The 5th GIS-focused algorithm competition, GISCUP 2016, co-located
with ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2016, October 31-November 3, 2016, San
Francisco, CA, USA
http://sigspatial2016.sigspatial.org/giscup2016
Call for Submissions
--------------------
This year will be the 5th GIS-focused algorithm competition, GISCUP
2016, co-located with the 2016 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference. ACM
SIGSPATIAL hosts an annual algorithm contest with the goal of
encouraging innovation in a fun way. The winners will be announced at
the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference in November 2016. Contest
participants will submit original computer programs to be evaluated by
the contest organizers on a common dataset.
This year’s contest will focus on applying spatial statistics to
spatio-temporal big data in order to identify statistically
significant hot spots using a distributed computing framework and
functional programming languages. With the advent of the ubiquitous
collection of spatio-temporal observational data (e.g., vehicle
tracking data), the identification of
unusual patterns of data in a statistically significant manner has
become a key problem that numerous businesses and organizations are
attempting to solve. This year’s SIGPSPATIAL Cup addresses this
significant programming challenge.
For this year’s contest, each team will utilize a very large
collection of spatio-temporal observational data – the New York City
Taxi and Limousine Commission Yellow Cab trip data. This dataset
consists of over one billion records representing all Yellow Cab taxi
trips in New York City between January 2009 and June 2015. Each record
in the dataset contains key
information such as pickup and dropoff date, time, and location
(latitude, longitude), trip distance, passenger count, and fare
amount.
Given this dataset, each team will then identify the fifty most
statistically significant dropoff locations by passenger count in both
time and space using the Getis-Ord statistic. Space will be aggregated
into a 200m grid; time will be aggregated into two hour periods. Each
team will utilize the Apache Spark open source cluster computing
framework; the tests will be run on a cluster of twenty five
commodity-level PCs (3GHz, quad core), each equipped with 24 GB of RAM
and 3 TB of disk storage. The applications that will run on top of the
Spark framework can be implemented using Java, Python, or Scala using
functional programming techniques. The dataset will be provided in
HDFS as a collection of uncompressed CSV files.
In summary, the key topics that are being addressed in this year’s cup
are the following:
- Spatio-temporal data
- Big data
- Spatial statistics – Hotspot analysis
- Distributed processing
- Functional programming
The top three teams will be provided with cash and or other prizes. In
addition to these prizes, the top three teams will be invited to
submit a four page paper for a contest paper session to be held at the
2016 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference. These papers will be subject to
review and acceptance by the contest organizers, but it is expected
that each of the top three teams will have their paper in the
conference proceedings, a ten-minute presentation in the contest
session, and a poster presentation in the conference’s regular poster
session.
At least one team member of each winning team must register for the
2016 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference.
At least one team member of each winning team must register for the
ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference.
Important Dates:
---------------
July 29th, 2016: Submission of Contributions
August 9th, 2016: Invitation of papers for the best submissions
August 16th, 2016: Submission deadline for invited papers
August 23rd, 2016: Camera-Ready paper deadline
More information about the contest can be found here:
http://sigspatial2016.sigspatial.org/giscup2016
Contest Chairs:
---------------
Erik Hoel, Esri, ehoel@esri.com
Martin Werner, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, martin.werner@ifi.lmu.de
Ranga Raju Vatsavai, North Carolina State University, rrvatsav@ncsu.edu
Contest Masters:
----------------
Randall Whitman, Esri, rwhitman@esri.com
Mike Park, Esri, mpark@esri.com
-----------------
Follow ACMGIS @
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4162155
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1450681355222657/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sigspatial_gis
--
Ahmed M. Aly