GIS Day

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On Thursday, November 7th we participated in the Purdue GIS Day by submitting our poster to their poster contest. We didn't win the award but it was certainly interesting to see the different posters that other people submitted to the contest, although many of them were quite specialized in their field and were not very accommodating to the lay person. I know that Alan won one of the awards for his poster on the utilization of GIS in UAS mission planning which was pretty interesting. Other posters from our capstone class included an analysis of UAS sightings and registered UAS pilots, the use of 3D modeling software to supplement photogrammetric software when generating 3D models, and using the Loc8 software to assist in search and rescue operations.

There were also presentations at GIS Day from several speakers. Alan did a quick talk about his GIS in mission planning topic. There was also a representative from Maxar Technologies which uses satellites to take pictures of the earth and uses methods similar to Pix4D to stitch them together to make large maps like in Google maps. I thought it was interesting that they have over 100 petabytes of data, it makes sense though since they're imaging the entire world. Christina Hupy was there extolling the virtues of including QGIS in the curriculum. It seemed like the main point was that not all companies will want to be using ArcGis (or able to afford the licensing) and having a free alternative opens up more opportunities for the prospective job seeker. Then there was a presentation by a representative from the US Census Bureau talking about their "TIGER" files (Topographic Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) and how they used different systems to update their data bases.

The career lunch consisted of the presenters talking about how they got into their respective GIS related professions while everyone ate. I honestly don't think that I will be going into a GIS heavy career, at least that's the plan, but after seeing the diversity of professions that were represented at GIS Day I believe that it would be impossible to completely avoid GIS when working with UAS. Keeping up with GIS trends and applications would certainly be a useful addition to my resume and one way or the other, GIS will come back to me.

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