GIS Day

We started GIS day by putting up the display of our poster.  I was surprised that the UAS posters represented over half of the posters being presented that day.  The other posters were very interesting and had a large range of topics.  One that I found intriguing was on snow removal and how they sectioned them out.  Below you can see what our group's poster looked like on display.

The arrangement that the posters were set up in was very odd.  They seemed to be out of the way and presented as a second afterthought.  An alternative setup that could be better is placing the posters where you walk in and the seating area after the posters.  Setting up like this would help draw the guests to the information on the posters first before taking a seat.

Several speakers from different parts of the industry came and spoke about how GIS is used on a day-to-day basis within their respected fields. The keynote speaker, Carly Sakumura from Maxar Technologies, explained how their personally owned satellites are used for various fields and industries. She also explained the process of how the satellites collect pictures and clean them up to make them easily viewable.  Below is a photo taken during Carly Sakumura's keynote talk.

Other speakers, such as Zachary Brecheisen spoke about the quantifying arid-region agricultural development in Peru using Landsat. Zachary has been doing this research for a few years and has figured out some of the driest areas in the region focused on in Peru.

Another highlight speaker was Christina Hupy, who explained the value of open source GIS in higher education. Christina explained that open source GIS is useful to teach to students because students are then able to utilize free GIS software without having to buy licenses from Esri. This allows students to develop their skills on their own time and gives them another edge when competing for jobs in the industry. The image below is Christina Hupy discussing open source GIS.