cutting-edge research being conducted by the GIM PhD students, reflecting their contributions to advancing point cloud processing and 3D vision.
May 1: Welcome Xiaoyue (Leah) Lyu to join us for pursuing her PhD degree at the University of Waterloo starting from Spring 2024. Leah received her Honours B.Sc. degree in Environmental Science from the University of Waterloo in 2019 and the M.Eng. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2020, respectively. Leah’s PhD research will focus on the R&D in LiDAR SLAM for indoor and underground environments.
April 27: A GIM Lab meeting was held in Room EV1-132. This regular monthly group meeting featured three presentations from the following PhD students: Zhengsen Xu for "Unsupervised Tree Counting Model and Wildfire Risk Prediction"; Wentao Sun for "A Click-based Interactive Segmentation Network for Point Clouds & 3D Gaussian Splatting"; Hao Xiong for "Understory Terrain and Canopy Height Estimation through Multi-source Satellite Data". The meeting was chaired by Dr. Hongjie He and showcased the ongoing research being conducted by GIM PhD students, demonstrating their contributions to advancements in geospatial mapping and remote sensing.
April 22: Jing Du successfully passed her PhD Comprehensive examination with her PhD thesis pproposal “Domain Generalization for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation in Diverse Weather Scenarios”. The examining committee consisted of external examiner, Prof. Michael Chapman from the Toronto Metropolitan University, internal examiners, Prof. David Clausi and Associate Prof. Nasser Lashgarian Azad, as well as her supervisors, Prof. Jonathan Li and Associate Prof. John Zelek. Congratulations to Jing!
February 28: Haochen (Henry) Zhou successfully completed his MES Thesis “A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Methods for Road Extraction from High Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery”. Congratulations to Henry！
January 22: Tirthaben Harshilkumar Gajjar successfully completed her MES Thesis “Classification of UAV LiDAR Point Clouds of Tree Species Using a Point-based Deep Learning Approach: A Comparative Study”; Lisa Tang successfully completed her MES Thesis “Evaluation of Machine Learning Approaches to Extraction of Shorelines with CoastSat Toolkit”. Congratulations to both Tirtha and Lisa!
January 5: Jingyi (Kristie) Hu successfully defended her MSc Thesis Defence in Geography, Thesis “Semantic Modelling of an Indoor Parking Garage Using Hand-held GeoSLAM LiDAR Point Clouds”. The examining committee consisted of Prof. Michael Chapman from the Toronto Metropolitan University, Dr Grant Gunn at GEM, and Dr. Linlin Xu at SYDE. The defence was chaired by her supervisor, Prof. Jonathan Li. Well done and congratulations to Kristie！

2023

October 30: A CRSS-SCT Waterloo Region Chapter Webinar was hosted today at noon. Professor Dongmei Chen at Queen’s University and Dr. Zilong Zhong, a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University delivered presentations respectively. The Webinar was organized and chaired by Kyle Gao, PhD students in Systems Design Engineering at the GIM Lab.
October 22: A GIM Lab meeting is held in EV1 building. First, a celebration was made for seven graduate students in our GIM Lab who received their degree certificate. Second, we welcomed seven new members to our GIM) Lab this term. They are: Dr. Dedong Zhang (postdoc fellow in Systems Design Engineering), Dr. Hongjie He (postdoc fellow in Geography), Hasti Shwan (PhD student in Geography), Zhengsen Xu (PhD student in Geography), Meixuan Li (MES student in Geomatics), Bill Songhan Luan (MES student in Geomatics), Lucas Kezhou Lyu (MES student in Geomatics). Welcome join our GIM Group!
October 21: Congratulation to seven graduate students in our GIM Lab to receive their degree certificates during the University Waterloo Fall 2023 Convocation https://lnkd.in/gu5ecedA. They are: Dedong Zhang (PhD in Systems Design Engineering), Hongjie He (PhD in Geography), Weidong Liang (MASc in Systems Design Engineering), Jingtian Tan (MES in Geomatics), Charlotte Zhuoran Pan (MSc in Geomatics), Yiqing Wu (MSc in Geomatics), Yikai Yao (MSc in Geomatics). Congratulations and wish them all the success for their future endeavors!
October 19: the fall 2023 PhD graduates dinner reception is taking place on Thursday, October 19 from 5:00-7:30 pm. Two PhD graduates Hongjie He and Dedong Zhang and their family members as well as their supervisor Prof. Jonathan Li were invited to attend this dinner reception.
