AAG@Denver

Last week, I was in Denver attending the conference of Association of American Geographers. The conference was a blast. It was a great example of the sheer breadth of Geography and its applications in almost every walk of life. I was mostly interested in GIS-based application architectures, Agent-based Solutions, Distributed & Internet GIS Architectures. A few of the interesting presentations were: Automated Graph-based path generation algorithm for routing UAVs, Schedule-based dynamic path finding algorithm for transit networks, Wavelet-based image retrieval techniques, and a couple of other agent-based GIS applications.

I also got a chance to attend several sessions on India. Here are some of the interesting ones: Annapurna Shaw from the Indian Institute of Management discussed the Metropolitan Restructuring in Post liberalized India. Andrew Harris spoke about how Bombay mills are being replaced by Mumbai Malls. Sanjukta Mukherjee of Syracuse University had an interesting presentation about the emergence of software industry in India. Kate Edwards spokes about the "Global Indian" and the Cosmopolindianism in contemporary India.

I presented my work on Friday. Got lots of feedback and even a suggestion that I should copyright the product and make money out of it! :) I will post a bunch of pictures from Denver here in a couple of days. Speaking of Denver, I throughly enjoyed the week-long stay there. We stayed right in the heart of downtown and so we had a chance to walk around and enjoy the sights. We also checked out Boulder and the Rockies. All through the week, the temperature stayed in the 70s. Even in the mountains, it was around 65s the day we visited. I kind of enjoyed snow with the temps in the upper 60s!

I had really good time out there with my buddies Andre and Sasha (They even made me go to the "Russian Speciality Group" meetings. HAHA). Andre and I shared the driving space; On the way up, Andre "took" Iowa and Colorado, and I drove Nebraska. On the way back, we took more turns. I have some enjoyable pictures all throughout the trip and I am excited to share them with you.

Back in Iowa, while watching news I learned that Denver was hit by a Blizzard on Sunday (today). All interstates were closed and flights cancelled. Huh, what a contrast to the "70 degree +" Denver that I saw yesterday to the "2 feet snow" Denver today. Quite lucky to make it back before the snow struck!

Until the next Blog,

Au Revoir!