Effective human mobility modeling and prediction constitute the core prerequisites for various location-based applications. To encourage research in this direction, the ACM SIGSPATIAL Cup 2025 posed the challenge of predicting human mobility trajectories from a sparse multi-city dataset. This paper presents our solution, MoBERT, a BERT-like model that adapts and leverages mobility semantics with additional direction and distance prediction, providing supplementary supervision signals for robust feature learning. MoBERT models are trained in stages through curriculum learning, where augmented trajectories are ordered by increasing mobility entropy for training with progressively increasing difficulty. The final score of our method is 0.14609, as measured by average GEO-BLEU distances across four cities. Finally, we analyze the results and discuss insights from our approach.

The ACM SIGSPATIAL Cup 2023 proposed the challenge to identify and map supraglacial lakes in Greenland in satellite imagery. The peculiarities of supraglacial lakes pose a hard problem for semantic segmentation and object detection tasks because the definition of a lake is ill-fitted to the inner workings of such approaches. For example, lakes are often covered by ice and snow and narrow streams can connect distinct lakes, which is not directly translatable to the semantic segmentation of water. It is also not well-posed for object detection, especially the identity relation - what is a lake, what is not (yet) a lake, and what are two lakes is challenging. In this context, we worked on adapting semantic segmentation using the Segment Anything Model and instance segmentation using Mask R-CNN to the setting. The latter ended up superior in our own evaluation and even got ranked second among all participants. We are proud that our approach has led to competitive performance. The source code is available from https://github.com/tum-bgd/GISCup23.