Bernt Wahl

Defining Neighborhood at the Hyper-local Level

What defines neighborhoods and how is this data useful? These identities are often interrelated, which, when combined, help form the fabric of a neighborhood community. Below are examples of how Neighborhood Based Boundaries and Demographic Data may prove useful in addressing the issues of neighborhood communities: public health, political districting, education, public safety, city planning and commercial marketing.

Drew Dara-Abrams

Cognitive Surveyor

GIS usually focus on the world as it exists. But what about the world as we remember and use it? Cognitive Surveyor is a distributed system that uses Android smart-phones to track people's travel patterns and to measure their spatial knowledge. I've recently used the system to study how people complete "traveling salesman" (shortest path) problems in downtown Berkeley. In this talk, I'll present both the (custom-coded) system and some results from the study.

Kyle Holland & Josh Harmsen

Geospatial Supercomputing

Chris Clasen

Remote sensing applications for assessing the Haiti earthquake damage

In the context of disaster response, remote sensing can help overcome on the ground challenges of damage assessment by providing wider coverage. Two approaches, semi-automated and manual interpretation, have been shown to facilitate analysis of damaged areas.  Semi-automated remote sensing analysis potentially offers a rapid and objective overview of damage. Prior studies conducted after the Bam earthquake demonstrated its potential for rapidly extracting building outlines and counting the number of collapsed structures. The availability of such data after Haiti would have provided an opportunity to guide the allocation of response and recovery resources.  Alternatively, crowd sourced visual interpretation of damage can also provide rapid damage analysis of a large area.

As part of a World Bank initiative, a professional volunteer community was established to facilitate assessment- the Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment Network (GEO-CAN). In the first effort of its kind, this community remote sensing initiative provided manual image interpretation for building count and footprint outline information by digitizing polygons for the Haiti earthquake Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA). A major drawback of the manual interpretation method, however, was the additional time required for completion, together with potential margins of uncertainty due to the subjective nature and inexperience of participants. 

Anil Agarwal & Prakash Narayan

Indoor Maps

Today, location-based services are available in "outdoor" maps. Micello is opening the "indoor" world in a similar way. Our passion is making really useful and accurate indoor maps of your favorite places (think malls, museums, college campuses, businesses and airports). Micello has been dubbed "Google Maps inside a building" and is powering the emerging hyperlocal, indoor location-based ecosystem.

Since launching publicly in September 2009 at the DEMOfall 2009 conference in San Diego, Micello has mapped thousands of locations globally. Micello has been featured in the New York Times, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, and TechCrunch - to name a few - and has won numerous awards.

Anil Agarwal is the VP Business at Micello. Anil is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company and business development. Prior to co-founding Micello, Anil was a Sr. Enterprise Architect at Sun Microsystems where he was driving consolidation and virtualization in the data center and helped customers world-wide increase operational efficiency. Before that, Anil was the Director of the Customer Benchmark Center where he had responsibility for conducting high-end benchmarks for Sun's customers.

Prakash Narayan is the CTO at Micello. Prior to co-founding Micello, Prakash was at Sun Microsystems where he was one of the founders of Zembly - a social network for developers to build services, widgets and social applications. Before Zembly, Prakash had responsibility for Java EE and SOA tooling in NetBeans. Prakash has been awarded multiple patents and is the co-author of a book on "Implementing SOA using Java Enterprise Edition".

Landon Blake

What does the geospatial professional of the future look like?

This session will briefly examine recent trends in technology and the geospatial industry and will consider their impacts on geospatial professionals. It will explain how these trends have been impacting geospatial professionals, and will make predictions on how they will impact these professionals in the future. It will then consider what the geospatial professional of the future will look like.

Devin Kelley

Customized datum conversion surface in the Sacramento Valley

HJW worked under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop and implement a customized datum conversion surface to convert three legacy DTM datasets in the Sacramento Valley from an approximation of NGVD29 to NAVD88. Doing so involved field survey of common monuments, recomputing secondary points based upon legacy GPS observations, and incorporating the differentials into the VERTCON conversion surface. Hundreds of files were then converted using ESRI Data Interoperability in ArcGIS, and resulting DTM was used to produce new 2\' contour maps. HJW completed this work in Fall of 2010.

Ossama Alami

Making GIS simple with Fusion Tables

Ossama manages the Geo Developer Relations team at Google. He has been supporting Google’s Geospatial APIs as a Developer Advocate, helping developers build applications around products like the Google Maps API, KML and the Google Earth API. Previously he worked as a Developer Advocate focusing on AdWords and Android. Prior to joining Google, he has worked as a consultant and software engineer at Accenture, CSC and Oracle. He calls San Francisco, CA home and in the winter can be found snowboarding in the Sierras.