Frank Romo is an inspiring leader in geospatial. He runs several educational programs with school students across the country such as in The Bronx and recently St Louis. The focus of episode was therefore on how AI is being used to facilitate better outcomes for students. Frank gave examples from his community organising work such as urban planning and urban design renderings in The Bronx, gathering data for geospatial projects, and as a study aid by creating a quiz to help pass the Part 107 drone pilot license.
Frank is a joy to talk with. He is such a breath of fresh air because of the concerted efforts he makes to be approachable to all. He dresses the part. It is deliberately memorable and contrasts strongly with typical office dress. He wears a bandana in some of the photos with students. As such, he brings an atmosphere of fun, informality and through this it is easier to generate engagement with students and adults alike regarding what can often be a dry subject - drawing maps with databases.
In the first episode I recorded with him, he publicly displayed for the first time a dashboard about gun violence in The Bronx, created during a RomoGIS community organising effort. First episode.
Frank gives us a masterclass in community organising. He just so happens to have geospatial capability also. He provides several fantastic examples of geospatial outputs and acquisition of political power by communities that he has served.
The Bronx gun violence dashboard is here. We are once again seeing, in this subsequent episode with him, the first public display of another dashboard from further community organising efforts. This is a dashboard about A Decade of NYC Shootings (2015 - 2024). In Frank's own words:
"This project transforms ten years of NYPD shooting incident data into an interactive app that reveals where gun violence has occurred in New York City between the years of 2015 to 2024. The data was processed by RomoGIS with data sourced from the NYC Open Data Portal. This app is designed to inform community safety initiatives and policy interventions as part of RomoGIS' GIS For Good Initiative to end Gun Violence (www.gisforgood.com, https://gunviolence-romogis.hub.arcgis.com/)."
Frank is a leader. We are privileged to have his time.
Juliette Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Floodmapp joins us to continue the coverage of how the geospatial industry is responding to the flood season. This is after an episode with Shelly Klose about True Flood Risk a couple of weeks ago. I should also highlight the episode on flood models with Fathom last year.
Juliette describes the capacity of her company to perform operational impact based flood forecasting. This is about using live data feeds such as from measures of precipitation, flood gauges, earth observation to provide a more accurate, real time estimate of where inundation will occur. Due to these factors, it will be better than, for example in the US, FEMA's 100 year flood polygons from here.
As such, she was able to give examples from the State of Queensland in Australia where the system was used by emergency responders to decide where to send door knocking crews and also rescue personnel.
Products from the likes of First Street and Fathom will not be able to offer these real time directives on where to send first responders. This is because they are large scale risk models developed with variables like topography, climate and historical rainfall without real time data on rainfall in the moment. They cannot offer advice on where to evacuate people from, where emergency services should send boats and helicopters.
We are privileged to hear from her as they are involved now in the Texas flood clean up. She emphasised that they offer services in forecasting, 'nowcasting' and 'postcasting'. It is of course helpful to have assistance in characterising the inundation extent after a flood. This helps with helping where to look for damage and the deceased, along with verifying the risk modelling work of the likes of FEMA, Fathom and First Street.
But one is forced to wonder how things would have gone if this or a similar service was involved in forecasting and early warning system activation for the area around Camp Mystic in Texas.
Speaking of which, it was good to have an expert like Juliette give her take on this viral post of mine in the moment as the implications of Camp Mystic spread across the internet. She had a simple directive - ‘by law … $USD8.7 billion has been spent just on [residential building] smoke alarms for fires… but what is the … investment in flood early warning systems? The economic damages from fire vs flood… it actually suggests that flood… is really far and above the cost … of fire. So I’d really like to see the expenditure on flood early warning systems reflect the risk. …if we’re investing this much on fire then we really need an alert system in every community where people are at risk’.
Emphasis mine.
The analysis I proposed above is happening now. I face a very steep learning curve on cloud native geospatial tooling such as Wherobots but I am making progress with the help of Matt Forrest, Ryan Kmetz and Piergiorgio Roveda. The output will be a nationwide identification of the communities at risk. I look forward to Juliette’s assessment of that analysis.