September 14: Professor Jonathan Li delivered a talk on Commercial High-resolution Satellite Constellations for Urban Sustainable Development at the 7th Canadian Symposium on Teaching and Research Excellence (CanSTARE 7), Waterloo, Ontario.
September 5. Prof. Jonathan Li is named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Science) this year. This is another honour Prof. Li has received after being elected as a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (2022), a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (2022), and a Fellow of IEEE (2023). Congratulation to Professor Li!
August 13-18: Prof. Jonathan Li and MSc student Kristie Hu presented their research at the 31st International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2023), Cape Town, South Africa.
August 2: PhD candidate Hongjie He successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled “Optimization of Rooftop Delineation from Aerial Imagery with Deep Learning” with Category A. Congratulations and well done, Hongjie! The Thesis Examining Committee included Prof. Michael Chapman, Dr. Linlin Xu, Dr. Grant Gunn, Prof. Jinfei Wang (external examiner from the Western University), and his supervisor Prof. Jonathan Li.
July 17: During the IGARSS 2023 awards ceremony on the opening session of the 43rd annual IGARSS symposium, Professor Jonathan Li was invited to the stage to receive the Fellow recognition. The Fellow certificate was presented to him by the 2023 IEEE President Elect, Dr. Thomas Coughlin. A photo of Prof. Li with Dr. Thomas Coughlin, and the IEEE GRSS President Dr. Mariko Burgin, the IEEE GRSS Major Awards Chair Dr. Alberto Moreira was taken. Congratulations to Professor Li!
July 17-21: PhD students Bella Wang and Kyle Gao, MSc Student Willow Liu along with Professor Jonathan Li presented their research at the IGARSS 2023, Pasadena, CA, USA.
May 23: Professor Jonathan Li delivered a Guest Lecture on Mobile LiDAR Point Cloud Analytics with Deep Learning to the Mobile Mapping School before the 12thInternational Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology (MMT 2023), 24-26 May 2023, Padua, Italy.
May 17-19：MSc Student Yikai Yao and Professor Jonathan Li presented their research at the Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event (JURSE 2023), Heraklion Crete, Greece.
May 8: Congratulations to Kyle Gao, a PhD candidate in Systems Design Engineeing, on being awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)/QEII-GSST Domestic! As a recipient of an OGS, and to recognize his outstanding achievements and potential, Kyle is also offered the University of Waterloo President’s Graduate Scholarship (PGS). As an OGS holder and a full-time Waterloo graduate student, Kyle will receive up to an additional $5,000 (paid as $1,666 per term).
May 5: Yiqing Wu successfully defended her MSc Thesis “Spatiotemporal Analysis of Human Mobility based on Land Use Types in the Greater Toronto Area During COVID-19 Pandemic”, congratulations! The MSc Thesis Examining Committee included Prof. Michael Chapman, Dr. Zahid Butt, and Prof. Jonathan Li (supervisor).
May 4: Yikai Yao successfully defended his MSc Thesis “Upsampling Indoor LiDAR Point Clouds for Object Detection, congratulations! The Thesis Examining Committee included Prof. Michael Chapman, Dr. Linlin Xu, and Prof. Jonathan Li (supervisor).
April 28: Charlotte Zhuoran Pan successfully defended his MSc Thesis “Mining Geotagged Tweets: Tracking Spatiotemperal Variation of Mental Health in Canada During COVID-19 Pandemic”, congratulations! The Thesis Examining Committee included Prof. Michael Chapman, Dr. Zahid Butt, and Prof. Jonathan Li (supervisor).
April 23: At the Awards Gala of the new fellows of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), Prof. Jonathan Li received the EIC Fellow (FEIC) certificate in recognition of his excellence in engineering and for services to the profession and society. He was named the EIC Fellow in April 2022 “for his exceptional contributions to geospatial mapping theories, algorithms, and cross-disciplinary applications”.
April 18: Dedong Zhang, a PhD candidate at the Department of Systems Design Engineering successfully defended his PhD thesis “Positioning and Semantic Information Extraction in Underground Environments Under Multi-sensor Fusion”, congratulation! The PhD Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by Prof. David Femandez, including Prof. Naser El-Sheimy from the University of Calgary (external examiner), Prof. Alex Wong and Prof. David Clausi (internal examiner), Prof. Michael Chapman (committee member), Prof. Jonathan Li (supervisor) and Prof. John Zelek (co-supervisor).
March 21: Prof. Jonathan Li is informed today that “Research.com, a leading academic platform for researchers, has just released the 2023 Edition of our Ranking of Best Scientists in the field of Computer Science. I am sure you will be very happy to learn that you have ranked #79 in Canada and #2000 in the world. You have also been recognized with our Computer Science Leader Award for 2023. Congratulations!”
