The Geo-Resolution 2019 conference brought together government, academic and industry partners, as well as St. Louis area college and graduate students, in a wide-ranging discussion of the growing Geospatial Ecosystem in Saint Louis. Co-sponsored by Saint Louis University (SLU) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the new conference is the first of its kind in the Midwest. The 21st Century Geospatial Ecosystem will require the combined efforts of government, industry and academia to provide the data and services needed for informed decision-making, to increase our knowledge of the world and to improve quality of life and societal conditions. Geospatial science touches on fields that include artificial intelligence, biosecurity, health, education, environment, food security and economic development.
Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, who assumed leadership of the NGA in February, and SLU President Fred P. Pestello, Ph.D., began the conference with a moderated discussion on the future of St. Louis:
Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, who assumed leadership of the NGA in February, and SLU President Fred P. Pestello, Ph.D., kicked off the day with a moderated discussion on the future of St. Louis. Benefiting from the federal government’s decision to expand the NGA’s presence in the city and a vibrant innovation community, St. Louis is poised to become a regional powerhouse in the field of geospatial technology, they agreed.
“The NGA has been an important part of this community for a long time. But you’re literally undergoing a transformation that I think is going to continue to accelerate the growth and dynamism of our region,” Pestello said. “As many of you might know, there’s $8 billion of investment taking place in St. Louis right now, just in this midtown area, well over $1 billion. We’re seeing the area transform.”
Partnerships between institutions of higher learning, the government and business are accelerating how we apply new knowledge and fuels the economy, he said. “We’re talking about 10,000 jobs directly related to the NGA and organizations as part of that, a total probably of 27,000 when you get the complete ripple effect. That’s an enormous impact on our economy,” Pestello said.
Sharp called the construction of the NGA’s new campus and partnership with academia and industry a “game changer” for the community. “I couldn’t be more excited about what we are doing here in St. Louis,” Sharp said of the NGA. “It starts with people and partnerships, and a great example is the partnership we have with Saint Louis University. We’re excited about tapping into the great minds you have here to do cooperative research and development.”
Mr. Francis Rose, Host of Government Matters TV (ABC) served as conference Emcee and led a discussion with Mr. Mark Munsell, NGA’s Chief Technology Officer, and Mr. Jack Dangermond, founder of Esri, the industry leader in GIS technology, on emerging geospatial technologies and trends. Mr. Dangermond spoke at length about the strength of the geospatial community in Saint Louis, and the role of innovation and ingenuity to prevail against potential adversaries and to further improve available technology and quality of life here and abroad.
Governmental leaders, including Dr. Stacey Dixon, the Director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Dr. Lee Schwartz, The Geographer of U.S. Department of State, Ms. Sue Kalweit, Director, Analysis, NGA and Ms. Christy Monaco, Director, NGA Office of Ventures and Innovation, participated as keynote speakers and panelists.
Our geospatial industry and professional leaders included Mr. Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of World Wide Technology, Mr. Robert Shelton, Jr., Chief Technical Officer and Advisor for Microsoft’s National Intelligence Division, Mr. Andy Dearing, CEO of Boundless Spatial, Inc., Dr. Steven Ward, Senior Director of Geospatial and Weather Sciences at The Climate Corporation and Dr. Marie Price, President of the American Geographical Society.
We were also fortunate to have leading academic and non-profit organizations represented at Geo-Resolution 2019. Mr. Jason Hall, CEO of Arch to Park, Dr. Dedric Carter, Associate Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Washington University, Dr. Dwyane Smith, Provost, Harris-Stowe State University, The Honorable Jeff Harris, Chairman of the Board of US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), and Dr. Annette Sobel, Major General (retired), first Director of Intelligence for the National Guard Bureau, Arlington, VA. and Senior Advisor to Saint Louis University, served as as panelists, moderators and speakers.
Our keynote speakers, moderators and panelists shared their insights on myriad geospatial topics including artificial intelligence, analyzing data, emerging technologies and trends, public/private partnerships, entrepreneurship and changing patterns of where people live. Conference sessions and informal networking emphasized that the 21st century geospatial ecosystem will require the combined efforts of government, industry and academia to provide the data and services needed for informed decision-making, to increase knowledge of the world and to improve quality of life and societal conditions.
