The 3^nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Urban AI (UrbanAI’25) brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss advancements and future directions in urban AI. UrbanAI’25 workshop is part of ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2025 (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025), which will be held in Minneapolis, MN, in November 2025.

As cities embrace digital transformation, they are evolving into smarter, more resilient, and efficient urban environments. At the heart of this evolution is Urban AI, which leverages data from a wide array of sources, including sensors, satellites, and IoT devices, to enable real-time analysis of critical urban functions. These data streams offer insights into infrastructure performance, urban system variability, energy usage, and human activity, providing a foundation for evidence-based decisions in urban planning, emergency management, and sustainability efforts. Advancements in Urban AI research push this vision further by employing state-of-the-art AI models, advanced analytics, and simulation technologies to build intelligent urban ecosystems. These ecosystems seamlessly integrate data across diverse domains such as transportation, energy, housing, and public services, fostering coordinated, efficient, and citizen-focused urban operations. A key challenge lies in the heterogeneous nature of urban data, which demands a nuanced understanding of geospatial characteristics, including location, proximity, topology, and spatiotemporal patterns. As such, spatiotemporal reasoning stands as a cornerstone of Urban AI, underscoring its significance to the SIGSPATIAL community.

Call for Papers

The 2025 Urban-AI workshop invites papers in the following topics (but not limited to):

• Foundational AI for urban applications
• AI for urban infrastructure planning and management
• AI for urban resilience and environmental risk management
• AI for smart cities and urban tourism
• AI for addressing data quality and privacy challenges in urban sensor networks
• AI for intelligent mobile urban sensing and situational awareness
• AI-Enhanced location-based services for urban applications
• AI-enabled urban mobility and transportation
• AI-enabled urban social services
• Other related Urban AI topic areas

Submission Guidelines

The following paper categories are welcome:

Full research papers: 8-10 pages (A full research paper will present a specific problem or topic and discuss methodology and findings along with future research directions)

Short research papers or application demo papers: 4 pages (Short research papers will demonstrate existing methods, toolkits, and best practices for building intelligent and resilient cities)

Vision or statement papers: 2 pages (Vision paper will be more situational in their coverage)

Papers must be in ACM SIG format (US Letter size, 8.5 x 11 inches) including text, figures and references. Accepted papers will be published in the ACM digital library under the condition that at least one author has registered for both the main SIGSPATIAL conference and the workshop, attends the workshop, and presents the accepted paper in the workshop. Otherwise, the accepted paper will not appear in the workshop proceedings or in the ACM Digital Library version of the workshop proceedings.

Deadlines

• Paper Submission: Friday, September 12, 2025 (11:59PM (PDT))
• Notification of Accept/Reject: Friday, September 26, 2025 (11:59PM (PDT))
• Camera-ready: Friday, October 3, 2025 (11:59PM (PDT))

Workshop Organizers

• Dr. Haoran Niu (niuh@ornl.gov; +1- 865-341-0247) Post-doc, Computational Urban Sciences Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA.
• Dr. Hao Xue (hao.xue1@unsw.edu.au; +61-293-482-742) Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
• Dr. Femi Omitaomu (omitaomuoa@ornl.gov; +1-865-241-4310) Group Leader and Distinguished Scientist, Computational Urban Sciences Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA.

Program Committee

1. Prof. Chao Fan : Clemson University
2. Prof. Filip Biljecki : National University of Singapore
3. Prof. Vanessa Frias-Martinez : University of Maryland at College Park
4. Prof. Chia-Yu Hsu : Arizona State University
5. Prof. WenWen Li : Arizona State University
6. Dr. Majbah Uddin : Oak Ridge National Laboratory
7. Dr. Abhilasha Saroj : Oak Ridge National Laboratory
8. Dr. Yang Chen: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
9. Dr. Soumendra Bhanja: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
10. Dr. Steffen Knoblauch : Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, Heidelberg University, Germany
11. Dr. Daniela Cialfi : Institute for Complex Systems, Council of National Research of Italy
12. Prof. Hiba Baround : Vanderbilt University
13. Min Namgung: University of Minnesota