This travel support enables U.S.-based students to attend the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2011 Conference, held in Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 1-4, 2011 (http://acmgis2011.cs.umn.edu/).
The ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference has established itself as the world's premier conference to foster research in the areas of Spatial Data and Analysis and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The conference provides a forum for original research contributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of GIS ranging from applications, user interfaces, and visualization to storage management and indexing issues. It brings together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geospatial data and knowledge, and fostering interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of GIS. It is the premier annual event of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL). The conference seeks to continuously advance the state of-the-art in spatial data management and spatial data analysis and broaden its impact.
This grant provides partial travel support and conference registration for 20-25 qualified U.S. based graduate and promising undergraduate student participants. The students will greatly benefit from attending this conference, as they will be able to partake in the current state-of-the-art in the area of geospatial systems and applications, present their work, and potentially make connections for research collaborations and research mentoring. The total number of ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS participants in the past has been in excess of 250 participants, with a majority of the participants from the U.S., followed by Europe and Asia. The conference participation has shown a steady increase in the past few years due to the growing importance of geographic information. A strong representation of U.S.-based graduate students at ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS is useful in maintaining U.S. competitiveness in the important research areas crucial for U.S. infrastructures and applications that critically depend on geo-referenced information. Those who receive the award will be featured in the NSF Student Supported Research special section of the combined Poster, Demo, and PhD Showcase Session, a major event in the conference that lasts for over three hours and is attended by all conference participants.
The goal of this award was to contribute to the education and training of students who belong to the next generation of scientists, engineers, and practitioners in the area of Spatial Information and of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This grant supported in the form of travel awards 30 U.S.-based graduate and undergraduate students to attend the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2011 Conference, which was held in Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 1-4, 2011. The Conference is annually organized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL), which is an association for researchers, students, and professionals interested in research, development, and deployment of solutions to spatial information handling and spatial knowledge extraction problems. The conference, which was started in 1993, has established itself as the world's premier research conference in Spatial Information and GIS; it provides a forum for original research contributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of GIS ranging from applications, user interfaces, and visualization to storage management and indexing issues. The 30 students included four women and four undergraduate students, including one underrepresented minority student (African American male). The awards ranged from $1,000 to one award of $250 to cover for the registration of a local student. Given the large number of students supported, this NSF grant can significantly contribute to the continuation of the competitive edge of the United States in the area of Spatial Information and Geographic Information Systems. The broader impact of the area of Spatial Information and Geographic Information Systems continuously increases with the emergence of new application domains and with the availability and ubiquity of large spatial data such as maps, repositories of remote-sensing images, 3D medical atlases, and the decennial census. Businesses, industry, academia, and governmental agencies are utilizing spatial information to improve their daily operations, structure new strategies, and increase overall productivity. Applications of spatial information handling can be found, for example, in location-based services in the M(mobile)-commerce industry, in strategic assessments in the military agencies, in climatology studies (e.g., effects of tsunami), in meteorological research, in computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) applications, in medical imagery and atlases (e.g., 3D brain atlas), in land-use classification of satellite imagery in urban planning, in the detection of local instability in traffic, in epidemiological pattern forecasting (predict spread of disease), in the health-care field, in analyzing crime hot spots in law enforcement applications, and in the creation of high resolution three-dimensional maps from satellite imagery in intelligence information gathering. The Chorley report points out that 80% percent of data have spatial properties or a spatial reference. Combined with the increased demand for spatial data processing, spatial information systems are gaining a substantial share across the spectrum in the industrial, government, and academic sectors.
