Jooyoung Yoo named Esri’s 2026 International EIP Student of the Year

The USC Spatial Sciences Institute alumnus won Student of the Year in the international Esri Innovation Program competition and delivered a lightning talk on AI-powered urban tree canopy mapping at Esri’s Imagery & Remote Sensing Educators Summit. He will represent the GIS community this July at Esri’s Education Summit and User Conference in San Diego.

Jooyoung Yoo, a graduate of the USC Spatial Sciences Institute’s Master of Science in Spatial Data and now a PhD student in Computer Science at Emory University, has been named the 2026 Esri Innovation Program (EIP) International Student of the Year, the top student honor in the GIS field, awarded by Esri from among winners submitted by universities worldwide.

The path to the international title began in February of this year when Yoo was chosen as the winner of the USC SSI Esri Innovation Program (EIP) Student of the Year Award by a committee of five SSI faculty members. Each year, USC SSI advances its winner to Esri for consideration in the International EIP Student of the Year competition. This year, Yoo went all the way – the first student in SSI’s 16-years participating with the EIP to win the top award.

“I was so pleased to learn about Jooyoung’s win,” notes USC SSI Director, John Wilson, “He earned this recognition and was chosen from an exceptionally large and competitive pool of students. His work was central to our mission of building geospatial tools that help cities and communities take data-driven approaches to planning and managing their tree cover. Ultimately, this will help to mitigate extreme heat exposure in large metropolitan areas.”

Heading to San Diego in July

As the international winner, Yoo will be invited to attend two of the most prominent events in the geospatial world, both taking place in San Diego this summer. The Esri Education Summit runs July 11-12, bringing together educators, administrators, and GIS professionals from around the world. It is immediately followed by the Esri User Conference (July 13-17), the world’s largest GIS conference, drawing tens of thousands of geospatial professionals from around the globe.

For Yoo, the invitation represents a remarkable arc: from developing his tree canopy mapping tool as a master’s student at USC, to winning the campus EIP award, to presenting at the Esri Imagery & Remote Sensing Educators Summit in April, to now being recognized as the best student in the entire international EIP program.

The award-winning research

The project at the center of Yoo’s recognition, “Democratizing Nationwide Urban Tree Canopy Mapping — Leveraging GeoAI, ArcGIS, and NAIP Imagery,” was developed as part of the USC Urban Trees Initiative led by Professors John Wilson with support from the Bezos Earth Fund. The research set out to solve a persistent problem in urban forestry: the most powerful AI tools for analyzing tree coverage are out of reach for most practitioners.

Yoo’s solution was a custom-built tool that blends Esri’s technology with open-source resources, plugging a point-and-click AI application right into ArcGIS Pro. Instead of expensive satellite imagery, it taps into free aerial imagery taken by the federal government (National Agriculture Imagery Program). Normally, this kind of analysis would require multiple programs, code writing, and serious technical expertise. With Yoo’s tool, someone can simply open ArcGIS Pro, point it at the desired area, and get answers to important questions like how much tree coverage exists, which neighborhoods have less of it, or how does tree coverage line up with property boundaries.

The USC EIP selection committee praised the project for its resourceful use of Esri tools to solve a complex obstacle. What distinguished Yoo’s work was not only its technical performance but its emphasis on removing the systemic barriers that have long prevented widespread adoption of AI in environmental monitoring.

From USC to the national stage

Yoo entered USC’s Master of Science in Spatial Data Science program with a computer science background and, under the supervision of Associate Professor (Teaching) Dr. Yi Qi at SSI — an investigator on the USC Urban Tree Initiatives — quickly developed expertise in applying deep learning to remote sensing imagery. Qi guided Yoo’s urban tree research and also taught the remote sensing (SSCI 588) and Spatial Data Science (SSCI 575) courses through which Yoo accelerated his skills.

“It has been my great pleasure to work with Yoo throughout his studies at USC,” said Qi. “Working closely with him, I’ve seen his remarkable growth coupling GeoAI and remote sensing. More importantly, he is genuinely accountable, collaborative, hardworking, and passionate, with a deep commitment to social wellbeing and sustainable cities.”

Even before the international result was announced, Yoo’s work had already attracted attention at Esri. Shortly after winning the USC EIP award, he was invited to present his research at the Esri Imagery & Remote Sensing Educators Summit, held virtually on April 22 and 23. The invitation to speak, arriving so soon after his award, marked a significant moment for both Yoo and USC SSI, highlighting the exceptional caliber of his work. His talk, “Democratizing Nationwide Urban Tree Canopy Mapping,” appeared in the Lightning Talks: AI Focused Projects session.

Open science and community building for the future

True to the spirit of democratization, Yoo has made all his project materials publicly available. Yoo’s model has been published as a deep learning model on the Esri ArcGIS Living Atlas and has accumulated over 10,000 downloads in roughly two months since publication. His code repository and datasets are freely accessible, and he has built an ArcGIS StoryMap (Democratizing Nationwide Urban Tree Canopy) that serves as a hub for the growing community of developers expanding on his work. The project’s code is hosted on GitHub, and datasets are archived on Zenodo. Multiple peer-reviewed papers are currently under review for publication.

Yoo’s commitment to open-source development means that urban planners, arborists, environmental agencies, and researchers without deep technical backgrounds can now employ advanced AI methods to capture actionable, locally relevant tree canopy data, a capability that was previously out of reach for most organizations.

For cities, particularly those grappling with extreme heat, this is no small thing. It means the data needed to plan smarter, more equitable green infrastructure is now within reach for almost anyone who needs it.