A hands-on Geo AI workshop
GIS is changing, and perhaps the tools and workflows changing GIS the most these days is Artificial Intelligence, or AI. I conducted a hands-on AI GIS (or "Geo AI") workshop recently and am using this space to share the contents with the wider community. The slides are posted at this location and contain:
1. The definitions and concepts around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Large Language Models, and Geo AI.
2. How GeoAI is changing GIS and workflows in organizations, and related career pathways.
3. Why instructors should be teaching with AI tools.
4. How instructors can teach with AI tools inside the ArcGIS ecosystem. I advocate starting with Gen AI Survey123 tools and continuing with ArcGIS Online, and then to ArcGIS Pro. Start with the pretrained models; plenty of them exist, are compelling, and are important for all of us to understand.
5. How students can learn with AI tools inside the ArcGIS ecosystem.
6. Two activities - GenAI Survey123 field survey generation, and feature extraction from imagery, are included in this workshop, with links to many more.
Included in the workshop are points of discussion about the benefits and the concerns related to AI, such as below:
AI presents us amazing capabilities and has already transformed decision-making and the makeup of much day-to-day GIS work.
We don’t get to go backwards in technology: AI tools are here to stay and are remarkable. We never have been able to go backwards in GIS or other tools; there is no "click here to run this tool in ArcInfo Version 6" or "click here to do this overlay with scribecoat and peelcoat" (to date me even further!).
Use AI tools wisely: Understand what goes into each model and algorithm. Read the metadata. If you are a creator of these tools, make sure you populate the metadata for others to use. Also, as AI tools can be quite complex, make sure you explain them as clearly as possible. Metadata doesn't help if nobody understands it.
I created a video reflection on the topic of AI in GIS education, here: • https://youtu.be/rnofTJEGw_0?si=FBKhlEWc9zjEidmW
On the Spatial Reserves data blog, https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com, we have been writing about where can I find geospatial data, how do I know if it is any good, and societal implications for many years. These implications include copyright, location privacy, ethics, and AI. We have recently written about an AI powered open data portal: https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/aipowered-open-data-portal-for-washington-dc/ and reviewed Dr Dawn Wright's work and writings about Why AI needs to be digitally resilient:
https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2024/04/15/reflections-on-why-ai-needs-to-be-digitally-resilie...
In the workshop, I include resources on how to keep learning in this rapidly advancing area, such as one that I consider to be an excellent first one-stop for GeoAI in education, the resource my teammate Canserina Kurnia created, entitled "Unlocking the power of Geospatial AI":
• https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/resources-for-unlocking-the-power-of-geospatial-ai/bap/...
Several Learn ArcGIS Lessons already exist in the lesson library at https://learn.arcgis.com.
These include classifying objects using Deep Learning in ArcGIS Pro:
• https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/6410c0524d750615175c0b58/classifying-objects-using-deeplearnin...
I thank my colleagues inside and outside Esri who are blazing pathways in this field, and to those at Esri who helped me prepare the contents for this workshop. I trust that this will be useful to the readers of this education community blog.