ACM SIGSPATIAL International Research Articles

Conference Report: The 30th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022) Seattle, Washington, USA November 1--4, 2022

This report presents the development and finalization of the 30th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022), which was held in Seattle, Washington, USA, November 1--4, 2022.

SpatialEpi'2022 Workshop Report: The 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Computing for Epidemiology

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers in the SIGSPATIAL community have utilized computational solutions to better explain, predict, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. Using spatial computing for pandemic preparedness has also been highlighted as a major application of mobility data science [16]. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the SIGSPATIAL community rapidly published ideas to improve our understanding of the spread of the virus in two SIGSPATIAL Special Newsletter Issues in March and July 2020 [28, 29]. These efforts led to the 1st and 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Computing for Epidemiology [5, 4] (formerly called Workshop on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19 in 2020) which has provided authors of these newsletter articles a forum to present and discuss their solutions. Including both work published at the SIGSPATIAL Special Newsletter and regular peer-reviewed submissions, this workshop included topics such as the collection of large spatiotemporal datasets [20], leveraging data mining and spatial analysis techniques to analyze and visualize such data [2, 12, 25, 21, 11, 9, 8, 3], developing predictive spatial models and simulations [6, 1, 19, 13, 24, 10, 23, 14], and employing novel technologies towards contact tracing and surveillance [17, 26].

The 14th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (IWCTS 2021), Beijing, China

This report summarizes the 14 th edition of the International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (IWCTS 2021).

GeoHumanities 2021 Workshop Report

This article reports on the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 29th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.

ARIC 2021 Workshop Report: The 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities

This report summarizes the focus of the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC 2021 - https://urbands.github.io/ARIC2021/) that was held virtually online on November 2, 2021. The attendance for the workshop was 40. The ARIC workshop started in 2017 with an aim to promote the interdisciplinary discussions among researchers, practitioners and developers to identify techniques and methods that would enable building next generation cities and infrastructures. This workshop continued its mission of bringing together researchers and practitioners to address the state-of-the-art techniques/methods, limitations and challenges to making cities both resilient and intelligent after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction to this special issue

The 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020) was originally planned to take place in Beijing, China. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the conference was first moved to Seattle, Washington, USA and then transitioned into a fully virtual conference. This newsletter provides event and experience reports of the organizers of the main conference and the ten satellite workshops.

The 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Gems

Researchers and practitioners working with spatial data often develop fundamental new techniques they would like to share with their community. These are not necessarily new research results, not yet in any textbook, but they are interesting, self-contained techniques for doing something useful in the domain of spatial data. We call these techniques "spatial gems".

The 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Safety and Resilience

Safety is vital for people and emergency management helps keep people safe. Emergency management includes four stages: Planning and Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery. Geospatial applications (including GIS) have been extensively used in each stage of emergency management. Nowadays, on the technical side, artificial intelligence tools like deep learning could be put to good use. For example, one of the main benefits of deep learning over various machine learning algorithms is its ability to generate new features from limited series of features located in the training dataset. Therefore, deep learning algorithms can create new tasks to solve current ones. Decision-makers can utilize the geospatial information to develop planning and mitigation strategies with such advanced techniques. GIS models and simulation capabilities are used to exercise response and recovery plans during non-disaster times. They help the decision-makers sense the near real-time possibilities during an event. Once disaster occurs, GIS will take effect in real time response and recovery activities.

GeoHumanities 2020 workshop report

This article reports on the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.

The 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Data Access and Processing APIs (SpatialAPI 2020)

With the increasing amount of publicly available geospatial data, the demand on spatial data exploration and analysis kept growing. The SIGSPATIAL community is both a provider of new systems with cutting-edge technology on accessing and processing geospatial data, and a user for all these systems. The SpatialAPI workshop is designed to help the SIGSPATIAL community by growing the knowledge of the existing well-established systems that are available for accessing and processing geospatial data. This includes, but is not limited to, web APIs, programming libraries, database systems, and geospatial extensions to existing systems.

The 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020)

This report describes the development and finalization of the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020), held virtually online, November 3-6, 2020. The attendance for the 2020 conference was 999, the highest in the history of ACM SIGSPATIAL.

The 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities

The advancements in sensor technology and ubiquity of connected devices has enabled the generation of large volume of disparate, dynamic and geographically distributed data both by scientific communities and citizens. With astonishing technological innovations and convergence, there have been major changes in peoples daily activities and social interactions. These innovations have contributed to the establishment of smart and connected cities. A smart city is forward-looking, progressive, and has the potential to provide high-quality life. A resilient city can preserve its activities and bounce back to its previous stage or to a new normal in the face of an emergency while meeting the daily activities and needs of its citizens. It is imperative to improve our understanding of Resilient and Intelligent Cities in order to leverage these new technologies to tackle the challenges ranging from climate change, public health, traffic congestion, economic growth, to digital divide, social equity, political movements, and cultural conflicts, among others.

