On Monday November 16th, 2020 the opening Keynote Address of the USGIF GEOINT Community Forum was presented by Stacey Dixon, Ph. D., Deputy Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The theme of the conference “The Convergence of Commercial Content with AI/ML to Provide Clarity” shaped the narrative for the week ahead. Dixon said that Covid-19 provided an unexpected opportunity to reimagine their mission very quickly.
Stacey Dixon, Ph. D., Deputy Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
This week Enview, a company in the vanguard of the field of scalable processing of 3D geospatial data, announced the launch of Enview Explore™, a web application that leverages AI and cloud computing to automatically process 3D data at great speed and scale. Additionally, Robert Cardillo, former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), has joined the company’s Board of Directors. Following an oversubscribed round of funding in May, the company continues to experience growth and momentum in the market.
Tammy Owen, Global Director of the Defense and Intelligence business area for L3Harris Geospatial, introduced speakers on the first day of the 6th annual ENVI Analytics Symposium held August 25-27th, which for the first time, was held virtually rather than in person in Boulder, Colorado as had been initially planned.
Normally approximately 17,000 people attend Esri User Conference held in San Diego, California but this year, the conference has attracted upwards of 80,000 people online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While it is sad not to be gathered in San Diego, the sheer volume of people who are able to participate online makes it quite a phenomena for Esri, a 50-year-old company spearheading the GIS movement globally.
The Geospatial Distancing series from L3Harris Geospatial recently conducted a panel discussion webinar entitled, “How will image analysis get done in a post-COVID world?”
Francois Valois, vice president, Civil Engineering with Bentley Systems spoke at Bentley’s recent Civil Design Virtual Press Briefing about the current state of civil engineering and how we now need to do things differently. Civil infrastructure will continue to need to accelerate, according to Valois. “There has been an enormous infrastructure deficit over the years. Any time we stop accelerating we make the problem worse. Now we have social distancing, and funding challenges. Projects may be funded by a special tax on gas, for example. In addition to this, we have to stay home and when we’re onsite we must have less people onsite and find new ways to work. Our answer is the digital twin, and helping our users to go digital.”
Robert Cardillo, former director National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) was the keynote at the AGI Geospatial Analysis Showcase on April 28th. Cardillo brings background and depth to the topic. Currently president of the Cardillo Group, he supports the intelligence profession and bigger GEOINT community, and also serves as a member of the board of directors and consultant to Cesium.
Pascal Strupler, Product Manager, HxDR, Hexagon Geosystems spoke with GISCafe Voice about its recent product announcement, HxDR. HxDR is aiming to be Hexagon’s central smart digital reality data hub, a new cloud-based digital reality visualization platform that can import and visualize any type of reality capture data from airborne, ground, and mobile sensors. This data can be integrated together easily, according to Strupler.
This is our final installment of Industry Predictions for 2020. Topics this week include satellites, Cloud for geospatial applications, data storage, data sentience, data sovereignty, growth, location, mapping fleets and much more.
Representatives from CubeWerx, DataCapable, T-mapy, GeoSapient, Inc. and Mapillary offer their insights into the industry and trends for the future.
GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2020 move forward into February. Topics covered this week are cloud-based asset management systems, artificial intelligence, smart cities, citizen science, open source mapping and data, GNSS advancements, big spatial data analytics, drone industry, enterprise scale and dashboards and data visualizations.