Stef De Sabbata, PhD
Associate Professor of Geographical Information Science, University of Leicester
Research
Output Area-level Foundation Model for the UK
Pioneering the UK’s first open population dynamics foundation model, generating rich, general-purpose digital fingerprints of communities at fine geographic detail to support researchers, policymakers and businesses in understanding how populations change over time and space.
Geospatial Mechanistic Interpretability of LLMs
A novel framework for the study of geospatial mechanistic interpretability, using spatial analysis to reverse engineer how LLMs handle geographical information. This project advances our understanding of the internal representations that these complex models generate while processing geographical information, what one might call "how LLMs think about geographic information" if such phrasing was not an undue anthropomorphism.
About Me
Stef De Sabbata is an Associate Professor of Geographical Information Science at the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Digital Culture of the University of Leicester.
Stef’s research focuses on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI). Her primary research interests lie in representation learning and foundation models, developing deep neural networks for urban analytics, including geodemographic classification and the study of urban form and function. Moreover, her recent work includes geospatial approaches to AI safety and mechanistic interpretability, exploring how large language models “think” about geographic information, and applications in cultural analytics.
Stef is the Chair of the Geographic Information Science Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG. She is also part of the editorial board of the Journal of Spatial Information Science, the steering committee of GIScience Research UK, the Commission on Location-Based Services of the International Cartographic Association, and the team of the Museum Data Service.
Before joining the University of Leicester, Stef was a Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She was awarded a PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and holds a BSc and an MSc from the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics of the University of Udine.