February 10: Prof. Jonathan Li received a letter from Prof. Jeffrey Casello, Associate Vice-President, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, University of Waterloo today: “Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (GSPA) in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association established an award to recognize those faculty members who have excelled in their support of graduate students. On behalf of GSPA and the selection committee, I am thrilled to announce that you have been selected to receive a 2022-2023 Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision!” Only three faculty members are selected to receive this prestigious award each year. Congratulations to Professor Li!

2022

November 21：Prof. Jonathan Li received the following email from Prof. K. J. Ray Liu, 2022 IEEE President and CEO today: “Dear Prof. Jonathan Li: Recognizing the achievements of its members is an important part of the mission of IEEE. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation. It is my great pleasure to inform you that the IEEE Board of Directors at its November 2022 meeting elevated you to IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2023 with the following citation: for contribution to point cloud analytics in LiDAR remote sensing, You bring honor to yourself and to IEEE by your achievements. Congratulations!” Only four new fellows are from the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) this year. Congratulations to Professor Li!
October 14: Dedong Zhang, a PhD candidate in Systems Design Engineering, delivered a PhD seminar “GNSS-denied environment re-positioning and semantic information extraction under multi-sensor fusion”, at 1:00 pm, October 14 in E5-6127. Well done!
October 10: Congratulations to Prof. Jonathan Li for being featured in the list of world’s “Top 2% Scientists” for the 2nd consecutive year, which was released on October 10, 2022 (DOI:10.17632/btchxktzyw.4). The publicly available database of top-cited scientists was created by a Stanford University team every year to provide standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions and a composite indicator (c-score). The top 100,000 scientists with a c-score or a percentile rank of 2% and above are selected based on the separate data, which show the career-long impact and the single recent year impact. Featuring in the list of the world's 'Top 2% Scientists' brings global recognition to the individual researchers and the institution. For this recognition, scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields. Prof. Li was recognized in two categories: “Geological and Geomatics Engineering”, and “Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing”.
October 1: The GIM Lab meeting was held in-person in EV1-350 on Saturday, October 1. A total of 15 person participated in the meeting, including a guest, Prof. Shunde Yin from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Two PhD students, Hongjie He and Kyle Gao, delivered talks about their research. Thanks William Xu for organizing the food and beverage. Thanks Jingtian for taking the group photos and organizing the activities.
September 1: Welcome the following new students join our Geospatial Intelligence and Mapping (GIM) Lab in Fall 2022: Vivi Cai and Liang-zhi Li (PhD students), Tirtha Gajjar, Jirui Hu, Willow Liu, Lisa Tang, and Yuliia Vozniak (master’s students), Michael Huang and Kristina Kuzenko (Research Assistants). Welcome on board!
July 14: Prof. Jonathan Li is named the 2022 Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA). Congratulations to Prof. Li!
June 13: Prof. Jonathan Li is named the 2022 Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) in recognition of his dedication to the application of science and engineering principles to advance social, environmental, economic and technical solutions. Congratulations to Prof. Li!
June 8: The Samuel Gamble Award was presented to Prof. Jonathan Li by Prof. Lena Halounova (ISPRS Secretary of General) and Prof. Mir Abolfazl Mostafavi (CIG Present), at the Plenary Session of the XXIV ISPRS Congress in Nice, France on Wednesday, 8 June 2022. Congratulations to Prof. Li!
April 28: Kristie Jingyi Hu will join us in Spring 2022 to pursue her MSc degree in Geomatics. Kristie is a BES Honour’s student in Waterloo Geomatics co-op at GEM. Her proposed master's work will focus on the development of AI-powered approaches to automated generation of 3D urban models and HD maps using LiDAR point clouds combined with aerial images to support the development of digital twin cities and autonomous vehicles.
Kristie is the recipient of the 2022 Caivan Future Cities Graduate Scholarship (worth $5000). Welcome Kristie!
April 6: Congratulations to Hongjie He and Sarah Fatholahi, two Ph.D. candidates in our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence Lab, for being granted by the ISPRS Foundation (TIF) travel grant valued $900 USD each. This fund would support them attend in-person ISPRS 2022 held in Nice, France. In the conference, the papers entitled “Impact of deep learning-based super-resolution on building footprint extraction” and “Spatial modelling of COVID-19 incidence rate in Canada” will be presented by Hongjie and Sarah, respectively. They will receive the conference certificate, and their names will appear in ISPRS Foundation Newsletter.
