Yi-Chia Chang

ML Engineer & Researcher

PhD candidate at UIUC working on Machine Learning and Earth Observation. Active contributor to TorchGeo ★ 4k, a PyTorch library for geospatial ML. Collaborated with Allen Institute for AI and Microsoft AI for Good Lab. Advised by Arindam Banerjee and Ximing Cai.

Yi-Chia Chang

Projects

TorchGeo ★ 4k
Microsoft & UIUC · Core Contributor

PyTorch library for geospatial ML providing datasets, samplers, transforms, and pre-trained models for satellite imagery. Widely used in academic and industry Earth observation research.

Python PyTorch Geospatial
UIUC · Allen AI

Benchmarked foundation model generalizability for crop type mapping across 35+ countries. Released harmonized dataset on HuggingFace for reproducible geospatial ML research.

Python PyTorch TorchGeo Transfer Learning Fine-tuning Foundation Models HuggingFace
SSL4EO-L NeurIPS 2023
Microsoft AI for Good Lab · UIUC

Datasets and foundation models for Landsat imagery. A large-scale self-supervised learning benchmark with 2.5M+ multi-spectral patches for Earth observation pre-training.

PyTorch Self-Supervised Learning Remote Sensing

Multimodal spatiotemporal forecasting model for crop yield prediction in Brazil using pre-trained models.

Python Foundation Models AlphaEarth OlmoEarth Time-series prediction

Publications

Environmental Research Letters · 2025

The consequences of trade for agricultural water use: evidence from subnational trade flows

Hari Dave, Anav Vora, Yi-Chia Chang, Megan Konar, Ximing Cai

IEEE IGARSS · 2025

On the Generalizability of Foundation Models for Crop Type Mapping

Yi-Chia Chang, Adam J. Stewart, Favyen Bastani, Piper Wolters, Shreya Kannan, George R. Huber, Jingtong Wang, Arindam Banerjee

NeurIPS Datasets & Benchmarks Track · 2023

SSL4EO-L: Datasets and Foundation Models for Landsat Imagery

Adam J. Stewart, Nils Lehmann, Isaac A. Corley, Yi Wang, Yi-Chia Chang, Nassim Ait Ali Braham, Shradha Sehgal, Caleb Robinson, Arindam Banerjee

International Journal of Infectious Diseases · 2021

Risk Assessment for COVID-19 Pandemic in Taiwan

Shu-Wan Jian, Chien-Tse Kao, Yi-Chia Chang, Pi-Fang Chen, Ding-Ping Liu

AGU Fall Meeting · 2022

Leveraging Novel Agricultural Technologies to Combat Climate-Induced Basin-Wide Water Availability Alterations in the Maipo River Basin

Anav Vora, Michael Bianchini, Yi-Chia Chang, Ximing Cai

EGU General Assembly · 2018

A Deep Learning Approach to Downscaling Precipitation and Temperature over Myanmar

Yi-Chia Chang, Ralph Acierto, Tomoaki Itaya, Akiyuki Kawasaki, Ching-Pin Tung

Skills

Languages

Python R SQL Bash

ML & Deep Learning

PyTorch JAX HuggingFace Lightning scikit-learn Transformers Self-Supervised Learning

Geospatial

TorchGeo GDAL rasterio GeoPandas Xarray QGIS Satellite Imagery

MLOps & Infra

WandB Docker SLURM / HPC Git Linux AWS DDP / Distributed Training