GeoTech Center Funding Ends in Aug 2012

Yesterday David DiBiase, in his role as as a "project advisor" with the GeoTech Center, shared the news on Facebook that National Science Foundation declined to provide the center with a second round of funding. The four years of funding ran 2008-2012 under award 0801893. (My colleague Joe Francica is also an advisor on the project.)

The GeoTech Center review meeting began this morning with the disappointing news that NSF declined to renew the Center’s funding for an additional four years. PI Philip Davis received the Program Officer’s email late last night. 

It's certainly a setback for community colleges and for the entire GIS education community. GeoTech is the closest thing we’ve had to an organization comparable in scale to NCGIA but wholly dedicated to geospatial education and training. Still, whether the GeoTech Center rebounds or not, some of its initiatives are too important to forsake. First and foremost, the GTCM needs to be updated, curated, and promoted—with or without NSF support. Now the task facing me and other project advisers is to help the team regroup, re-prioritize, and rethink next steps.

This is an unfortunate loss of funding; there is still much work to be done.

Paper Maps are Hard to Use and other Education GIS News

At Holt Elementary in Durham, NC, the local GIS users are teaching about GIS via Google Earth. I'm not sure how I feel about this exercise:

To illustrate the difference that GIS technology makes, [GIS analyst from the GIS division of the city’s Technology Solutions Department, Robert] Cushman asked the students to locate their homes or school on paper maps within 30 seconds. They hunched over the maps, furiously searching for familiar street names or landmarks. At the end of the 30 seconds, just one student said he’d located his home.

“Now we don’t use maps like this anymore – very rarely,” Cushman said. “The maps we work with are made to be easy to use” – like traffic maps on morning TV newscasts and those used by vehicle navigation systems. 

- Herald Sun

Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas are developing an emergency communications network that will maintain operation during natural disasters and provide critical warnings and geographic information to people affected by the disasters. The researchers are honing and testing the system now and expect to deploy a pilot network at the end of 2012.

Geo challenges include how to arrange the "mesh" network that enables the network and running GIS on low power devices. The work is funded by an NSF grant.

- press release

- project page

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMB) have created a detailed map (and accompanying study) of where terrorism attacks have occurred since 1970. 

...while certain areas (those surrounding Manhattan and Los Angeles, for example) have endured as terror 'hot spots' throughout the study, others have come and go. In the 2000s, for example, there has been a higher-than-average rate of attacks in Maricopa County, AZ, Phoenix's county. King County, WA, on the other hand, was a terror hot spot in the 1970s and 1980s, but has been largely quiet since.

- HuffPo

- press release

Learn How Open Source Software Benefits a Successful GIS Business

Lee Mitchell  owner of G.A.I.A. Professionals spoke about starting a new GIS business on the Jan 31 American Sentinel University Webinar. I learned during a detailed discussion of her work history that she worked in some capacity for American Sentinel University in curriculum development. That was not disclosed in the webinar marketing material and might have been made more clear in the presentation itself.

Virtual Internships and other Education GIS News

A Czech academic is leading efforts to draw up a new map of city centers, not according to their official names but rather based on the commonly understood slang names to have often survived for centuries in spite of the “proper” titles.

Jaroslav David, who teaches Czech studies at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Ostrava in the east of the country, has led a team which has completed the first part of a four year project funded by the Czech Ministry of Culture.

- Czech Position (great name!)

San Diego (Open Data) App Challenge and other GIS Competition News

Mayor Sanders and the City of San Diego are challenging the software developer community to create new apps using city and partner data. They’re also inviting the public to share their ideas for innovative new apps.

Winners will receive $50,000 in cash prizes as well as promotional exposure. Prizes will be awarded for apps that enhance city services and quality of life for San Diegans, and that use the data in innovative ways. Submitted apps can run on the web, desktop computers, tablets, or smartphones. The public is encouraged to share application ideas related to energy, tourism, economic development, transportation, the environment, health and other areas.

The public will have one month to share ideas for San Diego apps they’d like to see created. Developers will have approximately three months following the challenge launch to build their submissions. A panel of distinguished judges from the tech industry, venture capital, and partner institutions will select winners, and the general public will vote to identify two “Popular Choice” winners.

The Get Outdoors Massachusetts contest is open to the public and seeks public participation in developing technologies that feature Massachusetts outdoor and natural resources. The goal of the competition is to provide software developers with data to create a mobile application for the public to use a smart phone to map to public lands, access points and other outdoor venues for outdoor recreation. The agencies will provide data about state parks, wildlife management areas, public boat ramps, agricultural tourism locations and parking locations and lists of available activities at each facility or location.

The 2012 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest is designed to investigate the potential of multi-modal/multi-temporal fusion of very high spatial resolution imagery. This year, participants will download three different sets of images (optical, SAR, and LIDAR) over the downtown of San Francisco and each participant will get to choose their own research topic to work with. Proposals should describe in detail the addressed problem, the method used, and the end result.