“…We call this kind of practices spatially explicit machine learning (Janowicz et al, 2020;Li et al, 2021;Mai, Jiang, et al, 2022;Yan et al, 2017Yan et al, , 2019. Some of the unique challenges include how to represent different types of spatial data into the embedding/subsymbolic space , how to achieve geographic generalizability for a given machine learning/deep learning model (Goodchild & Li, 2021;Li et al, 2022), how to perform transfer learning across space and tasks (Fibaek et al, 2022), how to avoid geographic biases in GeoAI models , and so forth. This special collection also includes two innovative articles that tackle two questions we mentioned above.…”