Open geospatial intelligence for public impact

We're democratizing state-of-the-art AI algorithms and workflows for urban planning across mobility, hydrology, and climate.

Areas of impact

  • Mobility

    Transit, movement, and accessibility models for fast-growing cities, supported by satellites, crowdsourced data and participatory evidence.

  • Water

    Water monitoring, flood assessment, and decision support connecting hydrology with infrastructure.

  • Climate

    Neighborhood-scale spatial models for heat, flooding, and defensible climate-adaptation decisions.

  • Agriculture

    Crop representation learning, time series, and world models for agricultural planning and resilience.

Tech Focus

  • Representation learning of geospatial data

    Learn transferable spatial features from unlabeled, multimodal remote-sensing data.

  • Physics-inspired neural networks

    Embed physical structure into neural surrogates for reliable environmental simulations.

  • Geospatial active learning

    Reduce annotation effort by selecting the most informative locations and samples.

  • Planning agents

    Connect spatial data, analytical tools, and human goals through agentic decision support.

Urban mobility Climate resilience Accessible cities Water security Agricultural intelligence Planning agents Active learning Urban mobility Climate resilience Accessible cities Water security Agricultural intelligence Planning agents Active learning Geospatial NLP

Explore the work

Active projects

Open tools and applied research developed with institutions, communities, and public systems.

  1. 01

    OpenGeoMove

    Active

    A travel-demand estimation and network-design library being developed alongside bus-route design for Gurugram Metropolitan City Bus Limited (GMCBL). An extension supports design decisions for metro and ring-road projects in the Chandigarh Tricity area.

    • PublicationTowards Human-AI Accessibility Mapping in India: VLM-Guided Annotations and POI-Centric Analysis in ChandigarhAAAI Workshop AI4UP · 2026
  2. 02

    A water-quality and quantity-monitoring library that supports decisions on treatment-solution design and regulation. In this project, we work with dam authorities across three states of Punjab, Gujarat and Maharashtra to build a framework for flood reduction through better reservoir control strategies. We're also developing SOTA neural surrogates for hydrological and hydrodynamic simulations.

  3. 03

    AgriSSL

    Active

    Self-supervised learning for agricultural landscapes, uncovering the potential of remote-sensing modalities for downstream agricultural tasks.

    • PublicationTime2Agri: Temporal Pretext Tasks for Agricultural MonitoringAAAI · 2026
    • PublicationSAR2Agri: Learning SAR Intensity Representations for Agricultural MonitoringarXiv · 2026
  4. 04

    Disha

    Active

    An AI-native IDE for urban planners, enabling natural-language access to GIS and spatial analytics. We're also building MCP servers to resources such as CoreStack, GEE, IUDX and more to enable a hassle free data access, specially in India.

Past projects

  1. 01

    OpenGeoDemand — A library to simulate quick-commerce orders and estimate optimal dark-store locations. Watch video ↗

  2. 02

    CityCool — Methods and dashboards for tracking cool roofs, trees, and changes in lakes over time using satellite imagery.

    • PublicationWhat’s Up On The Roof: Tracking Cool Roofs in India with Satellite ImagingACM JCSS · 2024
    • PublicationGeospatial Active Learning for Efficient Data Annotation: A case study on cool roof detectionCOMPASS · 2025

Support & collaboration

Organizations helping move our work forward.

Join

We want people who care about both technical quality and public consequence.

Research engineers

Build spatial data systems, training pipelines, evaluation tooling, and interfaces that survive contact with real deployments.

Applied ML researchers

Work on multimodal learning, active learning, planning systems, and geospatial representation learning with strong downstream relevance.

Domain collaborators

Bring urban planning, climate, agriculture, hydrology, or accessibility expertise into projects that need sharper problem definitions.

Start A Conversation

Interested in supporting the work, collaborating, or joining us?

We are a research lab at Plaksha University, led by Anupam Sobti. There may be a good fit where difficult spatial problems call for patient, applied research that can move from paper to practice. If you are considering funding a project, collaborating, or applying to the lab, we would be grateful to hear from you.