I spent two days at the California Economic Summit, held this year in Ontario, heart of the "inland empire". I learned much about this region of the state that I know mostly as freeways connecting water polo games, or as endless similar roads through malls and housing developments. It is more populous, diverse, and vibrant than I had realized. The conference itself was very different from any that I have been to. Hardly any presentations, but break-out groups, passionate, inspiring panelists, tons of networking, good overviews, multiple perspectives, and no partisanship.
Here are some interesting facts about California that I did not know:
- 80% of CEQA lawsuits are related to urban infill development. Shocking. We need infill development as a sensible solution to a growing California.
- 1 in 3 children in the Central Valley live in poverty. 1 in 4 kids live in poverty in the inland empire. These rates are WORSE than they have been ever.
- The Bay Area is an anomaly in terms of education, income, health, voting rates, broadband adoption. The Bay Area is not representative of the state!
- Think of a west-east line drawn across the state to demark the population halfway line. Where might it be? No surprise it is moving south. Now it runs almost along Wilshire Blvd in LA!
- Empowering the Latino community in the state is going to be key in continued success.
- Broadband adoption around the state is highly variable: Latino, poor and disabled communities are far below other communities in terms of adoption.
- The first beer made with recyled water has been made by Maverick's Brewing Company.
- Dragon Fruit might be the new water-wise avocado. Good anti-oxidents, massive vitamin C, good fiber, etc. They taste a bit like a less sweet kiwi, with a bit of texture from the seeds. I don't think I'd like the quac, however.
- In 15 years, the state will be in a deficit of college graduates needed to meet skilled jobs. Those 2030 graduates are in 1st grade now, so we can do some planning.
- Access, affordability, and attainability are the cornerstones of our great UC system.
In every session I attended I heard about the need for, and lack of collaboration between agencies, entities, people, in order to make our future better. Here is my wordle cloud of discussion topics, from my biased perspective, or course.
Our goal was not to teach a specific suite of tools but rather to teach participants how to develop and refine repeatable and testable workflows for spatial data using common standard programming practices.
On Day 1 we focused on setting up a collaborative virtual data environment through virtual machines, spatial databases (PostgreSQL/PostGIS) with multi-user editing and versioning (GeoGig). We also talked about open data and open standards, and modern data formats and tools (GeoJSON, GDAL).
Analyzing spatial data is the best part! On Day 2 we focused on open analytical tools for spatial data. We focused on one particular class of spatial data analysis: pattern analysis, and used Python (i.e. PySAL, NumPy, PyCharm, iPython Notebook), and R Studio (i.e. raster, sp, maptools, rgdal, shiny) to look at spatial autocorrelation and spatial regression.
Wait, visualizing spatial data is the best part! Day 3 was dedicated to the web stack, and visualization. We started with web mapping (web stack, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Leaflet), and then focused on web-based visualizations (D3). Web mapping is great, and as OpenGeo.org says: “Internet maps appear magical: portals into infinitely large, infinitely deep pools of data. But they aren't magical, they are built of a few standard pieces of technology, and the pieces can be re-arranged and sourced from different places.…Anyone can build an internet map."
All-in-all it was a great time spent with a collection of very interesting mapping professionals from around the country (and Haiti!). Thanks to everyone!
There was a session that focused on education in which ideas about challenging in teaching “cyberGIS” to undergraduate students, among other things. Additionally, Tim Nyerges gave the CyberGIS plenary: "Computing Complex Sustainable Systems Resilience" in which he made the case that CyberGIS is a framework for studying socio-economic systems, resilience, and system feedbacks.
About the term Cyber. I am not alone in my dislike of the term "CyberGIS" (Matrix 4, anyone?), but it seems to have stuck here at AAG. In many of the talks “cyber” meant “bigger". There were mentions of the “cyber thing”, which I took to be a placeholder for cluster computing. However, there are many other terms that are being used by the speakers. For example, I saw talks that focused on participatory, structured, analytic-deliberation from UW, or high performance geocomputation from ORNL; the latter term I think better captures what earth system science people might recognize. Many talks used as their entry point to Cyber the proliferation of data that characterizes modern geography and life.
