 | PolDS 2025: 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science Minneapolis, MN, United States, November 3, 2025 |
| Conference web page | https://iharp.umbc.edu/polds25/ |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=polds2025 |
| Submission deadline | September 2, 2025 |
| Author Notification | September 26, 2025 |
| Camera Ready Deadline | October 6, 2025 |
Polar Data Science (PolDS 2025): 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science aims to connect the polar science community with the spatial computing community to foster convergent approaches that will address significant questions in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Addressing phenomena such as dynamic modeling of the ice bed, tracking the internal layers of the ice sheet, and investigating causal relationships between ice sheets, sea ice, and atmosphere requires developing new techniques for spatial and spatio-temporal data analysis, spatial machine learning, and spatial data infrastructure.
The workshop’s objectives will be informed by the ecosystem and research from NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions (iHARP), and other major Polar Science and AI research. For example, iHARP brings together 80 stakeholders and leading scholars in data science and polar science to advance our understanding of polar regions and their global impacts on sea level rise by deeply integrating data science and polar science to spur physics-informed, data-driven discoveries.
Earth’s climate history illustrates shifts in various geographical phenomena. For example, over glacial cycles, ice sheets have rapidly changed across varying spatial scales and contributed multiple meters of sea level rise in a century. With approximately 60% of the global population living within 100 km of a sea or oceanic coast, the acceleration of the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has raised concern among the scientific community. Sea level rise is just one of multiple global climatic events directly impacted by ice sheet mass loss. To minimize further societal burden resulting from such global climatic events with downstream local spatial effects, it is key to increase social capital towards collaboration on data collection and spatial analysis as well as identification and data-driven investigation of big polar-science questions. By exploring data science advances, such as spatial-temporal pattern mining and causal AI, we can help identify new research opportunities among members across various intersecting disciplines. Therefore, the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025 will act as a catalyst in the establishment of the polar informatics community and create the foundation of a future organization bringing together polar and data scientists.
Submission Guidelines
Types of Submissions
General information
- Full Research Papers. Submissions for full research papers are up to 8 pages excluding references. All page limits are based on the ACM two-column conference proceedings template.
- Short Papers. Based on the evaluations from the reviewers, the Program Committee may recommend that certain papers be accepted as 4-page (including references) short papers for poster presentation. All page limits are based on the ACM two-column conference proceedings template.
- Authors. We will follow the SIGSPATIAL 2025 single-blind approach; 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.
Deadlines
Paper submission deadline: 9th August 2025 September 2, 2025 deadline extended)- Author Notification: 26th September 2025
- Camera Ready Deadline: 6th October 2025
Formatting and camera-ready information
Guidelines are provided by the SIGSPATIAL 2025 conference and follow ACM requirements.
Step 1. Consider Reviewers' Comments
| Goal | Consider Reviewers' Comments |
| Performing Step | Address Reviewers' Comments |
| Checking Step | - |
Step 2. Use Latest ACM Template
| Goal | Use the latest ACM Template.Note: ACM changed the template recently (June 4, 2025). |
| Performing Step | Download the latest ACM camera-ready template(https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template).Please use "sample-sigconf" as a default template.A sample using this latest template could be found in this link (sample-sigspatial.pdf). |
| Checking Step | Check whether your submission looks like the sample PDF file (sample-sigspatial.pdf). |
Step 3. Include CCS Concepts and Keywords
| Goal | Include CCS Concepts and Keywords. |
| Performing Step | Include both CCS concepts and keywords in your submission.The information about CCS concepts could be in the link(http://www.acm.org/publications/class-2012). |
| Checking Step | Please check whether the CCS Concepts and Keywords enclosed in a red rectangle in the following picture could be found on the first page of your submission. |
Step 4. Include Correct Copyright block
| Goal | Include the ACM copyright block |
| Performing Step | Step 1: Wait for an email from ACM with the information about how to fill in and submit a copyright release form within the next two weeks after the author notification date.(If the first author does not receive any email from ACM within two weeks after the author notification date, please contact the proceedings co-chairs.)Step 2: Fill in and submit the copyright form.You will receive an email from ACM in resposne of the submitted copyright release form.Step 3: Include the ACM copyright block from this copyright form email |
| Checking Step | Please check whether the ACM copyright block enclosed in a red rectangle in the following picture could be found on the first page of your submission.Note: Different papers have different DOIs enclosed in a blue rectangle. The DOI of one paper should not be re-used for another paper.Note: The following shows an example of a copyright block which appears at the bottom-left of the first page. The DOI in the last line could be obtained from the ACM email.================================SIGSPATIAL ’24, October 29 - November 1, 2025, Atlanta, GA, USA© 2025 Association for Computing Machinery.ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-1107-7/24/10. . . $15.00https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456 (replace with your own DOI)================================ |
Step 5. Check Page Limit
| Goal |
Check whether your submission does not exceed the page limit as follows.
|
| Performing Step | Check manually |
| Checking Step | There are many ways of checking the total number of pages in your submission (PDF file). In Acrobat Reader, you could see the total number of pages in a PDF file easily. |
⋆Camera-ready full papers are limited to 10 pages, not including references, followed by unlimited number of pages for references, with up to 2 additional pages to be used as an Appendix. The Appendix should only contain additional information the authors feel would be helpful to justify claims made in the paper, e.g., proofs of Lemmas and Theorems, additional experimental results to further illustrate claims from the experimental results section, etc. The Appendix must be clearly marked as such and should appear at the end of the paper after the references.