The 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of spatially-explicit models have been developed to better explain the pathways of the disease, to predict the trajectory of the disease, and to test the effect of different health guidelines and policies on the number of cases and deaths. The 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19 workshop (COVID'2020) featured research efforts that aim to understand the spatial processes and patterns of COVID-19 spread using a variety of spatial modeling, simulation, and mining approaches. The goal of this workshop was to bring together a range of interdisciplinary researchers in the SIGSPATIAL community in the fields of computer science, spatial modeling, social sciences, and epidemiology. Also, this workshop was advertised for anyone interested in infectious disease data and modelling, including but not limited to COVID-19.

Conference report: The 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019)

This report describes the development and finalization of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019), held in Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 5-8, 2019. The attendance for the 2019 conference was 397, the second highest in the history of ACM SIGSPATIAL. Historically, what is now the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference started as a series of workshops and symposia in 1993. Its aim was to promote the interdisciplinary discussions among researchers, developers, users, and practitioners and fostering research in all aspects of Geographic Information Systems --- hence the original workshop acronym ACM GIS. The focus was on novel systems based on geospatial data and knowledge. It continued its mission of providing a forum for original research results, addressing conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of geospatial data ranging from applications, user interfaces and visualization, to data storage, query processing, indexing and data mining. The conference is now the premier annual event of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL).

Conference report: The 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019)

This report describes the development and finalization of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019), held in Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 5-8, 2019. The attendance for the 2019 conference was 397, the second highest in the history of ACM SIGSPATIAL. Historically, what is now the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference started as a series of workshops and symposia in 1993. Its aim was to promote the interdisciplinary discussions among researchers, developers, users, and practitioners and fostering research in all aspects of Geographic Information Systems --- hence the original workshop acronym ACM GIS. The focus was on novel systems based on geospatial data and knowledge. It continued its mission of providing a forum for original research results, addressing conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of geospatial data ranging from applications, user interfaces and visualization, to data storage, query processing, indexing and data mining. The conference is now the premier annual event of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL).

The 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Data Access and Processing APIs (SpatialAPI 2019)

With the increasing amounts of geospatial data, there is a growing demand on by developers and researchers to analyze geospatial data efficiently. The SIGSPATIAL community is both a provider of new systems with cutting edge technology on maintaining and processing geospatial data, and a user for all these systems. The SpatialAPI workshop is designed to help the SIGSPATIAL community by growing the knowledge of the existing well-established systems that are available for accessing and processing geospatial data. This includes, but is not limited to, web APIs, programming libraries, database systems, and geospatial extensions to existing systems.

GeoHumanities 2019 workshop report

This article reports on the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.

The 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Computing with Multifaceted Movement Data (MOVE++ 2019)

Modern technology allows us to track essentially anything that moves, be it animals, people, vehicles, or hurricanes. As a result, many efficient computational methods have been developed to analyze movement data, including methods for similarity analysis, clustering, segmentation, classification, and pattern detection. However, movement rarely occurs in isolation and to truly understand movement data it is of paramount importance to understand the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence movement, such as or health conditions or motivation (intrinsic) or the (natural) environment, weather, and other surrounding entities (extrinsic). Often the data that describes these factors is available together with the tracked object data for analysis, but comparatively few computational techniques fully utilize the potential of such multifaceted data. This workshop brought together researchers who are interested in developing computational techniques to analyze movement data in conjunction with other data sources that capture (some of) the factors which influence movement.

3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Analytics for Local Events and News (LENS 2019)

The 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Analytics for Local Events and News (LENS 2019) was held in conjunction with the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019). The workshop is intended to bring together experts in the workshop scope to exchange ideas on opportunities, challenges and cutting-edge techniques for local events and news analytics. The workshop has attracted ten submissions, all full-length research papers. Six submissions were accepted for publications; with 60% acceptance rate. The papers are reviewed by 7 program committee members, where each paper is assigned to two reviewers. Total 8 attendants registered for the workshop. The actual number of attendants along the day fluctuated from 8 to 12, with an average of 9 attendants maintained almost all the time. The paper titled DeepSpot: Understanding Online Opinion Spam by Text Augmentation using Sentiment Encoder-Decoder Networks , by Avik Nayak, Haiquan Chen, Xiaojun Ruan, and Jinsong Ouyang was awarded the best paper award. The paper titled Scalable Community Detection over Geo-Social Network , by Xiuwen Zheng, Qiyu Liu, and Amarnath Gupta was awarded the best presentation award. The workshop has achieved its goal in bringing up together experts and conducted a set of productive discussions and talks.

1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geo-Computational Thinking in Education (GeoEd 2019)

The 1st International Workshop on Geo-computational Thinking in Education (GeoEd 2019) was held in conjunction with the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019). The workshop is intended to bring together experts from both geography (or related) and computer science disciplines who have primary interest in geospatial data and technologies, either from academia or industry, to discuss the grand challenges towards improving existing learning pathways through integration of geo-computational thinking in higher education. This could impact a variety of disciplines that increasingly deal with geospatial data beyond geography, such as social sciences, environmental sciences, public policy, climatology, and other geo-related disciplines. The workshop speakers and attendants have discussed their vision on challenges and opportunities of various topics within the workshop scope.