As part of the conference, students from SLU, Washington University in St. Louis, Lindenwood University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Southeast Missouri State, Harris-Stowe State University and University of Missouri met with leadership from the geospatial community during a mentoring lunch. The event also featured a student poster session, with 15 students from SLU and other local universities participating.
More than 650 conference participants registered for the event, with more than 530 in attendance on April 9, willing the Wool Ballrooms and making use of our overflow seating. Feedback on the quality of the speakers, panel discussions, meeting logistics and smartphone app (which provided agenda, logistics, speak bios, and allowed participants to submit questions to the speakers and panels) was very positive, and NGA has already committed to Geo-Resolution 2020 on March 25, 2020.
Jeannette Cooperman of Saint Louis Magazine, one of the reporters who attended the entire conference, published a very comprehensive article on the conference proceedings:
Is geospatial intel the new framework for civilization? The NGA’s new director speaks his mind: A conference at Saint Louis University offers a peek at the future—and a rallying cry for the latest version of American know-how.
BY JEANNETTE COOPERMAN, Saint Louis Magazine, https://www.stlmag.com/news/geospatial-intel-NGA-sharp/
Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, the new director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, made his first public remarks here, speaking at the April 9 Geo-Resolution conference at Saint Louis University. Sharp talked about the NGA’s deep roots in St. Louis, beginning with defense mapping for World War II. Today, the agency integrates oceanography, satellite imagery, photo analysis, cultural geography, and human intel. “We produce and deliver trusted geospatial intelligence,” Sharp said, and “we do so by knowing the Earth, the physical science of the earth, its characteristics, and by layering information on top of that understanding.”
After the sweeping opening, the conference got specific, with experts from academe, industry, and government (partnerships whose necessity was emphasized again and again) talking about mapping from every angle. Geospatial data can be used to find water below a desert; to track the spread of an epidemic; to predict a flood or respond to an earthquake. But with the data itself flooding us, several speakers echoed the need to let machines take over some of the monitoring, freeing analysts to research and interpret. Right now, almost half the NGA analysts’ time is spent “knowing the known,” monitoring what’s already been pinpointed rather than discovering an unknown location or spotting an ominous trend. The “computer vision” of AI could someday change that ratio.
Timing’s urgent. Steven Ward, senior director of geospatial and weather sciences at The Climate Corporation, noted that by 2050, there will be 3 billion more people on the planet, farming on one-third less land, and population will be concentrated in cities. “Food supply, food security, as we become more urbanized, is going to be critical,” he said. Cities will be hives of information, and “that geospatial data is really a new currency. It’s the connective tissue within a city that ties people together.” (If you think your city’s already well-mapped, he added, “go through something like Hurricane Katrina. We thought we had a good grasp on the city, who was where, what was where. We did not.”)
The data might not always be reliably complete, accurate, and refined, but it is abundant. “It’s embedded everywhere, both the technology and the tradecraft,” said Mark Munsell, the NGA’s chief technology officer. “If you think about what you do with your handheld devices, what you do on the internet—there’s a location aspect to it. And the more technology is put in place, the more this technology grows. Look at the companies trying to harness data. You have to have spatial technology to make sense of this data. And because of that, it’s pushing into areas of technology where it’s never been before. More and more, we are harnessing this global cloud infrastructure to be able to do things with this data that nobody else has ever dreamed of.”
Stacey Dixon is the director of IARPA, which stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. In her words, “it’s like DARPA,” the defense research group, “except much smaller and much poorer.” Yet it’s working in the ether of AI, biosecurity, social media data mining, and machine recognition and translation of little-spoken foreign languages. She talked about current projects:
Finder geolocates images, gathering data on remote or troubled spots that carry no metadata and welcome no tourists.
DIVA automatically detects activity in the multicamera, streaming-video environment of today’s surveillance systems. “This was prompted by the Boston Marathon bombing,” she explained. “All the video that had to be hand-combed. We want to be able to do it in advance.”