Clemens Schotte is Senior Program Manager at Azure Maps. It is pronounced "Claymens SuHotte". Microsoft has a few geospatial offerings:
Microsoft Bing Maps is the most well known amongst the public. It is a web-based mapping service offering street maps, aerial imagery, and route planning for public and consumer-facing applications.
Microsoft Azure Maps is a cloud-based geospatial platform designed for developers to integrate real-time mapping, routing, and spatial analytics into enterprise and IoT applications. Code samples.
Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro was released 2 months ago. It provides global-scale environmental datasets and analytical tools, tailored for scientific research and sustainability use cases, with deep integration into cloud-native workflows.
It's nice to see a big tech monopolist has devoted some attention to our industry and is keeping up with the cloud native geospatial trend. Speaking of trends, we have a nice continuation here of the episode with Nelson Roque that kicked off the name change to Geospatial FM.
This is because of a recent blog post about model context protocol (MCP) by Clemens. Why has a brain researcher's comments about what cognition is made me excited about MCP servers? They enable tool use and extraction of up to date data from APIs. This enables the AI to operate on data beyond what it was trained on. As stated in the recording, this is sounding suspiciously like multimodal real time data feeds.
This is an aspect of organic organism cognition as described by Nelson. Something else that got my attention here is that Clemens mentioned introducing both short and long term memory, check the diagram here.
As such, we have a nice demonstration in front of us about the kind of progress a Big Tech company is making at the cutting edge of our species effort to duplicate our reasoning capacity.
Thanks Clemens!
Tue (Matt) Le-Quang is a Data Reporter at VnExpress.net. He spent time with us today analysing and mapping the upgrade of Vietnam's administrative boundaries.
Quoting from his publication VnExpress (Google Translate):
"After the reorganization of 34 provinces and cities, the number of commune-level administrative units in Vietnam decreased by 67%, from 10,035 to 3,321 units. Of which, Hanoi merged the most units with a reduction rate of more than 77%."
Tue has made a web app about this here. There has been a bit of debate over it the past half decade, such as this 2020 piece from VnExpress. Most recent English coverage I can find is this. The country used to have 63 provinces, now there will be 28 with 6 extra cities as their own areas, for a total of 34. A pertinent quote from that article speaks of large savings for the taxpayer:
"This restructuring is projected to reduce the workforce by approximately 250,000 people, including 130,000 officials, civil servants, and public employees, as well as 120,000 part-time workers at the commune level. The reform is expected to save more than VND190 trillion (US$7.3 billion) in the 2026–2030 period."
This brings up the work of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor.
Work for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Simon Johnson. These books are riveting. They describe, as the title of the first says, how destruction of, or failure to maintain, institutions causes a nation to fail. The second book, The Narrow Corridor, is intended - in Daron's words from the second video above -
"…to provide a framework that is applicable across ages and across countries for thinking about what supports prosperity, what supports democracy and what supports liberty. The key idea ... is what supports robust participation from the people and we need the state to play a pro liberty, pro prosperity role. In particular to create inclusive markets which have the right legal system, provide equality of opportunity, the right regulations against the powerful actors."
It is so inspiring to see their work quoted by a citizen of, and reporter from, Vietnam in the midst of state action to navigate the country into The Narrow Corridor.
Thank you to Tue for giving us the privilege of this report and for all the diligence providing insight to the readers of VnExpress through geospatial apps. Clearly he is a talent, and a credit to the education system of Vietnam.
The podcast is picking up the pace in terms of meeting my heroes. UN Mappers is an open spatial data volunteering programme run by the UN. Michael Montani stepped through the part of the UN he works for and some conflicts or disasters his team is currently helping on. We were also given a look at the UN's operational web map and some commentary on the unique cartographic style that they have to use.
We then discussed what the UN's mapping team cannot do, and the place this creates for a worldwide volunteer effort. To get involved, he instructs us to go to HOT OSM Tasking Manager and search for tasking by the UN Mappers organisation. We were also given details on the comprehensive and multilingual geospatial training offered by the UN to prepare volunteers to make quality contributions. It was a strong show of force regarding what the UN can do to cause a broad benefit for the world in a particular skill area.