March 1: Research.com, a leading academic platform for researchers, has just released the 2022 Edition of our Ranking of Top 1000 Scientists in the field of Computer Science. Prof. Jonathan Li has been ranked #66 in Canada and #1660 in the world. This year is the first time when Research.com has decided to split the usual computer science and electronics ranking into two separate rankings with one of them focused only on computer science while the other features only electronics and electrical engineering researchers. The ranking is based on the H-index metric provided by Microsoft Academic and includes only leading scientists with an H-index of at least 30 for academic publications made in the area of Computer Science. The full ranking for Canada is available here: research.com/scientists-rankings/computer-science/ca. The full world ranking is available here: research.com/scientists-rankings/computer-science.
January 15: Congratulations to Qiutong Yu and his co-authors for being the recipient of the 2022 Esri Award for Best Scientific Paper in GIS - 3rd Place for the paper, "Spatial Resolution Enhancement for Large-scale Land Cover Mapping via Weakly Supervised Deep Learning", co-authored by Yu Q, Liu W, Gonçalves WN, José Marcato Jr J, *Li J, published in Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing (PE&RS), 87(6), pp. 405–412, 2021. The award consists of a certificate and a cash award of $400, granted by ASPRS.

2021

December 11: Professor Jonathan Li is named the 2022 Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) in recognition of his “excellence in engineering and services to the profession and to society”. The EIC was originally founded in 1887. Congratulations to Prof. Li!
November 24: Congratulations to Bing! Qingxu Hu successfully defended his MSc thesis entitled “Land Disturbance Extraction in Alberta Oil Sands Satellite Imagery”. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li and included Dr. Linlin Xu, Assistant Professor from the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo and Prof. Dr. Michael A. Chapman from the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University.
November 3：Prof. Jonathan Li among world’s top scientists:
Stanford University recently published a comprehensive list that identified the top 2% of scientists worldwide. The list provides a ranking of 100,000 top scientists using citation metrics to determine the relevance and importance of a given research topic. Prof. Li was recognized in two categories: “Geological and Geomatics Engineering”, and “Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing”.

Congratulations to Prof. Li!
October 27: Prof. Jonathan Li was elected the President-elect of the Canadian Institute of Geomatics (CIG) at the CIG Annual General Meeting 2021, held virtually on October 27, 2021. Congratulations!
October 21: Congratulations to Professor Jonathan Li who is the 2021 winner of the CIG Geomatica Award! The award consisting of a customized sculpture was presented to Prof. Li by Ms. Marlene McKinnon, CIG President, during the Gala Dinner of GeoQC 2021 Conference held at Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, in the evening of October 21, 2021. The Geomatica Award is presented by CIG to someone who has contributed to the advancement of geomatics in Canada in an exceptional manner. The CIG Awards Committee Chair, Mr. Jean-Noël Lechasseur, CIG President-elect, Prof. Mir Abolfazl Mostafavi and his wife attended the Awards Ceremony.
September 16: We are excited to congratulate MSc Student, Yiqing Wu, who was recently the recipient of a Caivan Future Cities Graduate Scholarship (worth $5000). This Scholarship is funded by Caivan Communities and awarded to full-time Master students in the Faculty of Environment whose research addresses the challenges expected to be encountered by future cities. Selection for the award is based on academic excellence, and demonstrated leadership and community engagement. Congratulations!
September 8: Welcome the following new students join our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence Lab in the fall 2021: William Xu and Dening Lu (PhD students), Weidong Liang and Benyuan Wang (MASc students), who are in Systems Design Engineering, and Yiqing Wu (MSc student), Charlotte Pan and Jingtian Tan (MES students), Zarrin Tasneem, Longxiang Xu, and Joshua Chi Lai Ng (BES Honours Students), who are in Geomatics at GEM. Welcome on board!
June 24: Congratulations to Dr. Lingfei Ma! At the 42nd Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing (a virtual event) held during 21-24 June 2021, Dr. Lingfei Ma was awarded the 2020 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award for his thesis entitled “Road Information Extraction from Mobile LiDAR Point Clouds Using Deep Neural Networks” by the Canadian Remote Sensing Society (CRSS-SCT). It has been awarded annually since 1989 and Lingfei is the only recipient of this award this year. Dr. Ma is currently an Assistant Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China. He pursued his doctorate in geospatial data science at the University of Waterloo from 2017 to 2020 and published 4 papers as the first author in prestigious remote sensing and intelligent transportation journals. Lingfei has made new contributions to the development of 3D lidar point cloud understanding algorithms for high-definition maps and autonomous driving. Thumb up for his achievements!
