AGU Data Dump

Disclaimer: This post is as much for my own benefit as anyone else's. I needed to write down all the things that are swirling around in my head after AGU and I thought it might be interesting enough to others to put up here.

First, AGU went really well. Here you can see the poster I presented.

I had the great opportunity to network with a lot of people working in the UAV field and there were quite a few people who had a great deal of interest in what we are doing. I was able to meed John Dandois of Ecosynth and the University of Maryland (ecosynth.org), one of the true pioneers of using UAS technology in ecology. They are doing really great work on the same sorts of things as us and I definitely see the possibility of some collaboration in the future. I also met people from University of Arizona, Oregon State University, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Norway, and San Francisco State University who are all working with UAV and ultra high resolution imagery. These connections all have the possibility for learning quite a bit from the mistakes of others and for them to learn from ours. Additionally, I had the chance to meet with some vendors, which is part of what I wanted to cover here.

I spoke with guys from Google Earth Engine and Microsoft Research. Earth Engine is really cool in that you can run some pretty advanced data analysis in the cloud, which would take a lot of the load off of us when generating really complex products with vast amounts of data. Then, with the ability to tie Earth Engine into Maps Engine, where we could upload imagery and have it processed by Google into more manageable pieces, the prospects for a really powerful data management, visualization, analysis, and dissemination tool start to become clear. This is something that I will be working with over the next few days and I am pretty excited about the prospects. Hopefully a grant from Google which will provide us access to these tools will really open up our possibilities in the data visualization area.

Microsoft Research has an interesting GIS program called Layerscape which looks to be much more user-friendly than something like ArcGIS and, as you might expect, it comes with all the necessary bits and pieces to disseminate the maps once you have made them. It looked pretty cool but it remains to be seen whether it will be able to beat the Google offerings and be worthwhile.

I also spoke with a couple hyperspectral imager vendors and people who are operating hyperspectral units on UAS, which got me thinking about these kinds of things again. I found a couple companies which have really impressive offerings, namely Resonon (resonon.com). I heard from a researcher I was talking to that the Resonon systems are actually fairly inexpensive, which would be huge for us if true.

Well, thats all for now, hopefully I have even more exciting stuff to share next time.