The conversation then turned to how to maintain an enthusiastic, engaged base of contributors. He located volunteered geographic information in the broader realm of citizen science, indicating there is a general set of techniques here to create a rabid corps of contributors. What I appreciated the most is their Mapper of the Month award of the best mapper, called out on Instagram. Here is the latest one.
Of course, I asked about how the UN is approaching the emerging trend of foundation models and AI. Have a listen for his response.
So, what an amazing moment to have had the chance to talk with such a motivated, good natured individual as Michael Montani. Many of us will have wondered what it might be like to work for the UN, surely one of the world's most significant geospatial organisations. In this hour with Michael we have a clear understanding of how they assist in conflicts and disasters, what their operational map looks like and how they go beyond the capacity of their own team by mobilising a volunteer geospatial army.
We are privileged to have had Michael's time.
At the beginning of the year I conducted an exhaustive review of all the #LAfires geospatial responses. This turned into a series of podcast episodes culminating in a discussion with Jamon van den Hoek. A theme was synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to detect building damage. There were some side quests related to near real time earth monitoring for commodities trading, key company profiled was Ursa Space.
So now the floods are upon us. The Camp Mystic tragedy on 4th of July took the lives of 27 souls asleep in a summer camp lodge by Guadalupe River in Texas.
Necessarily, I am conducting a review of useful geospatial products and services that help respond. I've already done this in a terrific episode with SwissRE, regarding a recent acquisition of theirs, Fathom.
Fathom is a flood modeling company based in Bristol, UK. They were recently acquired by reinsurance heavyweight Swiss RE. Hence they are a welcome addition to the list of publicly traded companies profiled on this podcast.
Gavin was precient in spending time discussion his team's flood modelling work across the US. Now we have an example in front of us about the consequences of ignoring them. Why? Shockingly, Camp Mystic managed to wrangle an exemption from the 100 year flood polygon and what that means for insurance and positioning buildings. Quoting from Wikipedia:
“Between 2011 and 2020, FEMA re-shaped its Special Flood Hazard Area to exclude 30 camp buildings following appeals from the camp, possibly due to insurance or increased regulation concerns.[19] The Special Flood Hazard Area marks the region most at risk for once-in-a-century floods. In 2025, at least 12 camp structures were considered to be within the Special Flood Hazard Area, with more being partially within the area.[19]”
[19] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/us/texas-flooding-fema-flood-map-camp-mystic
Starkly speaking, humans have a terrible history of adjusting safety behaviour through loss of life. I know this from myriad examples during engineering projects in several countries in a career since 2011. The number of stories I have heard leaders tell of lives lost on the job during project kick off to cause adherence to safety standards is almost at a level of desensitization.
So, here we are, more lives lost, including 20 or so innocent young girls on a summer camp. So, it is time to consider what our discipline can do, which is a hell of a lot. We can attend to for example True Flood Risk, the topic of this episode. It is an inspirational story of entrepreneurship based on someone barely avoiding flood damage to their home.
This is because the ground floor height of the founder's home was just higher than the neighbour's. The neighbour got flooded, her house did not. Based on this simple observation, a measurement idea emerged and it has ballooned into a business from there. The usual insurance service is there. A great story. Listen in. Another outcome of this tragedy is this viral LinkedIn post of mine. I said:
"I mean it’s time for our discipline to get to work. This type of analysis can be done at nation scale immediately and Overture Maps Foundation’s building footprints used to detect which people are next in the firing line. An LLM connected to the pipeline could then automatically write political and media campaign material and strategies to pressure funding out of governments. ⚙️🔧"
It was prompted by a Reddit post. My LinkedIn post got 377,000 impressions and 305 reactions, 9 reposts and 267 comments. It went on for days. None of those that responded showed me the app that I am calling for.
I am now building it.
Michael Ferrari is Chief Scientific and Investment Officer at AlphaGeo. We focused on how resilience varies across geographies and what this means for long term regional investability. Accompanying this discussion is their web app. This is confronting. If you change the time slider to "End of Century", most of the world is red, indicating significant physical climate risk.
