Message from Conference General Chair

 It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 4th International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research and Application; in short form, COM.Geo 2013, which takes place in the capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose, California, U.S.A. on July 22-24, 2013.

The explosion of the power and sophistication of computing applications in the past few years has revolutionized the way we live and work. This marked trend is of especial significance for geospatial computing, which directly relates to the very foundations of our society and essentially embraces all the diversification of its activities. Geospatial information, already important in many scientific and engineering disciplines, is increasingly becoming an integral component in consumer-driven technologies. How to further improve or enhance geospatial information processing, organizing, analysis, and visualization? Especially, handling rising flood of digital data from many difference sources puts serious technical and scientific challenges.

With rapid progress of information processing and multiple disciplines, there are more and more promising computing technologies, which could be employed to solve these problems. At present, cloud computing, mobile computing, visual computing/GPU computing, business intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and social computing have been playing key roles in geospatial applications. Some latest computing advancements, such as big data computing, heterogeneous computing, IoT/sensor computing, and bio-computing, have great potentials for the effective realization of information processing in the geospatial environment.

The COM.Geo conference not only focuses on the latest computing technologies for multidisciplinary research and development that enables the exploration in geospatial areas, but also highlights the impacts of these current and prospective computing technologies on the future of the geo-world. Our consideration is intended to bring fresh thoughts to explore new directions for geospatial research and development. The conference also provides a vision and a combined outlook for both computer and geospatial communities, i.e., how computing technology is changing the landscape of geospatial applications and how diverse geospatial information processing requires the change of various computing technologies. COM.Geo is playing a guiding role to advancing the technologies in computing for geospatial fields.

COM.Geo conference is a leading-edge conference on computer science and technology for geospatial research and application. It is also an exclusive event that builds a bridge between computing and geospatial fields. It connects researchers, developers, scientists, and application users from academia, government, and industry in all related fields. The previous COM.Geo conferences keynotes were delivered from White House Office/USGS, DOD, DOT, DHS, U.S. FCC, Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, OGC, MIT, etc. The attendees were from more than 50 countries all over the world. COM.Geo publications, read and cited worldwide, have broad impact on the development of theory, method and practice in geospatial computing.

Innovative geospatial research and application technologies are the brightest spotlights at COM.Geo conference. COM.Geo 2013 has exciting and high quality technical program sessions including brainstorm plenary keynotes, leading-edge panels, emerging tech shows, workshops, full papers, short papers, briefing papers, tech talks, demo talks, posters, hot short talks, and exhibits for the conference. Furthermore, at the conference, Google, Microsoft, NASA, IFTF, MIT, Stanford University, and OGC reveal their latest cool technologies and give the key insights about Google Fusion Table, Microsoft GeoFlow for upcoming Excel 2013, energy efficient GPS sensing with cloud offloading for location-based services, Big Data analytics, worldwide geospatial data collaboration, innovative mobile city exploration, augmented reality, Location-based access control for geospatial data, etc. This year, the subfield program is also explored on computer vision and image processing with geospatial techniques. This strong combination is largely due to the technology improvements in both domains and strong commercial application incentives.

Special thanks to Keynote and Plenary Speakers, Dr. Carl Reed, Dr. Jie Liu, Mr. Mike Liebhold, Mr. Curtis Wong, Dr. Jayant Madhavan, Dr. Kristian Kloeckl, Mr. Patrick Hogan, and Dr. Kevin Montgomery, for their insightful vision to be delivered to our attendees. We appreciate the generosity of sponsors and partners: Computing for Geospatial Research Institute, NASA, Google, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, OGC, George Washington University, Stanford University, MIT, and IEEE & CPS. We also would like to acknowledge the invaluable efforts and contributions of COM.Geo team and student volunteers.

We look forward to an exciting week of sharing technical ideas and visions with colleagues from around the world. We thank you for attending the conference and being a part of this very important event.

 

Lindi Liao, Ph.D.
COM.Geo 2013 General Chair