Dear CPGIS members,

The 24th International Conference on GeoInformatics (GeoInformatics 2016,https://cpgis.org/Conferences/ConferenceDefault.aspx?ID=71), organized by the CPGIS, will be held in Galway, Ireland (August 14 – 20). We invite you and/or your students to participate in the annual CPGIS Best Student Paper Competition. The Competition is a long-standing tradition of the 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 the GeoInformatics 2016.  

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 and the drafting of the manuscript;  

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

(5)  The paper has not been submitted for applications to other awards.

(6)  The paper has been accepted by the conference. The student will orally present the accepted paper at Geoinformatics 2016.

The Award Committee will invite scholars in relevant fields to review all submissions. Judges appointed by the Award Committee will make final decisions based on the quality of the paper and the presentation at the conference.

To enroll in the student paper competition, please submit the following documents tostudentpaper@cpgis.org

(1) Your FULL paper and corresponding files.

(2) The email showing notification of paper acceptance by the conference (by forwarding the email or including as an attachment).

The DEADLINE for submitting the full paper to the competition is June 28, 2016. 

Thanks for your interest. We look forward to your participation.

Best regards,

Xiang Chen

Chair of CPGIS Student Paper Competition Committee