Industrial Papers

ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 Call for Papers - Industrial Track

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigspatial26industri

Overview

The thirty-fourth ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2026 (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026) will be held in Riverside, California, USA, on 3rd-6th November 2026. The conference began in 1993 as a series of symposia and workshops to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners on novel systems based on spatial data and knowledge, and foster interdisciplinary discussions and research across all aspects of spatial information systems. The conference provides a forum for original research contributions that cover all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of geospatial data, ranging from applications to data storage and query processing to the Internet of Spatial Things and spatial AI. The conference is the premier annual event of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL). Researchers, students, and practitioners are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Industrial Track

The Industrial Track at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 is the premier venue for showcasing how geospatial innovation moves from the lab to the real world. We invite submissions that highlight cutting-edge industrial advancements, operational case studies, and the unique challenges of deploying spatial systems at scale. Our mission is to foster a high-impact dialogue between industry practitioners and the academic community.

We seek contributions that demonstrate applied research and practical impact. Key themes include, but are not limited to:

• Novel System Architectures: Distributed spatial databases, cloud-native geoprocessing, and real-time streaming pipelines.
• Operational Experiences: Lessons learned from "in-the-wild" deployments, including scalability, reliability, and maintenance.
• Sector-Specific Innovations: High-impact applications in logistics, utilities, urban digital twins, autonomous mobility, climate tech, and disaster response.
• Emerging Trends: The intersection of LLMs/VLMs/Foundation Models with spatial data, privacy-preserving geoinformatics, and edge computing.

Our review process prioritizes relevance, impact and ingenuity over theoretical proofs. Submissions will be evaluated based on:

• Significance of the Problem: Does the work address a high-stakes or large-scale industrial challenge?
• Practical Effectiveness: How well did the solution perform in production or a real-world pilot?
• Transferable Insights: Does the paper provide "lessons learned" or architectural patterns that benefit the wider SIGSPATIAL community?
• Open Challenges: We highly value papers that identify current bottlenecks or unmet needs to inspire future collaborative research.
• Applied Novelty: Innovative adaptations of algorithms to real-world data, creative system integrations, or pioneering applications of spatial research in new industrial sectors
• Clarity: Effective communication of the solution’s value to both practitioners and academics.

All papers should be submitted through EasyChair using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigspatial26industri

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission: Friday, June 5th, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
• Paper Submission: Friday, June 12th, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
• Notification of Accept/Reject: Friday, July 31st, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
• Camera-ready: Thursday, August 21st, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time

Topics of Interest

Suggested topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Spatial AI

• Generative AI for spatial reasoning and simulation
• Spatial and spatio-temporal foundation models
• Novel foundation model architectures or training (pre-training, alignment, fine-tuning) methodologies targeting spatial datasets
• Causal reasoning in space and time
• Spatial machine learning and explainability
• Privacy and ethics in spatial computing
• Spatial and spatio-temporal reasoning in robotics
• Agentic GeoAI
• Trustworthy and responsible GeoAI
• Spatial and spatio-temporal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Techniques
• Spatial representation learning, encoding, and grounding methods for multi-modal data
• Evaluation benchmarks for foundation models
• Safety, hallucination control, and uncertainty quantification in spatially grounded foundation models

Big spatial data

• Spatial and spatio-temporal analysis
• Query processing and optimization
• Spatial data mining, pattern analysis and knowledge discovery
• Spatio-temporal data management
• Spatial decision support
• Spatial data quality and uncertainty
• Geo-entity linkage, geo-enrichment
• Distributed and parallel algorithms
• Geospatial architectures and middleware
• GPU and novel hardware solutions
• Cloud and edge spatial data platforms
• Spatial vector databases
• Spatial graph data management and analysis
• Unified relational/graph/vector architectures for spatial retrieval-augmented generation

Pervasive spatial computing and internet of spatial things

• Localization and tracking indoors/outdoors
• Contact tracing
• Location-based services
• Spatio-temporal sensor networks
• Traffic telematics
• Mobile systems and vehicular ad hoc networks
• Edge spatial computing systems and on-device intelligence
• Virtual/Augmented/Mixed reality for spatial computing
• Spatial computing in autonomous vehicles
• Cyber-physical systems and their applications in spatial computing

Spatial data acquisition, integration and processing

• Standardization and semantic interoperability
• Earth observation and satellite data processing
• Computational geometry and computer graphics
• Spatial scene understanding and spatial awareness in images and videos
• Spatial, geo-social and trajectory simulation
• Spatio-temporal stream processing
• Governance and cross-organization spatial data sharing
• Spatial knowledge graphs
• Multi-modal spatial computing and data fusion
• Space and planetary mapping

