The U.S. has been rocked by tragic school shootings and other violence over the past years, with very little deterrent to this increasing trend.
At the Esri User Conference 2018, a talk entitled “School Safety GIS – Survey123” was conducted by GIS specialist for Detroit Public Schools, Randall Raymond, and Officer Adele Gardner, Detroit Public Schools Community District Police Department, who outlined the work they have been doing over the past year to use social media and other geospatial tools to detect, analyze and visualize potential dangers to kids in schools.
“We were able to create a social media mapping feed that was out-of-the-box Esri available and discovered while it did what we wanted it to do in some ways, it was very manual and labor intensive,” said Raymond. “You needed someone to constantly be looking at the feeds that were coming in. We partnered with Esri and they suggested a company named DataCapable, that was doing social media for event detection, event notification and event mapping for the power and gas industry. We figured it was the same for a big power company and they would be interested in what we’re doing. They retasked some of what their software does to give us more analytics and give us more understanding of potentially dangerous situations happening at schools by monitoring for specific events. We could use machine learning and artificial intelligence to go through messages and quickly determine the validity of them, confidence in them and decide if there is action that needed to be taken.”
Raymond retired from upper administration in the Detroit Public Schools in 2013 and has continued the work with the school system since that time, helping with high school programs and consulting with their police department. He works with Officer Gardner helping them to continue to learn to use their ArcGIS tools and do more strategic thinking about deployment of police resources.
The value of social media has been long recognized by Officer Gardner, who has extensive examples of problems with kids in Detroit Public Schools and social media being used to organize the meetings where kids to go to events in the city and rob people and steal from cars, etc. But privacy is obviously a very big issue, according to Raymond. (more…)
Location intelligence technologies are a ubiquitous part of business, both retail and commercial. A powerful tool at their disposal is the Census Business Builder – Small Business Edition as well as their Regional Analyst Edition. These are innovative, simple-to-use cloud-hosted mapping applications that allow users to easily navigate and use U.S. Census Bureau key demographic and economic data to help guide their research into opening a new, or expanding an existing, business. The tool dynamically combines Census geography and data, such as:
Demographic, socioeconomic, and housing data from the American Community Survey;
Business data from the County Business Patters, Non-employer Statistics, Economic Census, and Survey of Business Owners;
Imports and Exports data from the International Trade program;
Epson announced this month two new high-speed, easy-to-use wide-format SureColor® T-Series plotters – the Epson SureColor T3170 24-inch desktop printer and the SureColor T5170 36-inch floor-standing printer. While these printers benefit professionals and workgroups across a range of industry segments including architecture, engineering, CAD, GIS, education, corporate, home and small office settings, the new wireless printers also feature an all-new clean and compact design coupled with the reliable printing performance inherent in Epson’s technical printer solutions.
President and CEO of Esri, Jack Dangermond, was proud to point out at his Plenary at the Esri User Conference this year, this is the 38th conference, and the purpose of the conference is the same as it was 38 years ago: to be together, share knowledge and have fun.
In May, Trimble announced version 4.1 of Trimble® Business Center office software designed for surveyors and geospatial professionals to simplify the creation of cadastral, GIS, infrastructure inspection and tunneling deliverables. Using new cloud-based data synchronization and workflow task management capabilities, Version 4.1 provides seamless integration with Trimble Access™ 2018 field software to improve field-to-office productivity.
Data providers abound in the GIS and geospatial industry. Choices range from mapping, built and natural terrain modeling, survey, GIS/LIS technologies, geospatial web, and asset inventory, mapping, geodetic and engineering surveying, photogrammetry, satellite imagery and real-time satellite data, remote sensing, aerial and ground-based LiDAR surveys, geographic and land information systems (GIS/LIS), 3D scanning, and spatial computing and analysis and much more.
Recently, ArcGIS Pro specialists at the company Mapillary answered a few questions for GISCafe Voice:
How long has Mapillary been in existence? What is its primary focus?
Mapillary is a street-level imagery platform powered by collaboration and computer vision. The company was founded in 2013.
Mapillary combines images from any device into a visualization of the world to generate data for improving maps, developing cities, and progressing the automotive industry. Mapillary’s tools enable anyone to collect, share, and use street-level images. Computer vision technology reconstructs locations in 3D and recognizes objects from the images to generate map data at scale. Today, people and organizations all over the world have contributed over 250 million images toward Mapillary’s mission of helping people understand the world’s places through images and making this data available.
What does the new Mapillary for ArcGIS Pro beta contain – what are its primary features?
The Beta focuses on bringing Mapillary public imagery into ArcGIS Pro. In short, it lets customers:
view Mapillary imagery as visual reference,
view, edit, and create features in street-level imagery,
compare imagery to see how places change over time.
What was in the previous release and why did you make certain feature upgrades?
The latest version, available in Public Beta, contains the same general functionality as earlier releases. However, we’ve made considerable performance improvements.
Earlier releases of Mapillary for ArcGIS Pro faced a challenge when rendering the large number of features required to show our imagery coverage. Our previous method of serializing vector tiles into a feature layer came coupled with a decrease in performance. For the Public Beta, we’ve notably increased performance and reduced system overhead by serving vector tiles directly into ArcGIS Pro. This means a faster and more efficient experience using Mapillary Imagery from the add-in.
Is a specific type of camera used?
The imagery on Mapillary is contributed collaboratively by Mapillary users all over the world: individuals, companies, non-profits, and governments. The platform is device-agnostic so every contributor uses a camera setup that suits them best, from Mapillary mobile apps to action cameras to professional 360-degree cameras.
What kind of geotagging of photos is used?
The Mapillary mobile apps (including integrations with some common action and 360-degree cameras) save location information into the image EXIF during capture and is then uploaded to Mapillary directly via the app. In addition, any geotagged images can be uploaded with help of our web uploader or command line tools. It’s also possible to upload image files together with a .gpx file that’s used for geotagging during the upload process. (more…)
This week’s GIS news includes a wide variety of announcements, from IBM’s PAIRS Geoscope to redistricting data from Caliper, of the 2018 edition of Congressional Districts.
There is a great need for services that facilitate working with large amounts of geospatial data from disparate sources. IBM addresses that need with their announcement of PAIRS Geoscope, a new experimental cloud-based service that makes it easier for developers to work with large amounts of geospatial data from across a wide variety of sources. The service handles ingesting, integrating and managing the data and allows developers to focus on their queries.
Recently, I began to receive maps pertaining to income, immigration, unemployment and related impacts. It made me consider putting together these maps to show a broader story of what these maps can show us in terms of current as well as historical timelines in terms of income or lack thereof. The following maps also displays communities where the highest number of non-citizen residents and DACA recipients live.
As mentioned in our year-end wrap-up, a great number of events that shaped technology in 2017 were natural disasters. Scientists and experts predict that we will see more of these natural events and will continue R&D efforts to prepare for them.
Smart city technology will become more important as geospatial professionals seek to find better ways to predict, analyze and prepare communities for the onslaught of weather events. Actual Smart Cities are being built in some parts of the world. And to make those smart cities and countries, in some cases, viable, we will grow greater confidence in artificial intelligence, vehicle technology, Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), drones, high resolution satellites and small satellites, augmented, virtual and mixed realities and data and sensors.
These technologies have become or will become a part of the fabric of geospatial interaction as the demand for them increases.
The Global Mountain Explorer provides information from global scales down to specific mountains, such as Borah Peak, Idaho pictured above. (Public domain.)
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