“Don’t fly them around fires, please,” he joked to an audience of 16,000-plus at the San Diego Convention Center.
Esri, based in Redlands, is a world leader in geographic information systems, and this five-day conference – Esri UC – is the biggest event on its calendar, attracting clients throughout the world.
The public’s use of unmanned aerial systems has been recently blamed for hindering battles against wildfires. But according to Esri, drones can be powerful tools for inexpensive gathering of customized data.
Esri is developing tools that can drop data on base maps and turn hundreds of photos into 3-D composites that can be manipulated, showing for example what a home would look like with or without trees.
In his opening address Dangermond outlined other innovations at Esri, including a “big data project” that will be introduced next year, enabling clients to integrate “a few hundred million or billions of observations” of real-time activities such as taxi trips into maps, thus creating an instantly understandable picture of how people live.
Esri works with several thousand business partners, Dangermond said, and also supports 5,000 nongovernmental organizations to address such problems as wildlife preservation, ocean pollution and the need for clean water supplies.
ESRI is “strong and growing,” Dangermond told UC attendees, but his ambitions are bigger than running a successful company. He sees GIS as a way of helping humanity understand its problems and overcome them, something that “alters the evolution of the planet.”
“Is such a future possible? ... Ultimately, I believe it is,” he said at the end of his 90-minute presentation. “My sense is that not only is it possible, it’s going to be inevitable.”
The keynote speaker at the conference, Martin O’Malley, called geographic information systems “the modern tools of a new beginning.”
O’Malley’s Monday address echoed ideas presented by Dangermond, who said the world is entering a geographic age of enlightenment, or geo-enlightenment, in which maps and data are combined in dynamic ways to show people how to improve their world.
O’Malley is a former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland and used GIS in his administrations to identify problem areas that required government services. He is a Democratic presidential candidate and used the occasion to present his vision of what federal government should be, collaborative in the way the Internet is.
O’Malley also said there is an imperative to deal with climate change. “Climate change is the biggest economic and business opportunity to come to the United States in 100 years,” he said.
O’Malley was the last in a series of “heroes” introduced by Dangermond to give testimonials about the power of GIS.
Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization talked about his work to stop the Ebola outbreak in western Africa and the success brought about by mapping the movement of patients and the people who were exposed to them.
Gary Knell, president and CEO of the National Geographic Society, called for greater geographic literacy and said educators must take into account the technological savvy of kids who will “never know the world before tablets and smart phones.”
©2015 The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
