This travel support enables U.S.-based students to attend the 18th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL), held in San Jose, California, USA, November 2-5, 2010 (http://acmgis2010.cs.ucsb.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 geo-spatial 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 geo-spatial 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.
The importance of spatial information handling continuously increases with the emergence of new application domains and with the availability and ubiquity of large spatial data such as maps, 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. The ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL) is an association for researchers, students, and professionals interested inresearch, development, and deployment of solutions to spatial information handling and spatial knowledge extraction problems. ACM SIGSPATIAL fosters research and development activities in this area by holding an annual event viz. ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographical Information Systems.Travel support was funded by this award for U.S. based graduate and promising undergraduate student participants to attend ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010, which was held in San Jose, California, USA, November 2-5,2010. The conference provided a forum for original researchcontributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementationaspects of GIS ranging from applications, user interfaces, andvisualization to storage management and indexing issues. Through the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2010 Website and electronic email -- all US Based student authors were invited to submit their respective travel award application to facilitate the selection of the awards. The selection process was handled by the selection committee comprising the following indivdals: (i) Divyakant Agrawal, UC Santa Barbara,(General Chair, SIGSPATIAL'2010); (ii) Ioana Stanoi, IBM Research Almaden, (PC Member, SIGSPATIAL'2010); (iii) Silvia Nittel, Universityof Maine, (PC member, SIGSPATIAL'2010); (iv) Cyrus Shahabi, University of Southern California, (SIGSPATIAL'2010 Sponsorship Chair); (v) Yi Chen, Arizona State University, (External Member). The selection decision were made in September'2010 and the applicants were notifiedof the acceptance/rejection in October 2010. Twenty-two students applied for this travel award, and 3 applications were transferred from Google travel award for female students. The travel award committee decided to grant each of the 20 students who had papers in SIGSPATIAL 2010 or its co-located workshops a $1000 award, to grant each of the two students with PhD showcase papers a $750 award, and to grant one student who had no papers in the conference or workshops but was doing relevant research a $500 award, in total $22,000. Among the 23 awardees, two were undergraduate students, and the remaining were PhD students. All awardees attended the conference which significantly augmented the research and education and training of the US Students. The total participation in the conference was approximately 240 participants -- thus approximately 10% of the participants were funded by the NSF award.
