More #ESRIUC Awards, Students and Keynote

Carlos Salman Gonzalez, ESRI’s distributor in Mexico (among other passions) received the Lifetime Achievement Award and gave an entertaining talk about being happy and following your passions.

Gil Grosvenor of National Geographic introduced two members of the Cave Club and their teacher from Big Fork High School in Montana to discuss their mapping and conservation efforts on caves in Glacier National Park. Sound familiar? You may have read about their work right here on All Points Blog! In January I mused if the students had presented their work at a GIS conference. Now they have. The pair just returned from visiting President Obama and receiving the President’s Environmental Youth Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC.

Grosvenor then gave the Alexander Graham Bell medal to both Roger Tomlinson and Jack Dangermond.

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The keynote from Richard Saul Wurman focused on this current project 19 20 21, aimed at making sense of the 19 cities that will have 20 million people in the 21st century. He, like many other smart people I know [he reminds me a lot of Vincent Virga, see my coverage of his talks at a geo event], is happiest exploring things about which they know little, in this case how cities are defined and the patterns within. He and his partners on the effort are using GIS to create new ways to find those patterns because he noted, “understanding precedes action.”