Jina Kim Wins Graduate Category of Student Research Competition at SIGSPATIAL 2023
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) Ph.D. student Jina Kim won the First Place in the Graduate category of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition at the International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL) 2023. The ACM SIGSPATIAL is the largest and most prestigious venue for spatial computing and computer science. It focuses on the latest advancements in spatial data management, spatial analytics, and their applications. Kim’s work focuses on developing techniques to automatically learn meaningful representations from large-scale, multimodal spatial data. Her SIGSPATIAL research presentation introduced an approach to learning what humans feel, think, and see about their surroundings from easily accessible online text descriptions.
“Understanding how humans see, feel, and think about their surroundings can support a variety of applications such as trajectory mining and public health,” said Kim. “I looked at developing AI models to be beneficial for real users in our environments. That's why I'm doing research right now on spatial artificial intelligence that solves real-world problems.”
Kim’s success is a reflection of her advisor, Professor Yao-Yi Chiang’s guidance. Looking ahead, she is focused on expanding her research.
“My next step is to extend an approach to incorporate other modalities of spatial data effectively, aiming to enhance the impact on public health and environmental understanding.”
At the SIGSPATIAL conference, Kim not only showcased her research but also demonstrated her commitment to mentorship. She mentored CS&E undergraduate Rhett Olson, an undergraduate student who also won the Student Research Competition in the undergraduate track.
“When undergraduate students want to participate in research competitions, I always recommend reaching out to Ph.D. students with similar research interests and see if they want to work on their honors thesis or Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), which is a very good program in our university.” Kim advised, highlighting the importance of mentorship and collaboration.
In addition to her research and mentoring roles, Kim co-organized SpatialWomen (SpatialW) with another Ph.D. student, Min Namgung. This initiative, endorsed by Professor Yao-Yi Chiang, is dedicated to advancing diversity in the fields of computer science and spatial science.
“We also have successfully organized the second networking event of female researchers at SIGSPATIAL in Germany. It was a good opportunity to actively connect with female researchers and have career development mentoring senior researchers in SIGSPATIAL,” Kim remarked.
This award is not just a personal accomplishment for Kim but a source of inspiration for aspiring researchers in spatial computing and computer science. Her research paves the way for understanding human perceptions and interactions with their environments, showing practical implications for public health, urban planning, and environmental studies.