Gengchen Mai Receives AAG 2023 J. Warren Nystrom Award
We are thrilled to announce that Gengchen Mai was awarded the AAG 2023 J. Warren Nystrom Award for his dissertation on geographic question answering with spatially explicit machine learning models at the 2023 AAG general meeting in Denver, Colorado.
Dr. Mai was a Ph.D. student in UCSB's STKO Lab and Spatial Center under the supervision of Krzysztof Janowicz. He graduated from UCSB Geography in June 2021. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia. His winning paper entitled “Towards General-Purpose Representation Learning of Polygonal Geometries” was published in GeoInformatica in 2022. The Nystrom Award was established in 1980 by former AAG executive director J. Warren Nystrom to support an annual prize for the most outstanding paper based on a recent dissertation in geography within a three-year period. Many prestigious scholars have won the Nystrom Award before, including Dr. Stewart Fotheringham, Dr. Steve Herbert, and Dr. Jennifer Miller.