These sessions were organized through an NSF-funded center: The CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies http://cybergis.illinois.edu/. Their formal definition of CyberGIS is: “geographic information science and systems (GIS) based on advanced infrastructure of computing, information, and communication technologies (aka cyberinfrastructure)". They say it "has emerged over the past several years as a vibrant interdisciplinary field and played essential roles in enabling computing-, data- and collaboration-intensive geospatial research and education across a number of domains with significant societal impact."
And of course, we had excellent talks by the Kellys: Kelly presented on our VTM work: "Quantifying diversity and conservation status of California's Oak trees using the historic Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) dataset” as part of an organized Historical Ecology session. Alice presented her paper: "Policing Paradise: The Evolution of Law Enforcement in US National Parks" as part of the session on Green Violence 2: Interrogating New Conflicts over Nature and Conservation.
Goodbye Chicago! You provided a wonderful venue, despite the cold!
- Author: Robert Johnson
The final day of the Dev Summit has come and gone. Some highlights:
Today was all about JavaScript for me. Started with a look at the "good parts" of Dojo. While it may not be the best choice for front-end operations (I was introduced to the wonderful term "dom vomit" in reference to dijits) it's still a robust library with some good functionality. Additionally, as it's the backbone of ESRI's JavaScript API, it's kind of hard to get away from entirely.
Later, I had a look at JS optimization; in particular, ESRI's Web Optimizer. This is a really neat tool that's actually been around for a while, but which I had completely forgotten about. In a nutshell, it allows users to create a custom build of the API containing only the modules which are called in the code of their application. This drastically improves loading times and performance.
I finished out the day with two "road ahead" sessions outlining future development. Keeping with the theme of the day, one covered plans for the JS API, particularly the 4.0 release which should be entering beta in the coming months. Things to look forward to: 3D support, improved 2D performance, new classes, and script simplification.
The other "road ahead" session was billed as "ArcGIS Desktop and Pro" but only covered ArcGIS Pro. There are some pretty cool features like vector tile map and web scene authoring, lots of 3D functionality and range sliders for exploring multi-dimensional data. Overall, Pro looks like a really powerful application. However, at the end of the session, the first audience question was, "What about ArcGIS Desktop?" The answer: "ArcGIS Pro is part of the desktop environment." This was followed by a second question: "Is there a road ahead for Desktop?" After some hemming and hawing by the ESRI devs, we were told, "We'll cover that at the User Conference." Sounds like yet another hint at the inevitable demise of the traditional ArcGIS Desktop.
Overall, this was a great conference and an invaluable learning experience. I look forward to putting what I learned to good use and I hope to attend the Dev Summit again in the future.
- Author: Robert Johnson
It was another great day at the Dev Summit. The morning started off with a keynote address from John Tomizuka, Co-founder and CTO of Taqtile, a mobile app development company based in Seattle. John shared some of his successes and missteps in the world of app development and emphasized that two of the most important things to keep in mind when developing any app are a focus on the user and their needs as well as an in-depth understanding of the data you are working with.
I followed this with a session on UX/UI design for web apps. Good app design is something that many developers, myself included, don't always think about. I picked up some great tips like considering an app in the "empty state" rather than just going to a preconfigured template which may not really suit the task at hand and using task-focused workflows and UI patterns to really create clean, useful apps.
The afternoon was spent on sessions dealing with working with raster and feature data in Python as well as a more in-depth look at the Smart Mapping Initiative that was covered in yesterday's plenary. What I hadn't realized before is that the Smart Mapping interface has completely replaced the standard symbology tab in ArcGIS Online. All the full functionality is still there for users who are comfortable customizing all the options, but the default options are much more simple and driven by the data so that novice user can create great maps out of the box.
One more day to go. I'm looking forward to seeing more of ESRI's future devfelopment plans tomorrow.