May 10: Guide2Research has released the 7th Edition of its 2021 Ranking of Top 1,000 Scientists in the field of Computer Science and Electronics. Dr. Jonathan Li has been ranked 141th in Canada (www.guide2research.com/scientists/CA) and 3327th in the world ranking (www.guide2research.com/scientists) (2021).
May 4: Congratulations to Weikai Tan on being awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)! The OGS is valued at up to $15,000 per year ($5,000 per term for up to 3 consecutive terms). As a recipient of an OGS, and to recognize his outstanding achievements and potential, Weikai is also offered the University of Waterloo President’s Graduate Scholarship (PGS). As an OGS holder and a full-time Waterloo graduate student, Weikai will receive up to an additional $5,000 (paid as $1,666 per term).
May 1: Welcome Kyle Gao to join us for pursuing his PhD degree at the University of Waterloo starting from Spring 2021. Kyle received his Honours Bachelor's degree in Mathematics with Mathematical Physics Co-op program from the University of Waterloo in 2016 and the MSc degree in Accelerator Physics from the University of Victoria in 2020, respectively. Kyle’s PhD research will focus on Quality Assessment of Large-Scale Point Clouds. His research interests include deep learning, 3D computer vision, point cloud understanding, attention-based models, remote sensing, and change detection.
March 26: Congratulations to Qiutong Yu for successfully defending his MSc thesis. Qiutong’s master’s thesis is entitled “Integration of Satellite Data, Physically-based Model and Deep Neural Networks for Historical Terrestrial Water Storage Reconstruction”. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li and included Prof. Dr. Bryan Tolson from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and Prof. Dr. Michael A. Chapman from the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University.
March 16: Welcome Nan (Nancy) Chen, a CSC-funded Visiting PhD student from the School of Geological Engineering and Geomatics, Chang’an University, Xian, China to join our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence group. Nancy will conduct her PhD thesis research in the area of super-resolution reconstruction of earth observation data for 12 months under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li.
March 15: Prof. Jonathan Li received an email from Mr. Jeff Lovin, President of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) to inform that Prof. Li is the recipient of the 2021 Roger Hoffer Membership Award with it a certificate and a complimentary membership for the current year. Congratulations to Prof. Li!
February 22: Congratulations to Qiutong (Glen) Yu and Weikai Tan! Each of them has been selected as one of the successful candidates to receive one of the $5000 Waterloo.AI scholarships for Master’s and PhD student from the Faculty of Environment, respectively. The intent of the scholarships is to provide 12 one-time awards valued at $5,000 each. One Master's student and one PhD student from each of the University's six faculties will be chosen to receive a scholarship.
February 4: Dr. Li was informed by Dr. Yuhong He, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment with the approval of the Vice Principal Academic and Dean, University of Toronto Mississauga to offer him an academic appointment in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment at the rank of Professor, Status Only for a three-years term. Dr. Li has also been appointed the Associate (Restricted) Graduate Faculty Membership in the Graduate Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. The Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment offers status-only appointments only to individuals who are deemed qualified to make a significant contribution to the educational and research activities of the department. In return, the Department makes a commitment to further the academic activities and progress of all faculty appointees, in recognition of the contributions that they make to the mission of the Department in education and research.
January 1: Prof. Jonathan Li was appointed the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation by Elsevier.

2020

December 10: Hongjie He has successfully passed his PhD comprehensive exam titled “Automatic Building Footprints Extraction from VHSR Images using Deep Learning Techniques”. The exam committee includes Dr. Linlin Xu (Internal/External) from the Department of Systems Design Engineering, Prof. Michael A. Chapman from Ryerson University, Dr. Wesley Van Wychen, his supervisor Prof. Jonathan Li, and the exam was chaired by Dr. Nancy Worth. Congratulations!
December 9: Weikai Tan has successfully passed his PhD comprehensive exam titled “Super-resolution of LiDAR Point Clouds Towards High-resolution Urban 3D Mapping with Deep Learning”. The exam committee includes Dr. Dongpu Cao (Internal/External) from the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, Prof. Michael A. Chapman from Ryerson University, Dr. Quinn Lewis, his supervisor Prof. Jonathan Li, and the exam was chaired by Dr. Peter Johnson. Congratulations!
November 30: Prof. Jonathan Li was elected member of the Advisory Board of the UN Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) Academic Network.