Spatial search

• Geographic information retrieval
• Human-computer interaction and visualization for spatial systems
• Similarity searching
• Spatial data structures and algorithms
• Spatial modeling and reasoning
• Spatio-textual searching
• Natural language interfaces and conversational search over spatial data

Quantum Spatial Computing and Technologies

• Quantum computing for spatial data and applications
• Hybrid quantum-classical pipelines for spatial computing applications
• Quantum simulations for spatial systems and phenomena
• Quantum machine learning for spatial applications
• Quantum-inspired spatial indexing and search
• Quantum spatial databases
• Quantum sensing for spatial data and applications
• GPS-free quantum navigation technologies
• Benchmarks and empirical studies for quantum technologies on spatial workloads

Digital Twins in Spatial Computing Systems

• Urban, regional, and planetary digital twins
• Earth systems digital twins for climate, hazards, hydrology, and Earth ecosystem dynamics
• Facility digital twins for buildings, campuses, utilities, and industrial assets
• Mobility digital twins for flows of people, vehicles, goods, and services
• Human-centric and socio-economic digital twins for human services, social systems, health systems, transportation systems, and livability.
• Digital twin platforms

Spatial intelligence at work

• Epidemiology and health
• Cyber and physical security
• Smart cities and spaces
• Urban data and planning
• Geospatial computer vision applications
• Location business intelligence
• Personalized geospatial recommendation systems
• Environmental, climate, and natural systems
• Agricultural, food, and water systems
• Defense, intelligence, and public safety
• Utilities and urban infrastructure
• Geo health and epidemiology

Spatial Networks and Graphs

• Intelligent transportation and sustainable mobility
• Utility and telecommunications network modeling
• Transportation network modeling and route optimization
• Graph-based analytical techniques
• Sensor networks

Submission Guidelines

General information

Industry track papers may vary in length from 5 to 10 pages, excluding references. We understand some topics may require more or less explanation and are open to submissions of varying length.

Authors

SIGSPATIAL 2026 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, including the author order, to the author list are allowed for accepted papers. Each submission in this Industrial track must include at least one author with a non-academic affiliation.

All papers should be submitted through EasyChair using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigspatial26industri

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 a two-column format. Alterations to the template, especially to gain more space, will be grounds for desk-rejection without further technical review.

Camera-ready information

Papers accepted for SIGSPATIAL 2026 will be published in the Proceedings of the 34th 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

Papers accepted for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 will be published in the ACM Digital Library under the Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. Upon the paper acceptance, the contact author(s) will receive detailed instructions on how to prepare and submit the camera-ready copy of the accepted paper. Each accepted paper 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 submitted manuscripts and should disclose the use of AI software tools in the paper. Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM-published work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc. PC Chairs reserve the right to desk-reject a paper without review if the use of AI software tools is not marked appropriately.

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. Short-term affiliations, such as a summer internship or short visits, do not result in an institutional COI with all co-workers. However, the mentor and other collaborators are still marked.
• 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. 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.
• 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 contact the Program Committee Chairs or mark any potential conflicts on the submission website and include a note explaining why you believe they should be flagged. 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.

Note on EasyChair: EasyChair does not have a mechanism to indicate that a paper has no COIs. 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

Important note on ACM OPEN

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access (https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen). All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. To sustain this approach, ACM will charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) for certain types of manuscripts, listed on https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/article-types. If the accepted paper has at least one author affiliated with an OPEN participating institution (see the complete list at https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants), the paper’s APC is already covered, and the authors will not pay any extra charges. If none of the authors has such an affiliation, the other option is to pay the APC. To ease the transition in 2026, the ACM has implemented policies on waivers and discounts, available at https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-open-access-apc-waivers-and-discounts. The 2026 discount guidelines state that articles where one of the named co-authors is an ACM or SIG Member, the subsidized rate is $250/article (down from the list price of $700), and for articles where none of the named co-authors is an ACM or SIG Member, the subsidized rate is $350/article (down from the list price of $1,000). For articles eligible for 50% geographic discounts, the discount will be applied to the applicable subsidized rate.

For the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 conference, SIGSPATIAL accepts and handles requests for waivers for authors who have financial hardship according to the ACM policies, accessible on https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-open-access-apc-waivers. Guidelines for submitting waiver requests will be released along with the camera-ready instructions.

Industrial Co-Chairs Contact Information

• Heba Aly, Amazon, USA
• Swetava Ganguli, Apple, USA
• Petko Bakalov, Esri, USA