PolDS 2025: 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science Minneapolis, MN, United States, November 3, 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 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.

Submission Guidelines

Types of Submissions

General information

• Full Research Papers. Submissions for full research papers is 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 are 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 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
• Author Notification:  26th September 2025
• Camera Ready Deadline: 6th October 2025

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.

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 Twin Cities
• 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

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 excited to announce travel awards to help potential attendees with travel and conference costs. The funds for the grants come from the National Science Foundation (NSF). More details about application process will be released closer to submission deadline.