The Science of Where in the Fall

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10-02-2017 11:06 PM
DawnWright
Esri Regular Contributor
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Did you know that the fall season can be ALMOST as busy as pre-UC for Esri staff in terms of important science conferences? Here is the road ahead from my perspective.

 

October 17-19 – It will be great to have the Esri Health and Human Services GIS Conference here in Redlands this year, where Jack himself will speak, as well as Director of Sales Chris Cappelli, our own Chief Medical Officer Dr. Este Geraghty, spatial stats queen Lauren Bennett and spatial epidemiologist Dr. Linda Beale (of Insights fame). They will be joined by a host of distinguished plenary speakers including the COO of Kaiser Permanente and the Chief Medical Officer of Inland Empire Health Plan. Science-of-Where approaches toward stemming the opioid epidemic are sure to be among the many important timely and topics.

 

October 31-November 2 – The Esri Ocean GIS Forum here in Redlands moves into its fifth offering and is on track for its largest attendance ever. It has become more than just a small esoteric, specialist meeting. It is in fact a very important community-building event cutting horizontally across many business sectors, especially national govt, state/local govt, natural resources, nonprofit, education, defense. And did you know that it is often at the FORUM that new tech is demoed or introduced even BEFORE the Dev Summit or UC (e.g., dry run of VR/AR, launch of the SciPy Stack, advancements in multidimensional sci analysis, etc.). This year’s keynote will be given by former astronaut & NOAA administrator Kathryn Sullivan. And we will again be honored by Chris Cappelli’s plenary participation.

 

November 7-10ACM SIGSPATIAL in Redondo Beach. Esri plays a large and significant role in ACM SIGSPATIAL, one of the best academic conferences directly relating to key topics being addressed by Esri software development. Esri is a corporate sponsor for this event along with Google, Lyft, Facebook, Oracle, nVidia, Microsoft, IBM, and Ordnance Survey). With Esri's Erik Hoel at the helm as conference co-chair, Esri Dev staff serve as conference officers and members of the program committee. And Esri Dev staff have had two full papers accepted for presentation and publication (one on spatio-temporal join in Apache Spark and one on a new utility-centric graph information model). This is quite an achievement given the highly selective 17% acceptance rate (~40 papers out of ~230 were accepted). Esri had 2 of the top 7 ranked papers by numerical evaluation score!

 

November 9-10Imagery Education Summit here in Redlands - This one-time-only, invitation-only event will host 75-100 remote sensing/imagery faculty members from top universities across the country to discuss Esri’s technical advancements in imagery, drive platform adoption at these top universities and help them transform their imagery curricula. Conceived and convened by Imagery Director Lawrie Jordan, and co-sponsored by NASA and Oak Ridge National Lab.

 

December 11-15 – American Geophysical (AGU) Fall Meeting in New Orleans. AGU is the world largest, more pre-eminent Earth science conference. It dwarfs our UC with an annual attendance of over 25,000. AGU is a meeting that we not only serve as exhibitors, but co-organize sessions with scientists, present papers and posters, participate in science communication and career/education workshops. Dan Rather is speaking at this year’s event. In the past, keynoters have included Elon Musk and Al Gore.

 

About the Author
Dawn was appointed Chief Scientist of Esri in October 2011 after 17 years as a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University. As Esri Chief Scientist, she reports directly to Esri CEO Jack Dangermond with a mission to strengthen the scientific foundation for Esri software and services, while representing Esri to the national and international scientific community. Dawn maintains an affiliated faculty appointment as Professor of Geography and Oceanography at Oregon State. Follow her on Twitter @deepseadawn. More info. also at http://esriurl.com/scicomm and http://dusk.geo.orst.edu.