last updated: 25 June 2025
1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science (PolDS 2025)
This workshop 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 ice sheet, and investigating causal relationships between ice sheets, sea ice and atmosphere, require 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 to 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.
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.
Format
The proposed polar informatics workshop will be a 1 day workshop featuring a keynote, invited talks, contributed paper presentations, a poster session, a breakout discussion, and a panel. In addition to the presentation of research results, there will be discussions to identify new synergies (e.g., with broader polar science and data science and AI communities).
The workshop will also include discussions on prioritizing collaborative opportunities and synergies, along with a synthesis session highlighting the most compelling opportunities of common scientific themes and skill sets.
Types of Submissions
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
Important Dates
Workshop date: 3rd November, 2025
Paper submission deadline: 9th August 2025
Author Notification: 26th September 2025
Camera Ready Deadline: 10th October 2025
Submission Link: Coming soon!
ACM SIGSPATIAL — Workshop and Conference Registration
To register for the workshop, you must register for ACM SIGPSATIAL. You may find more information by visiting the conference website.
ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025 Conference Website
Venue
The conference is being held at the Graduate by Hilton Minneapolis,Address: 615 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414