About me

Hi there 👋 😊 my name is Stef and I am an Associate Professor of Geographical Information Science at the School of Geography Geology and the Environment, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Digital Culture, and Turing liaison (academic) of the University of Leicester.

I am a geographic data scientist working at the intersection between geography and artificial intelligence.

My current research focuses on developing spatially explicit machine learning approaches, particularly in urban analytics. In 2021, I organised a session at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG. This session sparked discussions and collaborations that led me to guest edit a special issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science on GeoAI in Urban Analytics. This issue includes my paper on using graph neural networks for geodemographic classification and I have also applied graph neural networks and heterogeneous graph neural networks to study urban form. As part of my research, I am also interested in the use and interpretability of foundation models in geography and cultural analytics. My recent work on the geospatial mechanistic interpretability of large language models demonstrates how spatial analysis can be used to unveil how large language models “think” about geographic information.

My research also aims to leverage artificial intelligence to understand everyday geographies, the emerging meaning we attach to geographic places through the content generated on internet platforms. I collaborate with colleagues on topics that span through the wide range of research topics represented in the School from the geographies of everyday multicultural living in Leicester to the study of the Anthropocene, and the University from graph theory to cultural analytics. I am the co-I of the Museum Data Service, a free new service that aims to connect and share all the object records across all UK museum. I will be leading the outreach activities of the Museum Data Service and, in the past, I have collaborated with the Science Museum Group to develop new approaches to analysing oral history archives using large language models and visual analytics.

I am the Chair of the Geographic Information Science Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG. I am also part of the steering committee of GIScience Research UK (GISRUK), the chair of the GISRUK 2018 conference, and a member of the Commission on Location-Based Services of the International Cartographic Association.

Before joining the University of Leicester in 2015, I was a Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford (2013-2015) and a Junior Research Fellow at the Wolfson College of the University of Oxford (2014-2015), and thereafter, a Research Associate of the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford (2015-2021). I was awarded a PhD from the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich in 2013 and a BSc and an MSc in computer science from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Udine.