Particularly alarming is when you change the toggle to "Resilience Adjusted Risk". This intensifies the red color in some parts of the world - Sub Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Papua New Guinea and along the coast from French Guiana to Venezuela. This indicates that these countries have low resilience and limited capacity to combat the effects of climate change. There are implications here for population migrations, as illustrated by AlphaGeo here with regard to Africa.
The conversation then turned to another app, produced in collaboration with Washington Post. Here one can input your location in the US and you will be given useful information from the perspective of a property investor on long term risk and resilience.
Parag Khanna is the CEO. He has given several interesting TED talks such as how megacities are changing the map of the world.
Perhaps the most fascinating idea of all though from Parag is Periodic Table of States, details here. For this analysis it all comes down to stability and they rank Eritrea as worst with a score of 2.36. They rank Switzerland best at 21.77.
Overall, a fascinating crash course from Michael on the kind of spatial finance I like - using geography to inform investment decisions. It was a case of meeting my idols. I am glad we were able to hit it off and am keen to see what develops.
Border Professor Henk van Houtum published Free The Map in 2024. He sent it to me whilst I was still living in London last year. Shows how long this has been in the making as I've since migrated to the States. Kind of fitting, given the book frequently mentions the EU migration crisis and problems with EU Frontex maps showing how many come from where. As a key intervention, the book recommends 'counter mapping'. An example of this for the Frontex mapping is Frontex: EU's Deportation Machine.
We began by talking about differences in freedom through passports, here is a link to Passport Index. We also talked about MAGA geography, with this great map from Representative Robert Garcia.
Speaking of geography, I wrote this poem years before meeting Henk. This is interesting because it reflects his points and was based on raw experiences I'd had at the time traveling through Southeast Asia. A big stimulus for Henk's arguments are these three maps, Fragile States Index, Corruption Perceptions Index and Freedom Map.
We are invited to consider a different perspective on the world and he puts the concept of counter maps before us in response. Examples of counter maps that step outside the gridded world of state cages start with Paul Butler's Facebook map from 2010.
This shows how little boundaries seem to matter, there are vast numbers of connections across national borders. Another great counter mapper is Python Maps. This individual publishes examples like world rivers colored by their hydrological basin.
This is an important type of border that the national borders template map of the world offers no detail on, or importance to. Another from the same source shows CO2 emissions.
Here there is a huge amount of emissions in the sea - a location where national border's don't apply. An effective counter map. We can continue with Al Jazeera's map of the world's oil and gas pipelines. The eye is invited to forget national borders exist.
An interesting example from Science-Metrix Inc is scientific collaborations 2005-9. This reminds us of the Facebook map with plenty of connections outside nations, but also several tight clusters of nations that collaborations occur across. Finally, if we are going to talk about countermapping and general visualisation beauty, we would be remiss to miss Globaia's incredible video welcoming us to the Antrhropocene.
Finally, I should mention that this was a deeply emotional episode to record for me. As shown in the Free The Map series of testimonial videos about my time across Cambodia and Kuwait, I needed to have this conversation with Henk in order to start to understand what I have witnessed in these terrible places. It is very helpful to have a book giving voice to what I have as a series of rage filled experiences. It was all summed up on page 39 of the book really.
So it is fitting that this page was shown throughout the video. Thank you Henk for taking the time to write this and to remind us that there is so much more to do than be a shill for national borders.
Appropriately, I am publishing today's episode from an airport - JFK. This is because it is about the positioning, navigation and timing vertical, specifically about how GPS can be spoofed and jammed, affecting air travel safety. Also appropriately, the recording with Dana Goward, President of Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, was occasionally of poor quality. The bandwidth gods have added a bit of ambience reflecting the jamming we talked about.
I found Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation through a Wired article - "A GPS Blackout Would Shut Down the World". Yes, I'm at the podcasting stage where I read Wired articles and just reach out to the people/organisations profiled ;-) Wired used a provocative but truthful title which, perversely, we can be proud of. This is because a vertical in The Geospatial Index is Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) companies. Companies, theory and technology in this vertical have, in Dana's words, produced a silent utility that the whole world has a critical dependence on. Well done to our industry, we are as vital as the water, power, sewer, telecom utilities! The PNT vertical is more well populated than others - 26 companies. There is a flyer in there recently, NextNav. I mentioned them during the episode with Dana and he gave some useful off the cuff commentary on the validity of their offering compared to other more economical solutions.
