IMAGE as LOCATION
Wednesday, October 22, 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM. Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley
Tickets available online: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/image-as-location-conference-tickets-12860529189
When man-made images constitute the evidence of our environment and even our existence, how is our perception of the world manipulated and shaped? The IMAGE as LOCATION conference brings together artists, technologists, and theorists to discuss how images define our understanding of our environment by allowing us to access the inaccessible. Beginning at the microscopic scale and moving through our human dimensions into planetary orbits, we will discover what it means to wrap our world in visual artifacts both from a cultural and public policy perspective.
Stanford’s Geospatial Computational Social Science Conference
Monday, October 20, 2014, 8:30 - 5:15, Mackenzie Room (#300), Huang Engineering Center, 475 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305
Speakers join us from Airbnb, Facebook, Google, and more.
- Learn more: https://css-center.stanford.edu/geospatial-computational-social-science-conference
- Lunch provided for all confirmed attendees. Reception to follow.
I spoke yesterday at the CEGA-DIME* co-sponsored event: Measuring Development: Energy & Environment. This was a terrific day of interesting talks, thoughtful conversations and great networking.
This workshop brought together engineers, social scientists, donors, and practitioners to discuss the use of novel measurement tools--including sensors, sensor networks, microsatellite imaging, and other remote sensing technologies--in energy and environment research.
I presented an "ignite" talk on some of our mapping work and talked about the idea of "Spatial Data Science". There were a number of highlights. Matt Hancher from Google gave a great overview of Google Earth Engine and asked: "What if the micro-satellite imagery revolution works. What will you do with the data?” Great and timely question. Big Spatial Data workshop to the rescue! We heard from people at the Energy Institute at Haas who are looking at smart sensors, iButtons and billing networks to understand energy usage around the world; Ronald Cohen from the Climate Readiness Institute spoke; there was tons of discussion about low earth orbit micro-satellites from Skybox and the Spire company (they monitor AIS beacons on ships yet they also can still find them as they move back and forth through fishing zones and turn off their beacons); there was a great idea from Tony Vodacek from RIT on the need to develop “a remote sensing playbook”: What are the sensors, resolutions, bands that are needed for a particular task?. David Lobell from Stanford highlighted some of his great work in remote sensing of crop yields; and Sol Hsiang from the Goldman School outlined his fascinating work on natural disasters, economies and violence.
Background: Technologies for measuring the adoption and impact of development interventions have seen substantial innovation over the past several years—examples include the use of microsatellite data for mapping weather patterns and agricultural yields, sensors for tracking behavior change, smart meters for recording real-time energy use, continuous emissions monitoring systems for measuring particulate matter, and platforms for smartphone- and tablet-based survey data collection. At the same time, network protocols for data management, visualization, and analysis have drastically improved.
*CEGA =UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action; DIME = World Bank's Development Impact Evaluation Initiative
Two members of IGIS - Shane and Robert, went to the the ESRI User Conference in San Diego this year.
Here is their report:
We were able to see the new offerings from ESRI that will be available in November of this year. ESRI will be releasing ArcGIS 10.3, this incremental release will have many improvements as well as new offerings that IGIS will be able to make available to the UCANR GIS Community. These new offerings will include ArcGIS Pro http://pro.arcgis.com and Portal for ArcGIS http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisserver/extensions/portal-for-arcgis.
ArcGIS Pro is a new desktop application that will be available to all users of GIS within UCANR. ArcGIS Pro is a multi-threaded, 64-bit, project based GIS system that provides a fast responsive desktop application for the GIS professional. It will allow user to have multiple layouts in one document. It will enable the GIS user to have 2d and 3d layouts available in one project. It is what we as GIS users have been requesting for many years.
Portal for ArcGIS prior to the 10.3 release of the ArcGIS Suite was an extension for ArcGIS Server that had to be purchased separately from ArcGIS Server. In November Portal for ArcGIS will be available for UCANR to install on the ArcGIS Server and it will provide a user interface similar to arcgis.com but within the UCANR intranet. This will open up some interesting options for UCANR.
Beyond these two additions we will be providing access to a new open data extension for ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS for Cad. The open data extension will allow us to provide an open data portal where the UCANR Network and the general public can go to download our data for use in other geospatial technologies. We will provide the ability to download certain data types such as, shapefiles, kml, or csv files. The ArcGIS for Cad extension will allow cad users within UCANR to leverage ArcGIS resources with Autocad. This will allow UCANR to update our cad drawings of our infrastructure and have drawings with the proper coordinate system and additional attributes that are not available with Autocad.
Beyond these upcoming software releases and tools the ESRI User Conference was a wonderful opportunity to renew old and create new relationships with other GIS professionals and to see how others are using GIS around the world. I look forward to putting these new technologies in place in the next year and to hopefully attending the user conference again in 2015.
The ASPRS Northern California Region is hosting a 2-day symposium on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in Reno, NV on October 21-22, 2014. The purpose of the event is to assemble academia, UAS developers, survey and mapping companies, government agencies, and UAS enthusiasts, to share information, showcase new technologies and demonstrate UAS systems in action (in flight). The event will be held at the Reno Stead Airport, an FAA-designated UAS test site, as well as at a symposium hotel in downtown Reno. The mission of the event is to advance knowledge and improve the understanding of UAS technologies and their safe and efficient introduction into our national airspace, government programs and business.
And we were there! Kevin and I went to the White House (here is photographic proof.)
The President’s Climate Data Initiative was launched March 18th with the tagline: Empowering America’s Communities to Prepare for the Effects of Climate Change. The initiative is a complex partnership of government, industry, academia and local initatives to get the US ready for climate change. The overall goal of the climate data initiative is "Spark Innovation": release data, articulate challenges, turn data scientists loose.
We saw some very interesting short talks from a range of speakers. Here are some highlights:
Jack Dangermond highlighted the many initiatives that ESRI is pushing to help with climate resilience. Kathyrn Sullivan from NOAA discussed her concept of "Environmental Intelligence", which describes the use of data to create resilience. She says: "NOAA capture 20TB daily, they release 2TB daily. Upon that data stream are built all the climate businesses we have today. What would this industry be like if we release the other 18TB?" Ellen Stofan from NASA talked about new earth observation missions, including satellites for precipitation, soil moisture, CO2, winds, aerosols. She announced another "data driven challenge" called "coastal inundation in your community". Rachel Kyte from the World Bank called their multiple initiatives "Open Data for Resilience". She said that climate change may eradicate the mission of the World Bank, because of its disproportionate impact on poorer communities worldwide. Rebecca More from Google gave us a fantastic overview of the Landsat, climate and topography missions that Google Earth Engine is working on.
Here are some press links:
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/19/climate-data-initiative-launches-strong-public-and-private-sector-commitments
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/19/fact-sheet-president-s-climate-data-initiative-empowering-america-s-comm
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/19/wh-launches-new-climate-data-initiative-wednesday/