Specific programme: CHIST-ERA IV 2023

CHIST-ERA is a network of research funding organisations in Europe and beyond with programmes in Information and Communication Science and Technology (ICST), at the intersection of the FET and the ICT and ICT-based domains. CHIST-ERA IV ERANET aims at supporting transnational research projects addressing long-term scientific challenges in the domain of ICT or at the interface between ICT and other domains.

Spain, through the State Research Agency (AEI), is participating in the call for transnational research projects on information and communication sciences and technologies, within the framework of the European research network ERA-NET CHIST-ERA: ‘European Coordinated Research on Long-term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences & Technologies ERA-NET’.

Project PCI2025-163213 funded by MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and co-funded by the European Union

Code: PCI2025-163213

UPV/EHU: Beneficiary

IP UPV/EHU: Gorka Azkune Galparsoro / Eneko Agirre Bengoa

Project start date: 01/06/2025

Project end date: 31/05/2028

Brief description:

Recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has given rise to a paradigm shift brought by Large Language Models (LLMs). Though LLMs arose from research in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is well-known today that zero-shot and few-shot transfer learning methodologies as well as novel prompting strategies make their deployment possible beyond the NLP field, achieving impressive performance on a significant range of domains and
downstream tasks. However, the deployment of LLMs in geographic information systems is still in its infancy.
The Geo-R2LLM project aims to create a novel paradigm for building knowledgeable and multimodal geographic LLMs by rethinking LLMs generation mode with retrieval and reasoning over multiple multimodal external knowledge sources to ground predictions. The improved multimodal geographic LLMs will be integrated in a geospatio-temporal AI (GeoAI) system prototype and evaluated on a pilot application related to context-aware navigation
systems in a complex urban environment. Navigation services can be considered as one of the most critical and widely adopted location-based services in modern society, hence the project has potentially strong impact also outside of academia.
This research will lead to fundamental advances in multiple disciplines spanning GeoAI, spatio-temporal reasoning, information retrieval, and natural language understanding, laying the groundwork for more effective AI platforms for various domains that relate to geography and geographical information science.