We are thrilled to announce that Zeping Liu, PhD student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin and member of the SEAI Lab, has been awarded the prestigious Amazon AI PhD Fellowship.
Out of the 15 Fellows selected in UT Austin, Zeping is the only recipient from the field of Geography — while all other awardees come from Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related disciplines. His recognition underscores not only his individual excellence, but also the growing importance of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) as a frontier area in AI research.
The Amazon AI PhD Fellowship is highly competitive, offering mentorship from Amazon research leaders, access to AWS resources, professional development opportunities, and $70,000 per year in funding support.
Zeping’s research focuses on developing geospatial multimodal foundation models and spatial reasoning method. His work aims to advance AI for understanding and addressing critical global environmental and societal challenges.
We congratulate Zeping on this outstanding achievement and celebrate his role in bringing Geography into the spotlight of cutting-edge AI research.