October 27: Prof. Jonathan Li was elected Vice President of the Canadian Institute of Geomatics (CIG).
October 8: Congratulations to Ying Li for successfully defending her PhD thesis with Category A. Ying’s Ph.D. thesis is entitled “Deep Learning for 3D Information Extraction from Indoor and Outdoor Point Clouds”. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by A/Prof. Dr. Robin Duncan from the Department of Kinesiology and included Prof. Dr. Derek Lichti (external examiner) from the Department of Geomatics Engineering at the University of Calgary, A/Prof. Dr. Linlin Xu (internal/external) from the Department of Systems Design Engineering (internal/external), Prof. Dr. Michael A. Chapman from the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University, Prof. Dr. Richard Kelly from the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, as well Ying’s co-supervisors Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li and A/Prof. Dongpu Cao from the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering. Congratulations!
September 8: Welcome the following five new graduate students joining our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence Group: Lanying (Bella) Wang, who received a M.Sc. degree in geomatics from the University of Waterloo. She will pursue her PhD degree in Urban Remote Sensing; Sarah Narges Fatholahi, who received a M.Sc. degree in geomatics engineering from the University of Tehran. She will pursue her PhD degree in LiDAR Remote Sensing; Jianshen Wang, who received a BES degree in geomatics from the University of Waterloo. He will pursue his MES degree in Urban Remote Sensing; Zijian Jiang, who received a BES degree in geomatics from the University of Waterloo. He will pursue his MES degree in Urban Remote Sensing; Haochen (Henry) Zhou, who received a B.Sc. degree in Economics and Applied Statistics from the University of Toronto Mississauga. He will pursue his MES degree in Geospatial Data Intelligence. Welcome on board! Each of you will find your experience at the University of Waterloo both rewarding and challenging.
July 30: Congratulations! Ming Liu successfully defended her PhD thesis with Category A, entitled “Satellite-Based PM2.5 Exposure Estimation and Health Impacts over China”, under co-supervision of Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li and Dr. Rebecca Saari from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by A/Prof. Dr. Andre Unger from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and also included Prof. Dr. Dongmei Chen (external examiner) from the Department of Geography and Planning, Queen’s University, Dr. Linlin Xu (internal/external) from the Department of Systems Design Engineering, Prof. Dr. Michael A. Chapman from the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University, and A/Prof. Dr. Chris Fletcher from the Department of Geography and Environmental Management.
July 28: Congratulations! Lingfei Ma successfully defended his PhD thesis with Category A, entitled “Road Information Extraction from Mobile LiDAR Point Clouds Using Deep Neural Networks”, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Roland I. Hall from the Department of Biology and also included Prof. Dr. Naser El-Sheimy (external examiner) from the Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, A/Prof. Dr. John Zelek (internal/external) from the Department of Systems Design Engineering, Prof. Dr. Michael A. Chapman from the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University, and Prof. Dr. Richard Kelly from the Department of Geography and Environmental Management.
July 20: Prof. Jonathan Li was appointed the member of the CIG Certification Committee chaired by Mr. Dick Mynen, Canadian Institute of Geomatics (CIG).
July 17: Prof. Jonathan Li was appointed an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS) in the general area of Lidar remote sensing and photogrammetry.
July 6: Congratulations! Zhipeng Luo successfully defended his PhD thesis at Xiamen University, entitled Representation Learning and 3D Object Recognition from Mobile LiDAR Point Clouds”, under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Yundong Wu from the School of Computer Engineering, Jimei University and also included Prof. Dr. Shunzhi Zhu from School of Information Engineering, Xiamen University of Technology, Prof. Dr. Cheng Wang, Prof. Dr. Ming Cheng and Prof. Dr. Haixin Sun from the School of Informatics, Xiamen University.
June 29: Congratulations! Lisha Chen, Jianlan Gao, Weisheng Lin, Di Liu, Shenlong Lou, Hongbin Zeng, under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li received their MSc degree in Information and Communications Engineering from Xiamen University during its 2020 Convocation Ceremony on June 29, 2020.
June 26: Prof. Jonathan Li was elected as Director together with the 2020-2021 CRSS-SCT Executive at the CRSS-SCT virtual Annual General Meeting (AGM) held June 26, 2020.
June 16: Ningxuan Zhang received his Masters of Environmental Studies (MES) degree at the University of Waterloo’s virtual Spring 2020 Convocation Ceremony during June 16-20, 2020. His Research Paper is entitled “Vehicle Emission Induced Air Pollution in Beijing China: Problems and Control Measure”.
