Purdue GIS Day 2019
Through the first semester of my UAS Capstone course, AT 409, the ultimate goal of our research was to be able to present a poster for Purdue's annual GIS Day Conference. On November 7, 2019 we did just that. This conference has been held annually for more than a decade, and serves as an opportunity for students, faculty, and members of industry to come together and learn from each other.
The day started with a few lightning talks, 15 minute presentations from students and faculty presenting their current research. Topics ranged from GIS usage for UAS mission planning, to forest communities migrating due to climate change. These presentations were very insightful and put together incredibly well. The main event of the day was the keynote presentation, Seeing a Better World from Space by Dr. Carly Sakumura. Dr. Sakumura is a research and development scientist at Maxar Technologies, a company based around satellites and earth observation. The presentation focused on the incredible quality satellite imagery that Maxar collects, how they use it, and the adjustments that are made to it. Maxar's satellites range from 30-50cm resolution, meaning each pixel of an image represents 30-50cm on the ground. Dr. Sakumura focuses on the adjustment portion of building orthomosaics, specifically Bundle Block Adjustment. In essence, she makes sure the images line up properly when building multiple images into a rectified orthomosaic. In addition to the incredible work she does with BBA, she also talked about correcting satellite images based on weather, clearing up wispy cloud cover, and various lighting corrections to ensure the orthomosaic has a unified look. Her presentation was really something special. I learned a lot about various satellite imagery corrections, and their usage. Maxar actually makes orthomosaics of entire countries or continents. Google Maps provides a lot of their imagery through Maxar.
After Dr. Sakumura's presentation, a few other research presentations were given, and then came the lunch panels. During lunch, many industry professionals gave brief introductions to themselves, how they got into GIS, and low-level advice for being in the GIS field. I had been under the impression that lunch would more so be a time for additional research Q&A as well as more actual presentations. While it was great hearing about everyone's storied past with GIS, I would have appreciated time to ask more questions. Many of the presentations were rushed through their Q&A portions earlier in the day due to time constraints, this would have been a great opportunity to give them more time.
After lunch, more research presentations were given, and the poster presentation began. As posts in the past have described, our group was presenting on our research into UAS implementation in search and rescue. More specifically, we are using a computer-aided object identification tool called Loc8 to try and determine if it is the best method for this task. Since the last update on our poster, we decided that it didn't quite show off the work we were hoping it did. We were a bit disappointed with what we created, so we completely overhauled the poster. Multiple days of intensive work resulted in the poster shown below.
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| Figure 1: GIS Day Poster |
Overall, we were incredibly happy with our decision to overhaul our poster. Before, we were too text based, and the poster didn't flow incredibly well. We think the story this poster tells is much easier to read, flows a lot better, and really draws your eyes to the most important parts; our maps, the process of using Loc8, and the results Loc8 has given us. The GIS day conference had a poster competition, and the judges seemed to agree with our opinions of the new poster seeing as how we took home the 1st place certificate.
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| Figure 2: The Loc8 Group at GIS Day 2019 |
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| Figure 3: AT 409 Capstone Class at GIS Day 2019 |
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