SIGSPATIAL’s mission is to address issues related to the acquisition, management, and processing of spatial data and knowledge generation with a focus on conceptual, design, algorithmic, geometric, visual, and systems implementations aspects. Its scope also includes, but is not limited to, geographic information systems (GIS), along with data storage, query processing, indexing and data mining.
The categories of problems, as well as the plethora of novel solutions, address issues of high societal relevance in various application domains, arising due to the availability of GPS data in ever-increasing number of mobile devices and smart phones. The use of navigation, routing and online mapping systems offered from companies such as ESRI, HERE, Microsoft (Virtual Earth) and Google (Google Maps and Google Earth) in settings ranging from tourism, traffic management, emergency/ disaster remediation and agriculture only further accentuate the importance of the topics that define the main thrusts of the SIGSPATIAL conference. It continues its mission of providing a forum for high quality research conference and workshops that are differentiated from other venues by focusing on the computational and system aspects of the field rather than on the available commercial products.
One of the focal tasks of the SIGSPATIAL leadership is keeping its flagship conference, the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL), affordable so that it can continue to be of good value to its attendees and be competitive price-wise with related conferences. As an example, the registration fees for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017 were: – $450 for ACM members; $550 for non-ACM members; $350 for students. Achieving this has been made possible by active solicitation of sponsor contributions and a great deal of vigilance and active involvement of the Organizing Committee, enabling a minimal financial burden in terms of contractual obligations when planning the conference. This, in addition, also enabled building financial reserves.
ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2017 was the 25th event of an annual series of symposia and workshops with the mission to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge. However, 2017 was the 10th year that the conference was held under the auspices of the new ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL) and the flagship conference (ACM SIGSPATIAL) was held in Redondo Beach, California (November 7 - November 10, 2017).
The conference received a total of 180 research submissions and 13 industrial experience and systems submissions. 39 of the submissions were accepted as full 10-page research papers for oral presentation, resulting in an acceptance rate of 19.7%. Additional 43 submissions were accepted as poster presentations (22.2% acceptance rate), and published as 4-page papers. There were 24 demonstration submissions, of which 14 were accepted for live demonstrations, published as 4page papers (acceptance rate of 58%). Finally, once again we encouraged the submission of papers describing visionary ideas. Of the 14 vision papers submitted, 6 were accepted for oral presentation and a publication as 4-page papers. Our reviewers put in a significant amount of effort in reviewing the papers and our hope is that the reviews were beneficial even to those authors whose papers were not accepted.
Continuing the tradition, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017 had a Cup programming contest, which focused on similarity search in databases of moving object trajectories under Frechet distance. The competition received 28 submissions and the teams totaled 68 members submitting formal entries. Three entries were selected as winners, and were additionally qualified for an invited paper, an oral presentation and award prizes during the banquet.
For the second time, after its debut in 2016, the conference had a Student Research Competition that aimed at providing a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to share their research results and exchange ideas with other students, judges, and conference attendees. This year, 4 papers (co)authored by graduate students and one paper authored by undergraduate students were selected to enter the final round of the competition.
During the one day workshops and the two and a half days of the main track, the ACM SIGSPATIAL attracted 325 attendees.
The technical program of the conference was decided in a two-stage process:
(1) each submitted paper was first reviewed by at least three members of a carefully chosen program committee (PC) consisting of experts in the relevant fields. Our PC had a total of 107 volunteers from academia and industry, plus an additional 22 members who were designated as the Senior PC. The assignment of papers to reviewers followed a bidding stage, during which PC members were allowed to express ranked preferences regarding their willingness to review a particular submission. In addition to three reviewers from the PC, each paper was also assigned a designated Senior PC member who studied the reviews, discussed the merits of the submission with the reviewers, wrote a metareview, and formulated an accept/reject recommendation.
(2) For the first time in 2017, we implemented a rebuttal phase where the authors received preliminary versions of the reviews and metareview and were offered the opportunity to address the concerns raised therein by submitting a response. The reviews, metareviews, and accept/reject recommendations were then finalized taking into account the responses and the selection of papers to include in the conference program was ultimately made by the PC Chairs. Certain papers that were not accepted for the conference, with the permission of the authors, were forwarded to the conferences Workshop Chairs to be considered for inclusion in relevant workshops co-located with SIGSPATIAL.
ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017 had two distinguished speakers: Markus Gross (Disney Research and ETH Zurich) with a keynote presentation Disney Research Technology to Create the Magic, and Bryan Mistele (INRIX) whose keynote addressed Building Smarter Cars & Cities from Spatial Data.
The 2017 edition of the conference was again run in a single track with one of the highlights being a fast forward poster session in the first afternoon where each poster author was given two minutes to present the highlights of their work to the audience. This was followed by a poster and Demo reception in the evening where the conference participants had an opportunity to interact with the poster authors. Poster paper authors were encouraged to do a good job by having two awards: one for besta fast forward presentation and one for the actual poster. Demo paper authors were awarded a best demo award for a running prototype that the authors demonstrate. The poster and demo components of the conference proved to be very popular with both the conference audience and the poster and demo authors. This year, for the first time, the conference has started the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), which took place during the workshop day and the first day of the conference. Awards for SRC were delivered during the conference banquet.
The conference also included a business meeting for SIGSPATIAL which was open to all SIGSPATIAL members as well as to all conference attendees.
The conference was preceded by a workshop day with the following ten workshops:
10th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (IWCTS 2017)
8th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on GeoStreaming (IWGS 2017)
3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Emergency Management using GIS (EM-GIS 2017)
6th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Analytics for Big Geospatial Data
(BigSpatial 2017)
3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Analytics (UrbanGIS 2017)
1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities 2017)
1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on High-Precision Maps and Intelligent Applications for Autonomous Vehicles (AutonomousGIS 2017)
1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI 2017)
1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Recommendations for Location-based Services and Social Networks (LocalRec 2017)
1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Analytics for Local Events and News (LENS 2017) 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Prediction of Human Mobility (PredictGIS 2017)
ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017 conference was generously co-sponsored by NSF, Oracle, Facebook, Lyft, Uber, ESRI, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, NVIDIA, Ordnance Survey, Morgan & Claypool, and Springer, whose participation and generosity demonstrated what can be accomplished by a successful partnership between academia and industry. Some of the sponsors held a recruiting table for potential students during one day of the conference. The NSF support of $30K enabled 37 students to receive financial help for attending the conference.
The SIGSPATIAL leadership has already undertaken all the steps and closely collaborates with the Organizing Committee for the 2018 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Conference, to be held in Seattle, WA on November 6-9, 2018 with 12 workshops on November 7. It has already secured sponsorship from Apple, ESRI, Lyft, UBER, Facebook, Oracle and HERE, and Morgan & Claypool. SIGSPATIAL has also applied for support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the amount of around $30K and plans to use these funds to offer 30-35 student travel grants.
