I'll just take a moment and say thank you for sending me all the thousands of
maps. The last couple of weeks I've been going through them like crazy and I'll
tell you if you talk about a moving experience, it's studying your work,
because your work is really covering, is really examining, is really coming up
with solutions for virtually all the challenges that we're facing across the
globe. From national security to environmental problems, to overpopulation,
to conservation of nature, all these things. This is why I feel so strongly
about you, and I think the best way to get to know you is to share a little bit
of the work. These maps show for example your work in environmental modeling
and assessment, and I won't go through them all but I'll share a few. The map in
the upper left looking at oil pollution simulation in the Moscow River, or
environmental nuisance modeling in France, or look at the beautiful work by
the Nature Conservancy and looking at landscape resilience modeling. Pretty
profound! In the world of Natural Resources, your work is improving
agriculture. It's looking at finding petroleum exploration sites and in
forestry, more sustainable forest practices, but I'm very attracted to the
one up at the upper left where the Woodside energy company offshore in
Western Australia used IBM Watson deep learning machine to connect with GIS to
understand and predict better their core drillings. And then, since my family is in
citrus I was very attracted to the one on the lower right which is looking at
space time modeling of a little disease that's wiping out Citrus in Florida
called Siletz, most interesting now. These next examples show your work in land
information managing the cadastre, or the foundation for the civil society
really. These parcel maps are interesting but what I'm attracted to here are all the
forms of analytics that you can make out of it, like predicting vacancy and in
Philadelphia or doing automated assessed valuations. Or look at this cool map in
the lower left which is looking at the income from each property and the
expenditures, public expenditures on property, it's kind of a geo accounting.
You get it? This is like a quick tip. In the field of urban design and urban planning your
work is working on creating a better future, doing urban design work.
Comprehensive planning like the City of Seoul, or resort selection over in Kauai
and Hawaii. All the analytics associated with urban planning that
brings The Science of Where to life in planning. These examples show GIS going
deeper and deeper into buildings and urban areas. Look at this beautiful
visualization in Sweden. An urban planner came up with an idea and he
wanted to share it with the citizens, so he made this animated film. In the
lower-right, the containment structure modeled in City Engine for containing the
nuclear waste tragedy that happened three decades ago and it just
goes on. In transportation field, GIS is now being used across almost every mode
of transportation. To model possible interactions and flows of traffic, to
real-time traffic monitoring and you can see in the center, Waze - this marvelous
crowd-sourced information that people are collecting is now being integrated
through partnerships between you and the Waze organization where you're sharing
street closures and your streets come alive with real-time
GIS information. This is very fascinating work. In engineering, GIS has been used for
facility management like water and airports and so on, but it's
also being used as a framework for work order management, managing the work that
must be done. You can see this beautiful map here showing the
statistical history of where work has been performed, that's powerful.
Right away your eyes are drawn to the lower right in the utility space in New
Jersey, we can walk around now with augmented reality and see the pipes
under the street. That's so cool! And, look at this neat map in the lower left
which is energy shed modeling. This is kind of like watersheds it's looking at
the shed by Oak Ridge National Labs, they modeled where the energy is coming from
to support urban centers across the U.S, and then lots of other examples of use.
In the commercial sector, GIS is being used by you to pick the
right sites like gas stations in India, or new business analytics in Brazil.
But over on the left, automating routing in Iceland and in Denmark, and look over
in the upper right, demographic modeling for banking. Okay, but my favorite is the
one right in the center and that's being done by Driscoll's. How many of you buy
berries from Driscoll's? Yeah most of you I think I suppose. What they're now doing is
GPSing every role while they pick the berries, putting it in those little
plastic containers and they track it, track the sort of food security of food
right to the market. I'm fascinated by that notion. In these important subjects
of Public Health, we're seeing GIS used to illuminate
things like the opioid epidemic that's happening here in the United States, and
also picked the right locations for health care and social service centers.
Look at here in the lower left where we're using demographic modeling to show
well-being in communities like Philadelphia or predict voting behavior.
Clearly our communities are safer because GIS is making maps not only of
incidents like here in Japan, but look up in the upper right here I'll call your
attention to the machine learning crime prediction work going on in London and
also in Rio de Janeiro, which is now being shared with the public. Well we
have a long history of using GIS, you in preparing for and responding to
disasters and here we see everything from volcano monitoring, to prediction, to
real-time situation awareness rooms and then managing situations like
damage assessments in Sri Lanka. Now a new chapter has opened in the last
couple of years which is one of citizen engagement. Through portals, open data
portals, open access portals but increasingly this is coming alive to be
more than just open data. It's maps where people are being
requested to give input back like in the UK, citizen reporting of events or 3-1-1
dashboards, but look at the map in the lower right here. This is a map that's
been made totally from scratch in a couple weeks. It's the mapping of
villages through crowdsourcing and I don't know how many of you in this room
participated in this, but hundreds of volunteers working with a GIS Corps
mapped all the villages by looking at
online air photos. These maps are important, they're providing the
foundation for polio eradication immunization programs and just magically
instead of spending millions of dollars, crowdsourcing made them come
alive. These beautiful maps of cartography like look at this neat one
in Switzerland, the Swiss topo. Now they have automated all the scales of maps at
Swiss topo. This is beautiful pieces of art and the Geological
Survey in Utah has made it come alive on the web. Both 2d web mapping and also 3d
web scenes that you can interact with and play with
natural resource maps. In the last couple years, the publishing of maps has just
totally changed. Story maps have come alive and all of the things that I
showed you all those dozens of slides that I showed you, every one of them has
a story, it's quite an interesting story. We could probably spend an hour just
talking about every one of those, and things are speeding up.
Story maps now, are being
produced by the thousands every day. I'm just shocked by this! My good friend
James Fallows is right here in the audience invented a term he called a geo
journalism and that's what's happening. Millions and millions of views of these
maps are made every day, on issues like climate change or social conflicts or
inequality, or where to take a vacation or scientific work.
It's quite extraordinary.