Sanjay Gangal, CEO and president of GISCafe, interviewed Ross Smith, program manager at TCarta recently, to talk about the importance of TCarta and its satellite-derived bathymetry, or SDB to climate change, sea level rise and GEOINT.
Looking forward to 2021 brings with it a necessary looking backward at what geospatial organizations and providers have had to deal with in 2020. On a regular basis throughout the next two months, GISCafe Voice will post industry predictions from professional geospatial organizations, looking at what vectors are influencing the industry and what directions the technologies will take. This week we will hear from spokespeople from Maptek, Nearmap, Septentrio and Sinclair Industries. Autonomous solutions, partnering with other technology providers, mapping critical care centers such as testing centers, cybersecurity and increased accuracy and analytics are all areas that geospatial and mapping have stepped up to as a result of Covid-19. The technology was there, ready to meet the sudden and unanticipated demand. What does that mean going forward? Greater resilience and growth, innovation at a more rapid pace, and much more, according to these industry professionals.
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)
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.
In a webinar recently presented by Emesent, the discussion was entitled “Smarter Lidar Technology for Infrastructure and AEC: better data, greater insights.”
Peter Dickinson, project manager for Emesent and Business Development manager for the Americas Dave Jaunay introduced customers who were using Emesent’s Hovermap sensor system for various challenging environments. It has been used extensively in mining and underground environments and land surveying.
The company Emesent is based in Brisbane, Australia with a staff of 38 but rapidly growing to meet global demands. The company aims to solve the problem of collection of data – in GPS-denied or challenging environments. The need to automate the collection of data, gave birth to the Hovermap for mine and roads, tunneling, indoor mapping and search and rescue, anywhere where maintaining a signal for GNSS solutions is problematic.
IDB president Luis Alberto Moreno & Jack Dangermond, president of Esri, discuss how GIS can help solve some of the world’s biggest problems, namely, Covid-19 and climate change at the recent Esri Virtual User Conference 2020.
Becky Tamashasky, Vice President of Vision & Product Engineering, Cityworks® | Azteca Systems, LLC, replied to our questions at GISCafe Voice in addition to her interview with GISCafe CEO Sanjay Gangal:
When is your new release of Cityworks coming out?
Becky T: As part of a public company, I can’t provide exact details, but I can say with anticipation that it is coming soon!
Do you want clients to think of Esri and Cityworks as all one solution or are you looking to have them view the solutions separately?
Many of our clients already view Cityworks and Esri as one cohesive solution. As the leading GIS-centric solution for public asset management and community development, we have worked to provide a seamless experience for organizations, and we support the Esri identity for user authentication across Cityworks platform and mobile native apps. (more…)
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.”
Pointfuse, a powerful modeling engine that delivers an automatic, precise and flexible way of converting the vast point cloud datasets generated by laser scanners or photogrammetry into segmented mesh models, has launched a new toolkit called Space Creator. Pointfuse Space Creator is designed to facilitate adopting laser scanning within space management, planning and utilization workflows.
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.