May 19: The CRSS-SCT Waterloo Region Chapter was approved by the CRSS-SCT Executive. The Chapter’s Council (2020-2022) consists of Prof. Jonathan Li (Chair), Dr. Andrea Scott (Treasurer), Dr. Linlin Xu (UWaterloo rap), Dr. Homa Kheyrollah Pour (rap of Wilfrid Laurier University), Haocheng Zhang (industrial rap from Ecopia Tech), and Lingfei Ma (student rap from U Waterloo).
May 16: Weikai Tan presented his paper entitled “Toronto-3D: A Large-scale Mobile LiDAR Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Roadways” (co-authored by Dr. Nannan Qin, Lingfei Ma, Ying Li, Jing Du, A/Prof. Guorong Cai and Prof. Jonathan Li*) at the CVPR 2020 Workshop on EarthVision'20 and our Toronto-3D: A Large-scale Mobile LiDAR Labelling Benchmark was officially released at the ISPRS Working Group I/2 website.
March 30: The Final Technical Report on “Spatial and Temporal Downscaling of GRACE Terrestrial Water Storage Using EALCO Model over Canada” (completed by Prof. Jonathan Li, Dr. Ke Yang, Hongjie He, Hasti Petrosian, and Ming Liu) has been submitted to Natural Resources Canada.
March 23: Prof. Jonathan Li received the Roger Hoffer Membership Award (Honorable Mention) from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).
March 11: Prof. Jonathan Li received the Samuel Gamble Award 2020 from the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) for his significant contribution to the development, organization or professional activities of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences at national or international level.
March 6: Welcome Hasti Petrosian with MSc and BSc degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of Tehran join our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence (GSDI) group as a Research Assistant in GIS and spatial analysis.
January 13: Welcome Wenxuan Zhu, a Gematics Program 3B undergraduate student join our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence (GSDI) group. She will conduct her BES Honours Thesis work under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li.
January 7: Welcome Kun Zhao, a CSC-funded Visiting PhD student from the University of Science and Technology Beijing join our Geospatial Sensing and Data Intelligence (GSDI) group. He will conduct his PhD thesis research in the area of large-scale machine learning for LiDAR point cloud data analytics for 12 months under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li.

2019

December 27: Welcome Dr. Nannan Qin from the Purple Mountain Observatory, also known as Zijinshan Astronomical Observatory in Nanjing, China join our GSDI Lab as a Postdoc Fellow under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li at Waterloo. Nannan received the PhD degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from Wuhan University in June 2019. He will spend 12 months here to conduct research and development of the algorithms and software tools in DEM extraction from point clouds acquired by LiDAR or Photogrammetry. Welcome Dr. Qin!
November 20: Welcome Bingxu Hu join us for his MSc program in geomatics starting in January 2020. Bing received his BSc degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 2019. He will focus on studying land-cover classification with AI under weakly supervised learning. Welcome Bing join us!
November 6: Welcome Dr. Ke Yang join our GSDI Lab! Dr. Yang received his PhD degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from Wuhan University in 2015. Having spent 4 years as a research engineer at China Transport Telecommunications & Information Center, he decided to take the postdoc fellow position at the Department of Systems Design Engineering under co-supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li and Dr. Linlin Xu. He will conduct research and development of digital photogrammetry and HD mapping techniques. Welcome Dr. Yan!
November 1: Welcome Dr. Wei Liu join our GSDI Lab as a visiting scholar. Dr. Liu is an associate professor from East China Jiaotong University in Nanchang and is funded by the China Scholarship Council for spending 12 months at Waterloo. Dr. Liu received his PhD degree in computer science from Xiamen University in 2015. He will conduct his research on vehicle fine-grained recognition and vehicle identification from images or point clouds using deep learning methods. Welcome Dr. Li!
September 10: Congratulations! Zheng (Kent) Gong successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled Semantic Segmentation and Object Detection of Indoor Scenes based on Backpack LiDAR Multi-sensor Data Fusion” at XMU. Kent spend 12 months from September 6, 2018 to August 25, 2019) with the Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, under co-supervision of Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li and A/Prof. Dr. John Zelek. The Thesis Examining Committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Hanzi Wang from the Department of Computer Science, Sciences and also included Prof. Dr. Yundong Wu (external examiner) from the School of Computer Engineering, Jimei University, A/Prof. Chenglu Wen (internal/external) from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Prof. Dr. Zhengmiao Deng and A/Prof. Dr. Haixin Sun from the Department of Information and Communications Engineering. Kent joined DJI in Shenzhen as a Research Scientist in LiDAR remote sensing.