Core3D creates “operationally realistic 3D environments. “You want to be able to model the area you’re about to enter in real time, as realistically as possible,” she explained. “Doing it from satellite imagery is time consuming.” She wants to be able to do a 3D model of a square kilometer in less than an hour. And the technology’s almost there, its resolution far finer-grained, the time lessening by the day.
Lee Schwartz, the State Department’s 8th Geographer, patrols international boundaries. Lately, he’s been working on participatory mapping and complex emergency responses. He described the growth of open-source mapping, the data fed by people in local communities. “This technology exploded after the Haiti earthquake, when a lot of information was being provided by satellite imagery” and made available to first responders. Now Schwartz’s office has MapGive, an initiative that encourages and increases volunteer participation.
“All I care about is good data,” he said, “whether it’s Big Data, whether it’s scraped from the web”—or supplied by somebody’s uncle, who’s been trained to map his neighborhood. The idea is to “overcome the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we didn’t let local communities map themselves.” Now that local data is being gathered, he added, “we are getting people from remote areas telling us that U.S. official boundaries are wrong, and we are correcting that.”
Efforts to correct mistakes, respond to disasters, or map poverty warm the heart. But other aspects of geospatial intelligence are rife with ethical challenges, from potential invasions of privacy to the violation of the confidentiality of individuals who agree to provide income or other demographic information. “Don’t expect lawyers to catch up,” warned Schwartz. “There are going to be guidelines that need to be created by those who are doing the work.”
An audience member asked whether access for people who’ve historically been marginalized was “compatible with capitalism and the increasingly hierarchical structures here in the U.S.” Ness Sandoval, who teaches sociology at SLU and is one of the leaders of the GeoSLU initiative, said that in his own work, he wants to make data available to empower everyday citizens in their fight against longstanding patterns of discrimination. Complex data can be used to examine policies and push for “spatial justice.”
Jack Dangermond is president of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, which provides geographic information systems. ESRI is based in California but now has offices in both St. Charles and Cortex—as well as many local clients, including the city of St. Louis. The NGA had a long history of separate, stovepiped enterprises, Dangermond remarked. Then “two big things happened: the internet and geography.” Those two big things have connected the various parts of the NGA, and the new framework “integrates all the -ologies—geology, sociology, psychology, biology—and all the different intelligence types. And it can be connected through maps that allow us to see patterns and relationships you can’t normally see.”
Dangermond described the NGA’s basic process, beginning with measurement, its historical mainstay, then visualizing those measurements through maps, analyzing them, overlaying other information, predicting “where bad guys are gonna go,” designing strategies, offering information to support decision-making, and taking action. That process isn’t just for defense, he said; it applies just as well to government, policing, forestry, flood prediction. And it’s “evolving to become a new kind of infrastructure. A geospatial infrastructure. I think this is the time, right about now, where this science shows up and becomes actually an instrument of evolution.”
Later, he added a warning: “Government is changing, because private sector technologies are maturing, and they are doing what only government used to do. These advances Microsoft and Google and others are making are replacing some of the services government has offered in the past.” At the same time, “the Chinese are moving in with their cloud computing and taking over whole countries… Now is the time when [the U.S.] government has to be resilient and take advantage of those private-sector ideas that are emerging…. We need to have an open democracy response.”
And the public sector needs talent. “Many will be motivated to go into public service because they have not only the skills but also the heart to make this country great. So watch out, China. Watch out, Russia. They don’t know what they’re messing with, with respect to the American spirit.”
The conference webpage and EventBright registration page worked very well, and allowed us to track attendance in real time. We hit our initial registration limit of 525 by the end of March, and re-organized the Wool Ballroom to accommodate 510, after which we raised the registration limit to 650. We hit that limit on April 5, closed registration, and used designated overflow space to accommodate the >530 conference attendees.
We also had a live-streaming capability available through the conference webpage, which was used in the over-flow rooms and individuals at NGA. For Geo-Resolution 2020, we will organize remote viewing events with academic and corporate partners locally and nationwide to expand the reach of the conference.
Our smartphone app was operational, and we have distributed info on its down-load and use to stakeholders locally and nationwide.
