The 23rd International Conference on GeoInformatics (GeoInformatics 2015, https://cpgis.org/Conferences/ConferenceDefault.aspx?ID=70), organized by CPGIS, will be held in Wuhan, China (June 19-21, 2015). We invite you and/or your students to participate in our annual CPGIS Best Student Paper Competition, which will be part of the GeoInformatics 2015. The Competition is a long-standing tradition of CPGIS for promoting academic development of young scholars in geographic information science.

The awards will include one First-Place Award ($600), one Second-Place Award ($300), and two Third-Place Awards ($150 each). Besides the monetary awards, all awardees will receive an award certificate. The awards will be presented in a public event of GeoInformatics 2015. The awardees and their advisors will be featured in the CPGIS newsletter and website.

As a tradition in the past, the flagship journal of CPGIS, Annals of GIS (published by Taylor & Francis, a world-leading academic publisher) will continue to hold the privilege to be the first to consider publishing the awarded papers. Your participation in the competition indicates that you agree to give Annals of GIS this privilege. All the awarded papers will go through the peer-review process of the journal. If the journal decides not to publish your awarded paper, the paper will be published in the conference proceedings. Note: Annals of GIS is NOT yet an SCI-indexed journal and we are currently in the process of applying for an SCI-index status for the journal; the conference proceedings is EI-indexed.

Different from other full papers submitted to the conference, papers submitted to the competition must strictly follow the format of Annals of GIS. Please find the format requirements at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tagi. To be eligible for the competition, the first author of the paper must meet ALL of the following conditions:

(1) The author is currently an enrolled graduate or undergraduate student, or graduated within a year by the time of submission;

(2) The author is a member of CPGIS (please go to https://www.cpgis.org/Membership/Default.aspx to check your membership status or follow the procedure of membership registration);

(3) The author undertakes the majority of the research work and the write-up of the manuscript;

(4) The paper has not been published or is under consideration of publication elsewhere (including the web);

(5) The author has not used the paper to apply for other awards.

The Award Committee will invite scholars in relevant fields to review all submissions. Selected papers will be organized into special competition sessions of GeoInformatics 2015 for oral presentation. Judges appointed by the Award Committee will make final decisions based on the quality of the paper as well as the proficiency of the presentation. Participating papers not selected for the competition sessions are still eligible to be included in other sessions of GeoInformatics 2015.

Please submit your FULL papers and corresponding files to studentpaper@cpgis.org (NOT to the conference).

The DEADLINE for submitting the full paper to the competition is March 30, 2015 and the notification of acceptance will be sent out on May 1, 2015.

Thanks for your interest. We look forward to your submissions!

Best regards,

Xiang Chen on behalf of the committee