Your Canadian Geospatial Briefing for April 1st: Geospatial World Forum; Maxar NaturalVue; GeoIgnite in GIS User; Canadians win Turing Award

GoGeomatics heads to Amsterdam

GoGeomatics founder Jonathan Murphy will be attending the Geospatial World forum April 2^nd-4^th to take part in an annual gathering of representatives from the world of location technology. The Forum attracts over 1500 professionals and 500 organizations each year, including Business Geografic, ESRI, Excel Geomatics, and Hexagon. This year the forum will also be hosting geo thought leaders Keith Masback and Sanjay Kumar, both of whom will also be attending GeoIgnite in Ottawa June 18^th-19^th. The theme for this year’s event is “Empowering Billions”, which references the immense power of geospatial behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

NaturalVue added to ArcGIS Living Atlas

Maxar has just announced an agreement to integrate its NaturalVue 2,0 image mosaic and National Urban Change Indicator commercial products into ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. The Living Atlas contains the world’s foremost collection of ESRI maps available in ArcGIS Online; the enhancements from Maxar will accelerate distillation of intelligence for analysts, helping to solve a multitude of global problems. NaturalVue includes over 60,000 Landsat 8 images and provides a basemap reflecting the true colours of Earth. Maxar’s image portfolio also includes Vivid and Metro mosaics, the highest resolution global mosaics available for commercial buyers. The addition of NaturalVue will give thousands of GIS users the ability to address geospatial problems on a global scale.

GIS User has the scoop on GeoIgnite

Geospatial and location technology has a uniquely Canadian history. Ottawa-based geographer Dr. Roger Tomlinson is universally recognized as the “father” of GIS, which is perhaps why the buzz around GeoIgnite—the newest conference to be established in the capital—has been growing with steady speed. GeoIgnite will be a vendor-neutral geospatial event, therefore filling a gap in the calendar of similar events. Given the amount of disruptive technology emerging in federal departments and the number of businesses eager to sell their products, a meeting between government and industry is the perfect way to boost the profile of the location technology sector. GeoIgnite is presenting an ambitious agenda in the hopes that this will be the annual showcase of the Canadian geospatial community.

Canadians win $1 million Turing Award for AI

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio were honored with the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery’s Turning Award. Alongside New York University’s Yann LeCun, the two “godfathers” of Canadian artificial intelligence shared the $1 million prize, which is awarded for “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing”. Hinton and Bengio have played founding roles in developing neural networks in machine learning, sparking a surge in commercial AI products and services. Through their efforts, computers are now capable of imitating some aspects of human capability. Working both independently and in collaboration, Hinton and Bengio found common ground in a shared conviction that computers could learn in a fashion similar to that of the human brain.