GeoAlberta 2019

Front Point attended GeoAlberta 2019 in Red Deer over the last couple of days and had a great time! A big shout out to the organising committee for pulling together some great key note speakers and presenters and for a very enjoyable and well organised event overall.

Some of the highlights for me (Nic Ranicar) were…

Key notes

Dr. Jody Carrington gave a very entertaining talk about connection (both in the workplace and in our personal lives). The talk had nothing to do specifically with GIS (which made for a great break from the rest of the proceedings) but everything to do with staying connected in our relationships. Having more connected relationships, being truly empathetic, and taking the time to actually listen to our colleagues can have a profound influence on all those around us and Jody captured this so well.

Twitchy (a.k.a. Stuart Ellis-Myers) had us jumping around, throwing "tomatoes" at each other and shouting in other peoples faces, all in an effort to break down barriers, highlight some of the issues and remove some of the stigma surrounding mental health. I don't think I've ever been so entertained by such a serious issue!

Presentations

Day 1 kicked off with an enlightening workshop from Dmitri Bagh (Safe Software) on using FME for computer vision and then kept the theme going with more interesting talks on cloud storage for imagery Big Data (Jason Suwala, Hatfield Consultants) and analysis using Google Earth Engine of some of these immense imagery data sets (Dan Wismer, fRI Research). Definitely some food for thought there for what lies ahead of us and how our traditional tools for managing and working with these Big Data sets might need rethinking. Got me super keen to play around with Google Earth Engine too!

After a fun evening at the GIS Day social event, day 2 kicked off with breakfast and an interesting update on the state of the Next Gen 9-1-1 rollout from Alex Miller. A day full of presentations ensued, including one by me on automated CAD validation using FME, which was well attended and generated some good questions and discussion. I'll be writing a follow up blog post on that shortly...

Food

The food throughout the conference was fantastic and, being one of those difficult people with food intolerances, I was very pleasantly surprised to see how well I (and others) were catered for.

Networking

One of the key aspects of an event like this is the opportunities for networking and GeoAlberta did not disappoint with plenty of coffee breaks and a great layout for breakfast and lunches that made chatting and meeting people a breeze.

All in all, I enjoyed the conference so much that I'm already looking forward to next year!