I am a PhD candidate at UCL’s SpaceTimeLab, supervised by Dr James Haworth and Dr Stefano Cavazzi. My research is funded by UKRI (EPSRC) and Ordnance Survey (OS). During my PhD, I have interned with the Responsible AI team at Nokia Bell Labs and at The Alan Turing Institute.

I study how people use LLMs (chatbots) for geospatial tasks: what they ask, what this reveals about spatial information behaviour at scale, and how designers can build responsible systems around it. I work at the intersection of GIScience, GeoAI, NLP, and HCI, using query logs and conversational AI datasets to characterise spatial information needs across interfaces. I’m particularly interested in subjective geospatial questions: those that go beyond what deterministic GIS can answer, and expose the gap between place as data and place as lived experience.

I am a co-founder and CTO of Safest Way, a Geovation-backed startup developing safety-focused pedestrian navigation. 📱 Try our app or learn more on the BBC, ITV, The Standard, or The Conversation .

Selected Publications (all publications →)

BritCHI 2026 (accepted)

Conversational Interfaces Reshape What People Ask of Place

Code

Ilya Ilyankou, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

[Chatbot users' most distinctively conversational geospatial behaviour is asking the system to write place-grounded text and plan trips, not to retrieve facts.]

PLATIAL'26

Place Distortion Begins in the Prompt

10.5281/zenodo.23071608 Code

Ilya Ilyankou, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

[The kind of place-writing people ask chatbots for (e.g. joke, review, report about a place) relates to whether the result idealises, stigmatises, or stays neutral; bias starts with the request, not just the answer.]

COSIT 2026

Much of Geospatial Web Search Is Beyond Traditional GIS

10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.10 Preprint Code 🤗 Classifier

Ilya Ilyankou, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

[People ask the web about place far more than we thought, and most of it is practical lookups (costs, hours, contact details, weather, etc.) that GIS isn't traditionally built to answer.]

Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment (2026)

CLIP the Landscape: Automated Tagging of Crowdsourced Landscape Images

10.1016/j.rsase.2025.101824 Preprint Code

Ilya Ilyankou, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Tao Cheng, James Haworth

[What you see isn't always what gets tagged. A CLIP-based classifier combining image, location, and title embeddings to predict geographic context tags from landscape photos, improving spatial understanding in data-sparse regions.]

SIGSPATIAL'24

Quantifying Geospatial in the Common Crawl Corpus

10.1145/3678717.3691286 Preprint

Ilya Ilyankou, Meihui Wang, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

[Nearly one in five Common Crawl documents contains geospatial information, offering a quantitative basis for understanding why LLMs develop spatial reasoning capabilities.]

SIGSPATIAL'24

CC-GPX: Extracting High-Quality Annotated Geospatial Data from Common Crawl

10.1145/3678717.3691215 Preprint Code

Ilya Ilyankou, Meihui Wang, Stefano Cavazzi, James Haworth

[A pipeline to extract paired GPX tracks and human-written descriptions from Common Crawl, yielding a multimodal dataset of 1,416 real outdoor routes for geospatial and NLP research.]

See the full publications list for all papers, including as co-author.

Professional experience

• Intern (Responsible AI Team), Nokia Bell Labs (summer 2026)

• Intern (Data-Centric Engineering), The Alan Turing Institute (autumn 2025)

• Data engineer, Geolytix (2022–2025)

• Full-stack developer, CTData Collaborative (2018–2022)

Teaching

As a postgraduate teaching assistant at UCL (incl. CASA) and lab demonstrator at Birkbeck, I have supported modules in geospatial programming, spatial analysis, data analytics, and web architecture.

Education

• PhD in Spatial Information Behaviour and Responsible GeoAI – University College London (UCL), 2023–2027

• MSc in Geographic Information Science (Distinction) – University of Leeds, 2019–2022

• BSc in Computer Science and Studio Arts (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) – Trinity College (Connecticut), 2014–2018

• Worcester College, University of Oxford – Visiting student focusing on machine learning and game theory, 2016–2017

Maps (view all →)

I love making maps. In November 2021, I took part in the #30DayMapChallenge, making one map a day for a month, each on a different theme. Below are a few of my favourites; the rest are on the full page.

Hands-On Data Visualization

Together with Jack Dougherty, I co-authored Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code (O’Reilly, 2021), drawing on our work helping people and organisations make sense of their data. It is available open-access in English, and has been translated into Korean and Traditional Chinese.

Since 2022, we have donated all royalties (currently over $5,000) to humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine, most recently to The HALO Trust.