As our U.S. Census nears its next collection in 2020, Hexagon Geospatial takes on the globe with its latest Census launch that takes into account the UN sustainable development goals.
In July 2018, a deeply disturbing and violent video began to circulate on social media. Taking place in Cameroon, it depicts two women and two young children being led at gunpoint away from a village by a group of Cameroonian soldiers. Blindfolded, the victims are forced to the ground and shot 22 times by the soldiers.
News this week takes a look at satellite imagery and machine learning for agricultural intelligence products, Dronecode platform-based products, traffic management using intelligent analytic rerouting, artificial intelligence and analytics, and AI and machine learning.
Google Driverless Car
The first two partnerships feature insights from the sky to earth. Herndon, Virginia-based Radiant Solutions, a Maxar Technologies company (formerly MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.), and TellusLabs, a satellite imagery and machine learning company, announced a partnership to offer agricultural intelligence products to provide insight on the world’s food supply, for the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere’s 2018 agricultural growing season and into the start of the Southern Hemisphere’s growing season. Those stakeholders such as food companies, government agencies and commodity traders who need a better understanding of the world’s current crop conditions and end of season expectations will benefit from this alliance.
Radiant Solutions’ Weather Desk™, an information platform enabled by advanced analytics applied to weather data, provides daily agricultural insights into how weather conditions are impacting agricultural markets. TellusLabs’ Kernel, enabled by machine learning applied to satellite imagery, provides insights into crop yields and agricultural forecasting. The offerings combine to deliver users an information to help them leverage the power of advanced analytics applied to persistent and pervasive weather and imagery data to derive insights into the agricultural supply chain dynamically and at a global scale.
3DR and Yuneec, two founding members of the Dronecode Software Consortium, announced a U.S.-headquartered joint venture to bring Dronecode platform-based products to market. The joint venture, which will operate as 3DR Government Services, will focus on serving the security and open platform needs of U.S. government customers and their vendors in the construction and engineering industries.
3DR Government Services will combine Yuneec’s hardware expertise and manufacturing scale with 3DR’s software. The first product from 3DR Government Services is the Yuneec 3DR H520-G, which is being unveiled at the InterDrone Conference in Las Vegas this week.
From traffic in the sky to traffic on earth, the following research study and enterprise data platform provider focus on AI and analytics and in the last case, takes into account blockchain technology.
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…)
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.
Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley kicked off the Bentley Corporate Update webinar last week with a discussion of how the annual corporate update is different than in previous years. Journalists in 28 countries attended the 2017 Year In Infrastructure Thought Leadership Conference and Awards held in Singapore.
Leighton Asia Hong Kong Boundary Crossing – BIM Advancements in Construction – Be Inspired Award Winner (photo courtesy of Bentley Systems)
Esri announced the launch of its Africa GeoPortal, #AfricaGeoPortal, a cloud-based platform that provides rich content and solutions from Esri and its partners for those wanting a vast resource for African nations.
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.
Aerial mapping company Bluesky of Leicestershire, UK has completed a research project backed by the UK government’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, to develop the use of mobile phones for capturing accurate 3D spatial information.
The nine-month research project focused on the use of standard smart phone technology to capture and calibrate video footage, and then convert it to 3D information. Designed for electricity Distribution Network Operators (DNO) and other organizations with a distributed asset base, the low-cost measurement tool can provide an accurate record of the feature’s location and its environment. Accurate measurements of essential infrastructure, such as overhead power lines and other utility facilities, could then be extracted using specially developed algorithms and workflows.