Short Papers

ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 Call for Papers - Short and Poster Papers

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acmsigspatial2026sho

Important Dates:

• Abstract Submission: Tuesday, June 9th, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
• Paper Submission: Friday, June 12th, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
• Notification of Accept/Reject: Wednesday, Aug 5th, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
• Camera-ready: Wednesday, August 19th, 2026, 11:59 PM Pacific Time

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, in 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 Researchers, students, and practitioners are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Short and Poster Paper Contributions

There are two avenues for short paper contributions: 1. A paper submitted to the research track of the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference may be accepted as a short paper (see the corresponding Call For Papers). 2. A paper can be directly submitted as a Short or Poster Paper and will be reviewed by the separate Short and Poster Papers PC. This new mechanism was introduced last year for the first time.

Short papers have at most 4 pages (including references), prepared using the ACM two-column conference proceedings template, and will appear in the conference proceedings.

Note: After acceptance, authors may request to publish their paper as a 3-page (including references) poster, to avoid paying the ACM open access fee (APC). They both will be presented at the conference via posters and short lightning talks.

Just as for the research track of the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference, there are two types of short papers:

1. Regular research short papers. These papers present original research on foundational concepts, such as novel models and algorithms for spatial computing.
2. Experiment, Benchmark & Experience short papers. These papers describe the design, implementation, and empirical evaluation of a novel system, or a new benchmark, or a novel experimental evaluation of existing platforms.

1. Regular Research Short Papers

• Papers about theory, models, and algorithms. These papers present original research on foundational concepts, such as novel models and algorithms for spatial computing. These papers are invited, where appropriate, to include a prototype implementation and evaluation that may include comparisons with alternate approaches. Example: a novel algorithm for complex query processing or a novel model of spatial causal inference.
• Papers about systems. These papers describe the design, implementation, and empirical evaluation of a novel system, framework, or processing pipeline created to address a specific problem. It typically provides a detailed explanation of a real-world problem, the architecture, functionality, and performance of the system, and an evaluation that may include comparisons with alternate systems. Example: a platform for spatio-temporal data analysis in real-time.

2. Experiment, benchmark, and experience papers

• Papers about experiments. These papers evaluate multiple existing solutions to a problem and, through extensive experimentation, offer novel insights through a comprehensive analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. Example: evaluating anomaly detection algorithms using various datasets.
• Papers about benchmarks. These papers introduce new benchmarks for evaluating and comparing different techniques, systems, or algorithms. They provide a standardized reference point to guide experimental research and foster consistent evaluation practices. Example: benchmarking spatio-temporal causal analysis algorithms.
• Papers about experiences. These papers provide insights, lessons learned, and real-world experiences from deploying existing systems. They focus on practical challenges and observations from real-world usage, which are crucial for understanding the limitations of existing solutions. All the co-authors of an experience paper can be from academia. Example: lessons learned from the deployment of a system for indoor tracking.

Topics of Interest

Spatial AI

• Generative AI for spatial reasoning and simulation
• Spatial and spatio-temporal foundation models
• 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

Spatial Computing Systems and Big Spatial Data Infrastructure

• 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

Spatial Intelligence for Society

• Intelligent transportation and sustainable mobility
• 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
• Industrial applications

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

Submission

General information

Short papers: up to 4 pages including references, prepared using the ACM two-column conference proceedings template, and will appear in the conference proceedings. Accepted short papers will appear in the conference proceedings. Submissions that do not follow the page limit requirements will be desk-rejected without technical reviews. All page limits are based on the ACM two-column conference proceedings template.

Paper titles. Regular research short papers titles do not have specific requirements. Add the suffix [experiments] at the end of the title, if you submit an Experiment, Benchmark & Experience short papers.

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.

Accepted short and poster papers. Accepted short and poster papers will appear in the conference proceedings. Moreover, in both cases a poster must be prepared and presented at the conference, as well as a short lightning presentation.

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. (Note 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. (Note 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.

(Note 1) Short-term 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.

(Note 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

Formatting and camera-ready information

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: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acmsigspatial2026sho

Camera-ready information. Short 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 will 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 short 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 in the form of a poster and a short lightning talk presentation. Otherwise, the accepted submission will not appear in the conference proceedings.

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.

Short Papers PC-Chairs Contact Information

• Alberto Belussi, University of Verona, Verona, Italy - alberto.belussi@univr.it
• Qiang Gao, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China - qianggao@swufe.edu.cn
• Vagelis Hristidis, UC Riverside, USA - vagelis@cs.ucr.edu