ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025 – CALL FOR VISION PAPERS

Important Dates:

  • Abstract Submission: Friday, May 23rd, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
  • Paper Submission: Friday, May 30th, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
  • Notification of Accept/Reject: Thursday, July 31st, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
  • Camera-ready: Thursday, August 21st, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Overview

After several years of being part of the research track, the Vision Track is inaugurated in SIGSPATIAL 2025 as a separate one. Continuing within its original spirit, the main objective is to encourage the researchers and practitioners to provide/share their visionary propositions that within a foreseeable future could provide impactful directions and compelling research opportunities for the SIGSPATIAL community.

The key property that separates the papers in the Vision track is that they will be evaluated and selected for acceptance based on their potential of expanding current SIGSPATIAL research agenda by defining new research topics and problems with transformative-impact potential. Specifically, the authors should not be bound by existing technologies or datasets, but are encouraged to rather look further ahead and present their out-of-box (blue sky) thoughts that could result in paradigm change, and enable quantum leap in knowledge. For instance, papers from 10-20 years ago foreseeing and proposing eco-routing and ride-sharing (and all the technical challenges they would bring) would have been “visionary”, as would papers today presenting opportunities for possibly transdisciplinary work expanding SIGSPATIAL’s research horizon on impactful issues such as quantum computing, climate change, spatial aspects of responsible computing research, and spatial data science for societal good. Another possibility (not that there should be any contextual bounds) is to look for specific scientific domains in which there are opportunities for novel spatial and/or spatio-temporal challenges.

Unlike other tracks (e.g., research, industry), the Vision Track does not have any constraints on the categories of topics. However, there are some basic rules as to what would not constitute a suitable candidate paper: (1) If the work is proposing slightly better solutions to well-studied problems (or variations thereof) with known solutions, then it is not recommended for submission to this track; (2) Even if the papers introduces a relatively new problem – in the case that it is dominated by a specific solution proposed by the authors and offers a very limited discussion in terms of broader future research impacts, then it should not be submitted to this track (the authors should consider Short Papers track for preliminary novel ideas and solutions). (3) If the paper proposes an application of existing techniques to a specific domain in which they may be useful – its value will be diminished unless there is a solid argument as to what would be the significant novel challenges for SIGSPATIAL community.

Submission Guidelines:

General information – Submissions to the Vision Paper track should follow the same formatting as regular papers but are limited to 4 pages (excluding references). The accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings, and pending confirmation, the best submission(s), will be eligible for partial travel grants.

Authors. SIGSPATIAL 2025 is a single-blind conference, therefore the names and affiliations of the authors should be listed in the submitted version. The author list is considered to be final after the submission deadline and no changes to the author list (addition, removal or changing the order) are allowed for accepted papers.

Formatting and Camera-Ready

Templates and submission. Manuscripts should be submitted in PDF format and formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates available at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. SIGSPATIAL uses the Conference Proceedings Primary Article template with two-column format. Alterations to the template, especially to gain more space, will be grounds for desk-rejection without further technical review.

All papers should be submitted through EasyChair using the following link: EasyChair Link

Camera-ready information. Papers accepted for SIGSPATIAL 2025 will be published in the Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. After the successful acceptance of a paper, we send an email to the contact author(s) with detailed instructions on how to prepare and submit the camera-ready copy of the accepted paper.

Registration and Presentation. Each accepted must have a separate paid author registration (i.e., an author cannot pay a single registration for more than one paper), and one author must attend the conference in person to present the accepted submission. Otherwise, the accepted submission will not appear in the conference proceedings or the ACM Digital Library version of the conference proceedings.

Conflict, authorship and content

ACM Policy on Authorship. Authors should review and follow the ACM Policy on Authorship which includes guidelines on the use of generative AI software tools for manuscript writing. In particular, the authors are responsible for all the submitted manuscripts and they should disclose the use of AI software tools in the paper.

ACM Policy on Conflict of Interest. As part of the submission, you will be asked to mark your conflict-of-interest with the Program Committee members. Authors should review the Conflict of Interest Policy for ACM Publications to decide if there is a conflict of interest. In summary, the following is a non-comprehensive list of examples of COI:

  • All PhD advisors/advisees regardless of the graduation date.

  • All current co-workers or a co-worker in the past 24 months. A co-worker is a person working at the same institution as one of the authors whether or not they actively collaborate.1

  • Any co-author of a research paper in the last 24 months regardless of whether the paper was peer-reviewed or not, e.g., white papers or arXiv papers also count.2

  • A research collaborator in the past 24 months whether or not this collaboration resulted in a publication.

  • Close friends or relatives.

When in doubt, please reach out to the Program Committee Chairs or mark the potential conflicts on the submission website and add a note on why you think they could be marked as such. The Program Committee Chairs will review them and decide how to use that information. PC Chairs reserve the right to desk-reject a paper without review if COIs are not marked appropriately.

1 Short-terms affiliations such as a summer internship does not result in an institutional COI with all co-workers. However, the mentor and other collaborators are still marked.

2 Community papers that have a large number of authors and do not stem from a specific research project do not constitute a COI, e.g. the reports titled "Towards Mobility Data Science" and "Diversity and Inclusion Activities in Database Conferences: A 2021 Report" do not by themselves result in a COI.

Note on EasyChair: EasyChair does not have a mechanism to mark that there are no COI on a paper. If you confirm that there are no conflicts, then you do not need to submit the COI form.

ACM Policy on inappropriate content. ACM Publications cannot be used to propagate political or religious views or denigrate individuals or groups of people. See https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/inappropriate-content-policy

Vision Track Co-Chairs:

Egemen Tanin, University of Melbourne, Australia

Goce Trajcevski, Iowa State University, USA