Step 6. Exclude Page Number
| Goal | Do NOT include any page number in your submission. |
| Performing Step | Check manually |
| Checking Step | At the bottom of each page, please make sure that there is no page number. |
Step 7. Use PDF file for Camera-ready Submission
| Goal | Use the PDF file format. |
| Performing Step | Use some standard tools (e.g., Acrobat) to generate the PDF file. |
| Checking Step | Check whether your submission could be opened by Acrobat Reader. |
Step 8. Use US Letter Size (not A4 Size)
| Goal | Use US letter (not A4 size) as the page size of your submission (PDF file).Note: The dimension of the US letter is "8.5 x 11 in". |
| Performing Step | This step could be done easily in US and Canada since the default page size is US Letter. In most other countries, usually, the default page size is A4.There are many ways of generating a PDF file with the US letter size. One possible way is:Step 1: Open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat.Step 2: Click on "File," and select "Print Setup."Step 3: Select "Letter" from the drop-down menu for "Size" under the "Paper" section.Step 4: Click "OK."Step 5: Click "File" and select "Print." Click on the drop-down menu for "Page Scaling," and select "Fit to Printable Area." Click "OK." |
| Checking Step | You could check the page size in Acrobat Reader with the following steps.----------------------------------------------Step 1: "File" --> "Properties"Step 2: After that, you could see a dialog box. In the "Description" tag, you could see there is a field called "Page Size" near to the bottom.Step 3: Check whether the content of this field is "8.5 x 11 in". If yes, this is a US letter size. Otherwise, no.Note that the page size of A4 is "8.3 x 11.7 in".---------------------------------------------- |
Step 9. Embed All Fonts
| Goal | Please embed all fonts in your submission (PDF file). |
| Performing Step |
The following shows the instruction. |
| Checking Step | You could check whether all fonts embedded in Acrobat Reader with the following steps.----------------------------------------------Step 1: "File" --> "Properties"Step 2: After that, you could see a dialog box. In the "Fonts" tag, check whether each font listed should have "(Embedded)" or "(Embedded Subset)" next to the font name. If yes, all fonts are embedded. Otherwise, no.---------------------------------------------- |
Step 10. Submit Camera-Ready Version
After you finish the above steps, submit your camera-ready paper no later than Monday, October 6, 2025 using your track’s EasyChair account (E.g. research track: add Easy chair link, proceedings author (* Papers)).
Step 11. Register for a Conference
At least one author of each submission must register for the conference. You must register for the main conference in order to attend the PoLDS workshop. There is no separate workshop fee.
List of Topics
We encourage participation from researchers in a broad range of topics exploring geospatial AI/ML techniques to detect novel patterns within data and promote scientific discovery in the polar regions.
Themes may include (but are not limited to):
- Improving our ability to project the future ice sheet contribution to sea-level rise across varying spatial scales
- New insights into ice-dynamics
- Improved estimate and visualization of the ice sheet and subglacial topography at a global scale
- Lining satellite-based observations of the near-surface with both atmospheric drivers and effects on the ice sheet
- Ensuring FAIR reproducibility of these scientific discoveries
- Accelerating discoveries in the polar regions with geospatial AI
- Improving our understanding of global and local sea level rise.
Program and Organizing Committee
Organizing Committee
- Dr. Vandana P. Janeja, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Dr. Shashi Shekhar, University of Minnesota
- Dr. Aneesh Subramanian, University of Colorado Boulder
- Dr. Mathieu Morlighem, Dartmouth College
- Dr. Mohamed Mokbel, University of Minnesota
- Dr. Jianwu Wang, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Dr. Josephine Namayanja, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Program Committee
- Dr. Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota
- Dr. Guangqing Chi, Pennsylvania State University
- Dr. Benedikt Riedel, IceCube Neutrino Observatory
- Dr. Bayu Tama, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Dr. Gong Cheng, Dartmouth College
- Dr. Maria Esteva, Texas Advanced Computing Center
- Dr. Ratnaksha Lele, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Dr. Sudip Chakraborty, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Christine Kirkpatrick, San Diego Supercomputer Center
- Dr. Chhaya Kulkarni, Towson University
- Dr. Sahara Ali, University of North Texas
Venue
The conference is being held at the Graduate by Hilton Minneapolis
Address: 615 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to Nikki Monczewski, iHARP Communications and Operations Coordinator, at nikkim@umbc.edu
Sponsors
iHARP: NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions is supported by the National Science Foundation, award #2118285
Travel Grants
The PolDS workshop organizers are pleased to announce travel awards to help select attendees with travel and conference costs. The funds for the grants come from the National Science Foundation (NSF). More details about the application process will be released closer to the submission deadline.