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Yi-Chia Chang
PhD Candidate. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
yichia3 [at] illinois [dot] edu

I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where my research focuses on machine learning and remote sensing for food security. I am fortunate to be advised by Arindam Banerjee and Ximing Cai. At UIUC, I worked closely with Adam J. Stewart on TorchGeo. I have worked with amazing collaborators from Allen Institue for AI and Microsoft AI For Good Lab.

Before joining UIUC, I was a visiting scholar awarded a full-year scholarship to study at The University of Tokyo. I visited Myanmar for observing tidal bore and collecting land use data while studying at UTokyo. I wrote a series of blog posts for the field trip. In 2018, I was a deep learning research intern at PASCO Corporation, where I researched convolutional neural networks and satellite imagery.

I obtained my B.S. and M.S. at National Taiwan University, where I worked on remote sensing satellite images and machine learning coupled with flood simulation to assess the impacts of extreme events caused by climate change with Ching-Pin Tung (NTU) and Akiyuki Kawasaki (UTokyo).

Interests: remote sensing, machine learning, food security, flooding, water resources management

News

Our research is featured by NCSA: Mapping the Earth’s Crops. March, 2025
Passed Preliminary Exam! March, 2025
Accepted paper at IEEE IGARSS 2025! March, 2025
Presented at NeurIPS 2023. December, 2023
Accepted paper at NeurIPS D&B 2023! September, 2023

Publications

On the Generalizability of Foundation Models for Crop Type Mapping IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2025 (accepted – camera-ready version in preparation)
Yi-Chia Chang, Adam J. Stewart, Favyen Bastani, Piper Wolters, Shreya Kannan, George R. Huber, Jingtong Wang, Arindam Banerjee
SSL4EO-L: Datasets and Foundation Models for Landsat Imagery NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2023
Adam J. Stewart, Nils Lehmann, Isaac A Corley, Yi Wang, Yi-Chia Chang, Nassim Ait Ali Braham, Shradha Sehgal, Caleb Robinson, Arindam Banerjee
Leveraging Novel Agricultural Technologies to Combat Climate-Induced Basin-Wide Water Availability Alterations in the Maipo River Basin. AGU Fall Meeting, 2022
Anav Vora, Michael Bianchini, Yi-Chia Chang, Ximing Cai
Risk assessment for COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2021
Shu-Wan Jian, Chien-Tse Kao, Yi-Chia Chang, Pi-Fang Chen, Ding-Ping Liu
Sentiment analysis for flooding control in Wilmington City, North Carolina. AGU Fall Meeting, 2021
Yi-Chia Chang, Qiankun Zhao, Matthew Wang, Ximing Cai
The Achievement of Shihmen Reservoir and its Catchments Management Project. 3rd International Workshop on Sediment Bypass Tunnels, 2019
Wei-Che Tsai, Yi-Chia Chang, Shang-Wei Li, Bin-Ru Tsai