It was a fascinating episode. If you've ever wondered about those maps showing GNSS spoofing and jamming, Dana, a highly accomplished pilot, gave us a lengthy commentary on what they mean and spoke to some geographies where there is a strong risk of this silent utility failing to work properly.
A note about running the podcast. It is an experience of talking with some highly accomplished and capable guests. Reading Dana's profile, on gps.gov no less, gives one pause. I got lucky here - I did not read this profile before talking with him. I am glad, because I would have been a deer in the headlights. Some quotes:
"...he served as the maritime navigation authority for the United States with 12 different business lines budgeted at over $1.3B/yr, and represented the United States at the International Maritime Organization, International Assn. of Lighthouse Authorities, U.N. anti-piracy working group, and other international forums."
He has received a humanitarian award for a coastguard chopper rescue:
"...Helicopter Association International’s Igor Sikorsky Humanitarian Service Award for his rescue of two fisherman at the height of Hurricane Chantal..."
As such, Dana has intimate, professional pilot experience of the risks of GNSS spoofing and jamming. As leader of the maritime navigation authority of the world's largest economy, he has the same degree of knowledge from the perspective of an administrator. This means his call to action as a leader regarding resilience of this silent utility is worth listening to. His charity, Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, is also worth joining.
One has to wonder when the US will become tired of the embarrassment of being behind the Chinese. Even in the domain of navigation system resilience, the States is behind. I am grateful to Dana for identifying the problem as not being money or technology, but a lack of leadership. He has put himself in front of us as the leader on this issue. Let's listen and study what he has to say, we might find the required actions are straightforward to implement: https://rntfnd.org/.
I came across Sergei Nozdrenkov through a post on LinkedIn saying:
"Hey friends, I’m looking for a founding engineer and founding AI research scientist to build multimodal foundation models for natural ecosystems, starting with 3D coral reef data."
He is the founder of Wildflow. This is a continuation of the nature data theme last touched on with Alex Logan in the episode about Cecil.
Sergei is an overwhelming intellect. It is a source of great hope that someone of his calibre plans to make a multimodal foundation model to assist in the understanding of coral reefs. Usually they're optimising dark patterns on social media platforms or designing weapons. So Sergei is a light of hope and optimism in the emerging foundation models industry.
He was so patient. He enthusiastically fielded my initial questions about the basics of foundation models and LLMs before then going into incredible detail on conservation methods for coral reefs. Without hesitation he included asides like a quick explanation of Gaussian Splatting.
Oh, and we started at the end of his product roadmap: terraforming. Yes, that's how much we covered. I don't really have much to say except that I present this as assistance to those responding to his call for founding engineer and founding AI scientist. He checks all the boxes for an inspirational, broad minded leader capable of humor.
Sergei has seen and done an incredible amount - yet he retains a childlike curiosity and enthusiasm. We have a lot to learn from him.
Upping the cadence here as the backlog is growing again and I need to get things out whilst they’re fresh. Today we’ve got BigGeo on the chopping block, a Canadian cloud based geospatial company. Brent Lane, CEO, was an inspiring speaker because (showing my bias here) he had another story about ringing the bell at the NYSE to tell us about.
This is the second time we’ve had someone on that’s done this, the first was Gillian Mollod regarding The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). To be precise, in Brent’s case it was the closing bell. So it’s inspiring to be working through the roster of people in geospatial who’ve walked the hallowed halls of this institution. Who knew they existed!
What is BigGeo? Datalab: A workspace to prepare, manage, and optimize data for analysis, visualization and delivery. Marketplace: A hub designed to showcase, explore, and seamlessly source a wide range of datasets. Datascape: A tool for geospatial visualization, data transformation, and interactive analysis. It is interesting to see Felt there, a prior guest on the show.
