About
Public health is fundamentally spatial. From tracking the spread of infectious diseases and identifying disparities in healthcare access to modeling the health impacts of climate change, geospatial data and computational methods play a central role in understanding and improving population health. The 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Computing for Public Health (GeoHealth’26) aims to advance research and practice at this critical intersection by encompassing a broad range of public health challenges, data sources, and analytical approaches. As health informatics enters a new era, the importance of geospatial data continues to grow. Applications now span infectious disease surveillance and forecasting, chronic disease monitoring, environmental exposure assessment, healthcare accessibility, and the allocation of limited public health resources. These challenges demand scalable, robust, and privacy-aware geospatial solutions capable of integrating heterogeneous and spatiotemporal data. The SIGSPATIAL community brings decades of expertise in managing, analyzing, and visualizing complex spatial and spatiotemporal data. When combined with emerging public health data sources (e.g., wearable devices, mobile sensors, social media, climate observations, and administrative health records), this expertise uniquely positions the community to make significant contributions to geospatial health informatics and evidence-based public health decision-making
Organization Committee
General Chair
| Joon-Seok Kim (Emory University) | Taylor Anderson (George Mason University) |
| Hao Xue (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)) |
Program Chairs
| Andreas Züfle (Emory University) | Su Yeon Han (Texas State University) |
Program Committee
| Xiang (Peter) Chen (University of Connecticut) | Andrew Crooks (University at Buffalo) |
| Amira Roess (George Mason University) | Hunsoo Song (Chungbuk National University) |
| Ignacio Segovia-Dominguez (West Virginia University) | Yao Li (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) |
| Di Yang (University of Florida) | Jeon-Young Kang (Kyung Hee University) |
| Alexander Hohl (The University of Utah) | Youngseob Eum (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) |
| Swapna Gokhale (University of Connecticut) | Samarth Swarup (University of Virginia) |
| Liang Mao (University of Florida) | Yiqun Xie (University of Maryland) |
| Hyesop Shin (University of Auckland) |
Web Chair
| Hossein Amiri (Emory University) |
Speakers
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Professor Ran Wei, University of California, Riverside
Keynote: Spatial Optimization to Maximize Child Survival Through Redistribution of Care and Prioritized Upgrades to Emergency Department Pediatric Readiness
Wei’s research has focused on GISciences, spatial analysis and optimization, with the aim of supporting policy and decision making in transportation, public health, environment sustainability, community resilience, crime, and policing issues. Her work has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals in GIScience, geography, transportation engineering, public health, and urban planning. In addition, she was the recipient of 2021 Chuck ReVelle Rising Star Award from the INFORMS Section on Location Analysis, 2020 Emerging Scholar Award from the Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) specialty group of the AAG, 2012 Benjamin Stevens Fellowship from the Regional Science Association International, and Best Student Paper awards from the SAM specialty group of the AAG, and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. Her research has been funded by various agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, U.S. Department of Transportation, and National Academies of Sciences.
| Timezone: CET | Title | Paper |
|---|---|---|
| 12:00-12:06 | Opening remark |
|
| 12:06-12:18 | Spatial Accessibility and Heat Vulnerability for Cooling-Center Planning in New York City Onyedikachi Okeke, Su Yeon Han |
|
| 12:18-12:30 | Beyond Distance and Time: Health-Aware Urban Mobility for Vulnerable Populations Federica Rollo, Laur # a Po, Letizia Cremonini, Teodoro Georgiadis, Marianna Nardino, Edoardo Fiorillo, José Ramón Ríos Viqueira |
|
| 12:30-13:30 | Lunch (on your own) |
|
| 13:30-13:48 | Fleet Capacity and Operational Coverage in Autonomous Transportation for Rural Healthcare Access Joon-Seok Kim, Su Yeon Han, Taozhi Chen, Jooyoung Yoo, Youjeong Kang, Andreas Züfle |
|
| 13:48-14:06 | Human Mobility Networks and COVID-19 Prediction: a Feature-aware Weighted Preferential Attachment approach and a Case Study for New York State Jie He, Andrew Crooks |
|
| 14:06-14:56 | Keynote: Spatial Optimization to Maximize Child Survival Through Redistribution of Care and Prioritized Upgrades to Emergency Department Pediatric Readiness Ran Wei |
|
| 14:56-15:14 | Towards Developing a Geospatially-Aware Explainable Non-Communicable Disease Prevention Chatbot Nicole Schneider, Avik Das, Nandini Ramachandran, Hanan Samet |
|
| 15:14-15:26 | A Mobility-Aware Synthetic Dataset for Wastewater Epidemiology: Simulating Where and When People Poop Hossein Amiri, Mohammad Hashemi, Akshay Deverakonda, Joon-Seok Kim, Yuke Wang, Andreas Züfle |
|
| 15:26-15:30 | Closing remark |
Location
3637 5th St. Riverside, CA, United States
Call For Papers
GeoHealth’26 will serve as an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working at the nexus of geospatial computing and public health. The workshop welcomes contributions that address spatial and spatiotemporal aspects of health behaviors, outcomes, exposures, systems, and interventions using methods from spatial databases, GIScience, geoinformatics, spatial data mining, machine learning, and computational modeling. We particularly encourage submissions that introduce novel geospatial methodologies, leverage emerging or nontraditional data sources, or present innovative applications with clear implications for public health policy and practice. Both full papers (8–10 pages) and short papers (4 pages) are welcome, provided they have not been previously published and are not under concurrent review. All accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for and attend the workshop in person. Submission details can be found at https://sigspatial2026.sigspatial.org/camera-ready.html. Following the main-conference, we also allow full papers to have a two-page appendix beyond the ten pages limit.
Paper Format
Manuscripts should be submitted in PDF format and formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. For latex users, please make sure that you choose sigconf type (e.g., \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}) in your latex file. Submissions to GeoHealth are single-blind – i.e., the names and affiliations of the authors should be listed in the submitted version.
Contact
Please contact geohealth26@easychair.org if you have questions about GeoHealth 2026.
| Geospatial Analytics for Infectious Disease Surveillance | Environmental Exposure Mapping (e.g., air quality, water, toxins) |
| Modeling Health Impacts of Climate Change | GIS for Health Equity and Access |
| Spatial Decision Support Systems for Health Resource Allocation | Urban Health and Built Environment Analysis |
| Chronic Disease Mapping and Risk Factor Modeling | Human Mobility and Public Health Interventions |
| Integration of Remote Sensing and Health Data | Real-time Outbreak Detection and Monitoring |
| Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in Health | Privacy-aware Health Data Integration |
| Social Determinants of Health and Spatial Inequality | Data Fusion from Wearables, EHRs, and Census Data |
| Health Communication via Spatial Dashboards and Visualizations | Spatial Epidemiology and Spatiotemporal Modeling |
Important Dates
Submission deadline
August 22, 2026
Author notification
September 15, 2026
Camera-ready Due
TBD
Workshop date
November 3, 2026
Student Travel Grant Applications:
To be announced