The 4th Digital Earth Youth Innovation Forum was held in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province from October 16 to 19, 2026. Four international students from CUG attended the event and presented their latest research findings on cutting‑edge topics. PhD student Abdallah M. Mohamed Taha won the Excellent Oral Presentation Award.

Zachariyah B. Conteh (from Sierra Leone) presented on behalf of Mustafa Kamal (from Pakistan), titled Landslide Susceptibility Mapping in Min County Integrating Soil Moisture and Machine Learning Models. The presentation illustrated that long‑term average soil moisture serves as a static hydrological factor and can improve the predictive performance of various machine learning models for landslide susceptibility mapping.

Zachariyah B. Conteh presenting

Ahmed Altaib Hussain Suliman Hussain (from Sudan) presented his paper Hybrid Stacking Ensemble Learning Prediction and Geotechnical Interpretation of Liquefaction Safety Factor for the Coastal Plain of Port Sudan. He discussed model accuracy, SHAP interpretability analysis and deep dependency sensitivity, sharing recent advances in geotechnical artificial intelligence.

Ahmed Altaib Hussain Suliman Hussain presenting

Yousif Hassan Mohamed Salh (from Sudan) presented his paper Groundwater Quality Index Prediction Based on a Hybrid LightGBM‑Metaheuristic Optimization Framework. He applied machine learning and intelligent optimization algorithms to groundwater quality forecasting to support sustainable water resources management.

Yousif Hassan Mohamed Salh presenting

Abdallah M. Mohamed Taha (from Sudan) delivered a presentation titled MLCCE‑DF: A Novel Framework for Image‑Based Mineral Prospectivity Mapping Using Self‑Supervised Contrastive Feature Extraction and Deep Forest. He won the Excellent Oral Presentation Award. Also as a member of the forum’s organizing committee, he helped promote the event among international students studying in China.

Abdallah M. Mohamed Taha presenting

Abdallah M. Mohamed Taha (10th from right）

The forum was co‑hosted by the International Society for Digital Earth, China University of Mining and Technology, and the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals. Centered on the theme “Digital Earth Empowers Sustainable Development and Utilization of Resources”, it brought together more than 200 participants from 26 countries and regions worldwide for academic discussions on Earth big data, geological artificial intelligence, and sustainable management of resources and the environment.