We finished off with an idea on how to apply it all - a global parking lot dataset sold via their marketplace that can be used as the basis for predicting quarterly earnings for shops like Dunkin Donuts where car presence, detected via earth observation, provides insight on income.Thanks Brent for coming on and showing us another way to ring the bell!
As usual there is a connection through a number of episodes going on here. Back when interviewed Stephanie May, she introduced me to global base maps made by various tech companies. I jumped at the opportunity to continue the theme when I came across Jordan Regenie's write up of his involvement in Bing Maps. He mentioned a company participating in that effort was Compass Data so I dutifully pursued them for an episode and got Hayden Howard.
After that he gave me a free ticket to GeoWeek and I jumped on a flight from Atlanta to a SHOCKINGLY cold Denver for a stunned, disoriented walk around the exhibit hall for a few hours talking to as many companies as I could. I came across several ground penetrating radar solutions. This included one on a towball which could detect buried services at highway speeds (Impulse Radar). Impressive stuff. I also saw the other end of the spectrum, pushcarts which are used to produce the fluoro graffiti footpath markings you see about buried gas, power, fibre optic lines (Screening Eagle).
I was curious about starting my own business, so I kept investigating. I went to a Georgia Geospatial Association networking event in Atlanta soon after and got talking with the CEO Michael Bellrose of Tri-Global Technologies, a positioning company. He put me in touch with Dan Bigman, CEO of Bigman Geophysical.
And that's how some of these episodes happen! Literally a journey across American geospatial to hunt down these conversations for you. It was a good one. Dan told us a CSI type story to start with, about how archaeology and ground penetrating radar can be used for crime scene investigation. It was gruesome, but a good illustration of how our broader discipline benefits society - something which has been a common theme the past string of episodes about SAR for bushfire and warzone damage assessment.
Here we continue the radar theme but using different, more proximate technology, requiring someone to push a device over the ground rather than wait for a satellite. Do I want to start such a business myself? Well it is tempting. A second hand pushcart is only about $15,000. With another $5k around that with a website, marketing and a cheap truck one could get to hustling the pavement. Thanks Dan for being my second Atlanta guest as I begin to orient myself regarding opportunities in America.
Brett Clark is Director Global Sales at Blackshark. Blackshark is an incredible company. They are responsible for the global 3D world of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Now they have a system called ORCA™ HUNTR.
This is a no-code environment enabling users—with little to no coding or AI background—to train, test, and deploy object detection and classification models on RGB imagery, including satellite, aerial, drone, or even JPEG/video frames. It also offers real-time feedback during training: as you label (“scribble” with a crayon-like brush), it immediately shows model results and entropy metrics, guiding where more data is needed.
Listen in for an example of how this system was put into action for the #LAFires response. They used it to detect 300 buildings the county was unaware of. This matters for clean up after fires, because there is significantly more debris and material movement to plan for.
Brett was a supremely cool dude. I have interviewed some of the finest operators in sales in geospatial on this podcast. Brett is clearly the best so far.
Conflict Ecology is a geospatial research lab led by Jamon Van Den Hoek, Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. I have been privileged to profile many leaders in our industry through this podcast. None, until now, routinely appear on TV and have the work of their lab used in print media. Jamon is a hero to us all and we are so privileged to have an hour of his time.
Continuing the EO Summit coverage, another attendee was Alex Logan, co-founder and CEO of Cecil. This is a nature data platform which began with trees. They focus on metadata, more here. It was a fascinating discussion. I am new to this space and there is a strong overlap with those in carbon credit and biodiversity markets. What I appreciate the most is the emergence of financial materiality. For example, The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is taking care of the US. In the EU things are more advanced, Nature Restoration Regulation. There is also the EU’s Regulation on Deforestation-free Products. All of this means an exciting data and app ecosystem is flourishing.
For example, I was invited to join Cecil’s Slack. A torrent of founders joined, one after the other introducing exciting new software facilitating the progress and insight intended by these disclosure frameworks and regulations. It is also a space filled with optimistic, conscientious people with the right future in mind. I am happy to have found them as these are my people. This is where I come from. This is the future I was brought up to build.
