Cheng Chengqi

Cheng Chengqi

Cheng Chengqi is a professor at Peking University, holding a Ph.D. in Physical Geography from Peking University (graduated in 1989). His core contributions include: pioneering the global 3D Earth grid coding theory and developing the GeoSOT spatiotemporal grid partitioning model—this model expands latitude and longitude into a 64-ary system, enabling seamless multi-scale discretization of space from Earth to 500,000 km beyond the geocenter (with a minimum grid resolution of 1.5 cm at the equator), solving long-standing global challenges in spatial data integration; he also established a discrete spatiotemporal computing system based on set algebra, improving computational efficiency by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude and shifting spatiotemporal computing from a continuous to a discrete paradigm.

His GeoSOT technology has wide-ranging impacts: it underpins China’s national positioning and remote sensing standards, and has been proposed as a global digital address standard to the Universal Postal Union; the technology has been adopted by enterprises such as Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud, supporting large-scale spatial data systems in nearly 20 cities including Tianjin and Chengdu, with query speeds improved by up to 189 times.

In academia, he has published numerous papers on spatial grids and GIS architectures in international journals and conferences such as ISPRS and GeoInformatics. He has also led major national programs like the 863 and 973 projects as Chief Scientist, and has been awarded honors including the National Science & Technology Progress Award (First Class) and the Military Science & Technology Progress Award (First Class). He is a leading scholar in the global geospatial computing field.