GeoAI equips GEOINT with population-scale situational awareness, enabling rapid understanding of people, place, and vulnerability in crisis zones. Beyond extracting roads, buildings, or runways, next-generation approaches estimate population distribution and composition, detect shifts in settlement patterns, and relate environmental and infrastructure conditions to human activity and risk conditions. This enables analysts to link landscapes to the actors who inhabit them, supporting indications and warnings, pattern-of-life understanding, and a more complete understanding of operational environments.

Satellite imagery and computer vision remain essential, but the frontier is multi-modal and context-aware. Models now fuse electro-optical and SAR imagery with censuses and surveys, administrative records, points of interest, aggregated mobility signals, ground reports, and text streams to infer socioeconomic baselines, demographic profiles, and mobility rhythms. This is shifting the GeoAI application space beyond object detection and feature extraction, and toward human geography at scale to deliver rich and rapid spatiotemporal insights, while also quantifying uncertainty.

These capabilities are essential for conflict and disaster missions. Pipelines that combine remote sensing with in-situ human-centered data, social media, and other digital exhaust can rapidly detect displacement, characterize damage, map accessibility, and identify emerging humanitarian needs, scaling analysts’ ability to monitor and inform policymakers of evolving ground conditions.

This panel will explore the evolving and expanding role of GeoAI in mapping, monitoring, and characterizing populations around the world. Panelists will describe the missions, science, and technology that are driving the development of these capabilities, and the impacts they are having on operations and people.

Moderator:

Lieutenant General Scott Berrier (Ret.) – former Director, DIA and Senior Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton

Panelists:

Dustin Homer – Chief Growth Officer, FRAYM

Marie Urban – Group Lead, Human Geography, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Dr. Narcisa Pricope, Associate Vice President of Research, Mississippi State University

GEOINT 2026

From Pixels to People: Multi-Modal GeoAI for Population Insight and Crisis Monitoring

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