Podcasting like this is a high paced, enticing discovery experience. I keep talking with inspiring people. Each episode is a small practice session on a possible future.
Thanks for being our guide for nature data Alex, thanks also for sponsoring the Nature Data for Finance meetup on the EO Summit sidelines.
I was privileged to be granted access as a member of the press to EO Summit by the convener, Aravind (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aravindravichandran/). I am now delivering on my duty providing coverage for you here. Adam Maher (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-maher-17969731/) is CEO and Founder at Ursa Space Systems Inc (https://ursaspace.com/). He participated in the Commodity Intelligence panel at the Summit (https://www.eosummit.com/eos2025/detailed-program). Conveniently, that is also the subject of this episode. So, for those who couldn't make it this is a chance to get a flavor of the event. It was a privilege to have Adam's time and attention. I know from organising this episode that he is a very busy man.
Another upcoming guest from the summit will be Alex Logan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-logan-cecil/). He will be talking about how they do nature data at Cecil.
Mike Spaeth is Global Vice President at US Artificial Intelligence Institute (https://www.usaii.org/). He has a career in environmental, sustainability and governance analytics at Moodys before moving on to Maxar then Earth Daily Analytics. Here he gained experience in geospatial foundation models. We are privileged to have him on regarding his latest role at USAII where he talked about the possibility of standing up a certification for the geospatial profession in GeoAI.
Gideon Singer is a Solutions Engineer at CARTO. He is another guest from Geospatial Risk Summit. Gideon gave a technical presentation on the first day about processing pipelines in CARTO. It was a sign of how far the platform has progressed since I began using it over a decade ago. Back then it was called CartoDB. In this episode he continues the demonstration of analysis, mapping and presentation in CARTO. This time in the context of broadband network access quality for senior citizens. He was also game for a description of spatial indexing which I didn’t warn him about! Another aspect of this conversation that I appreciated was being able to talk about my efforts to animate the Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia War bombing sortie dataset, using CartoDB back in the day. Gideon showed us that he and by extension CARTO have an interest in applications of our profession to map and examine injustice.
Ajay K Gupta is Chief Executive Officer of HSR.Health. This is a company in the Global Top 100 Geospatial Companies – 2025 Edition from Geoawesome (https://geoawesome.com/global-top-100-geospatial-companies-2025/). I voted on the selection panel 2022-2023 but not the year HSR was voted in. Another item discussed was AWS funding for their Anna platform (as it is novel tech). Additionally we talked through Poseidon Plastic Tracking System, an ocean trash programme. Finally, there was discussion of their Heat-Health Risk Index. Toward the end of the discussion Ajay made some comments about how foundation models could help in health applications of geospatial. It was good to see mention of this outside of the usual earth observation applications.
Links:
Upcoming Domain ChangeDue to launching Geospatial FM, I will change the domain from www.geospatial.money to www.geospatial.fm. This will occur over the next few days. Just a heads up. You will still receive emails as normal.Nelson Roque
Nelson Roque is Assistant Professor, Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. He studies the brain as it develops and ages. He also lectures in cognition. It was a deliberate choice to kick of Geospatial FM with him. If we are to create foundation models to use artificial intelligence for solving in geospatial then we had better be sure what intelligence is. Nelson started by saying cognition is the preferred term. The word intelligence comes with connotations that are to be avoided by those in a healthcare context serving the vulnerable. From the outset, then, it was a productive session driven by two studies he has conducted about an early version of ChatGPT and our incapacity to detect AI generated imagery. This included a live demo where I failed every single test! The episode concludes with an epilogue prompted by this from Matt White: https://matthewdwhite.medium.com/i-think-therefore-i-am-no-llms-cannot-reason-a89e9b00754f. Here he contends that modern versions of Gemini and ChatGPT leveraging chain of thought functionality do not actually involve reasoning.
The impression from Nelson is that Matt White is right and no reasoning is going on. This is a good accompaniment to Apple's blockbuster paper doing the rounds which carries the same message: "The Illusion of Thinking" (https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking). It was good then to secure commentary from this research psychologist on the implications of the latest versions of these tools.
