Biography

Dr. Yunus Serhat Bıçakçı is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Marmara University, where he leads the GeoAI Research Group. He is also an Affiliate Research Software Engineering Scientist in the Geospatial Data Science Group at the University of Glasgow. His research explores how multimodal artificial intelligence, vision-language models, and geographic information science intersect to tackle environmental, urban, and criminology challenges. He previously conducted postdoctoral research at UCL’s Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science and actively develops open-source scientific software for geospatial research.

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Interests
  • GeoAI & Geospatial Intelligence
  • Vision-Language Models (VLMs) & Multimodal AI
  • Spatial Data Science & Urban Semantics
  • Remote Sensing & Street-Level Analytics
  • Environmental Criminology
Education
  • PhD in Applied Informatics, 2021

    Istanbul Technical University (ITU)

  • MSc in Information Systems, 2013

    Sakarya University

  • BSc in Business Administration, 2011

    Anadolu University

  • BSc in Engineering, 2011

    Ankara University

Experience

Academic appointments and research positions

 
 
 
 
 
Faculty of Applied Sciences, Marmara University
Assistant Professor
Jan 2025 – Present Istanbul, Turkey
Department of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Founder and lead of the GeoAI Research Group. Research and teaching in GeoAI, multimodal vision-language models, spatial data science, street-level analytics, and remote sensing.
 
 
 
 
 
Geospatial Data Science Group, University of Glasgow
Affiliate Research Software Engineering Scientist
Jun 2024 – Present Glasgow, UK
Advancing open-source scientific software, multimodal foundation models, and geospatial intelligence frameworks in collaboration with the GDS Glasgow team.
 
 
 
 
 
Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, UCL
Postdoctoral Researcher
Jan 2023 – May 2024 London, UK
Conducted spatial data science, geographic profiling, and machine learning research for crime science and environmental criminology.

Open Source Software

Scientific research tools, Python packages, and open datasets

GeoAI-VLM

Geospatial Vision-Language Model analysis for street-level imagery. Automated downloading of Mapillary street images by geographic location and structured multi-attribute urban scene understanding via open-weight multimodal VLMs.


sppt-python

A high-performance Python implementation of the Spatial Point Pattern Test (SPPT) for aggregated count data. Accelerated with sparse-matrix operations and bootstrap resampling to quantify spatial distribution similarity and calculate S-Index metrics.

Honors & Academic Leadership

Selected academic honors, international committee chairs, and recognitions

Best Short Paper Award
Awarded for the research paper “A Graph-Based Community Detection Approach for Identifying the Semantic Neighbourhoods within London’s Airbnb Properties” presented at the 29th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science in Tartu, Estonia.
International Committee Chair
Serving as International Committee Chair for GIScience 2027, the flagship international conference on Geographic Information Science.

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