September 3: Welcome Yuwei (Vivi) Cai, Liyuan (Lucy) Qing, Zihao Liu, Qihang Wang, Zihao (Roy) Yang, and Qiutong (Glen) Yu join our GSDI Lab their MES/MSc/MEng studies either at the Department of Geography and Environmental Management or at the Department of Systems Design Engineering. Welcome you all!
September 1: Welcome Hongjie He join us for his PhD study in the upcoming four years. Hongjie received his BSc degree in geomatics from China University of Petroleum in Qingdao in 2016 and MSc degree in Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, Lanzhou University in 2019, respectively. Hongjie is funded by the China Scholarship Council and will focus on development of deep learning methods for extraction building rooftops from high resolution aerial and satellite images under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li.
August 1: Prof. Jonathan Li together with Dedong Zhang from Waterloo, Shenlong Lou and Hongbing Zeng from XMU participated in IGRASS 2019 held in Yokohama, Japan from July 28 to August 2. They delivered one oral and 5 poster presentations.
July 19: Prof. Jonathan Li participated in the 29th International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2019) held in Tokyo, Japan during July 15-20 and delivered a presentation.
July 1: Welcome Dr. Yan Liu join us for her 12 months visiting research under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li. Dr. Liu received her PhD degree in information engineering from China University of Geosciences in Beijing (CUGB) in 2015 and she is a lecturer with the School of Information Engineering at CUGB. She is funded by CUGB to conduct research in machine learning and deep learning algorithms for large-volume geospatial data processing. Welcome Dr. Liu!
June 28: Congratulations to Rongren Wu and Zheng Zhang for receiving their MSc degree in information engineering from Xiamen University. They both completed their three-years graduate studies under supervision of Prof. Li at XMU. Rongren successfully defended his MSc thesis entitled “Tree Segmentation and DBH Estimation from Point Clouds based on Deep Learning” and Zheng successfully defended his MEng thesis entitled “Point Cloud Registration based on Local Descriptors” in May 2019. Congratulations to both!
June 25: Prof. Li participated in the 6th International Conference on Earth Observation for Environmental Changes (EOEC 2019) and 8th International Conference on Geoinformation Technologies for Natural Disaster Management (GiT4NDM 2019) held in Chengdu, China during June 24-26. Prof. Li served as theCo-Conference Chair and Program Committee and chaired technical sessions.
June 21: Congratulations! Zilong Zhong successfully defended his PhD thesis with Category A, entitled “Spectral-Spatial Neural Networks and Probabilistic Graph Models for Hyperspectral Image Classification”, under co-supervision of Prof. Dr. Jonathan Li and Dr. Alex Wong from the Department of Systems Design Engineering. The Thesis Examining Committee was formed by Prof. Dr. Shengrui Wang (external examiner) from the Department of Computer Science, Sherbrook University, Dr. Michael Chapman (internal/external) from the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University (Adjunct of Waterloo) Engineering, Prof. Dr. David Clausi, and A/Prof. John Zelek from the Department of Systems Design Engineering. Zilong has accepted an offer and will start his postdoc research at the School of Data and Computer Science Sun Yat-sen University after graduation.
June 15: Congratulations to Mengge (Christina) Chen, Yue (Jane) Gu, and Weiya (Victoria) Ye for receiving their MSc degree in Geomatics during the 2019 Spring convocation. All of them spent two years with us from September 2017 to June 2019 and all successfully defended their master’s thesis during the Spring 2019 term.
June 13: Prof. Jonathan Li and Lingfei Ma gave oral presentations at the Joint EuroCOW-M3DMaN Workshop and Laser Scanning Workshop during the ISPRS Geospatial Week held in Enschede, The Netherlands during June 10-14.
May 6: Congratulation to Prof. Jonathan Li for receiving the 2019 Outstanding Achievement Award for recognizing his pioneering contributions in developing and promoting mobile LiDAR Mapping technology. This award was presented to Prof. Li by Prof. Naser El-Sheimy, Conference Chair and the Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering and Prof. Deren Li, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering during the opening session of the MMT 2019 held in Shenzhen, China.
May 1: Welcome Weikan Tan join us for his PhD program in geospatial data science. Weikai received his BES and MSc degree in geomatics from the University of Waterloo in 2014 and 2016, respectively. After working in a Toronto-based remote sensing company for almost three years, he starts to pursue his PhD degree LiDAR remote sensing and point cloud analytics using deep leaning models under supervision of Prof. Jonathan Li in May 2019. Welcome back, Weikai!