Dr James Williams
Research Fellow in
GeoAI & Data Science.
GeoAI · Foundation Models · Urban Intelligence · Conflict Data
I am a Research Fellow in GeoAI and Data Science at the University of Nottingham, with a PhD in GIScience and a track record spanning urban representation learning, conflict documentation, and human rights analytics.
I specialise in geospatial foundation models, graph neural networks, and discrete global grid systems, with applied work across multi-city corpora and humanitarian contexts. As development lead of CDISaW, I built cloud-native infrastructure indexing over 10 million conflict records for interdisciplinary research into slavery and war. I also created MORPHEME, an open-source GNN embedding model that quantifies urban characteristics across 24 global cities using OpenStreetMap data.
My work bridges cutting-edge spatial AI with real-world impact in conflict, rights, and place. I am currently based at the Rights Lab and Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War.
Technical Expertise
Background
Career
My work spans geospatial AI research, spatial software development, and university teaching. I have built geospatial systems for local government and civic infrastructure, contributed to national active transportation policy through the Leisure Walking Systems Working Group, and completed a secondment with Ordnance Survey working on spatial routing engines. In academic settings I have taught computer science at university level and led programme development across two institutions. I am currently a Research Fellow in GeoAI and Data Science at the University of Nottingham, based at the Rights Lab and Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War, where I lead development of large-scale conflict data infrastructure and geospatial AI systems.
Academic Background
Education
PhD Digital Economy
Geospatial Computer Science
University of Nottingham
Nottingham Geospatial Institute · Horizon CDT
MSc Computer Science
Distinction
University of Nottingham
School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
BSc (Hons) ICT
1st Class
Nottingham Trent University
School of Science and Technology
Funding
Grants & Awards
Royal Society Partnership Grant — HalesAir
Royal Society · 2025 – 2026
Horizon CDT Large Impact Grant
EPSRC (EP/S023305/1) · 2024
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services · 2025 – 2028
British Computer Society Prize
Outstanding performance in Technology Cluster · 2019
Community
Professional Service
British Cartographic Society
Affiliate Member · 2022 – Present
Association for Geographic Information
Network Member · 2020 – Present
Peer Review — Urban Research & Practice
Taylor & Francis · Ongoing
Peer Review — RSECon
Research Software Engineering Conference · Ongoing
Collaborators