AAG 2009 Conference

I was in Las Vegas for the annual Association of American Geographers' conference. Boy, the conference was great; I learned quite a bit from the conference. However, the sheer number of presentations in this conference makes it impossible to attend all the interesting presentations. Also, I really dislike (yes, dislike) Las Vegas as a conference venue. Whoever thought that we can walk through smoke-filled casinos with drunks and their margarita bongs, and proceed to the conference halls for intellectual conversations!!

I participated in a panel discussion on Open Source GIS and I also gave a presentation about the research I am working on. I just found today that somebody took our picture while at the panel discussion. Here it is...


Anyhow, post-conference, we drove to the Grand Canyon's South Rim. Boy, was it wonderful or WHAT! I will reserve that topic for another blog post. We also traveled to Tucson, AZ to see a couple of friends of mine. It was total fun.

Victoria and Vancouver: Photos

I was in the beautiful western Canadian province of British Columbia. I had an awesome conference in the little city of Victoria and then traveled to Vancouver for a day! Overall, it was an awesome trip. Story is definitely coming up, soon. Here are the photos.

Vancouver, BC: New!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2193178&l=75546&id=5734033

Victoria, BC:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2192897&l=2f995&id=5734033

Stay tuned for updates and story.

Visiting South Africa...

Hello! One more travel update - I'm visiting South Africa. Yes, it is super exciting SA! This will be my first ever visit to the Southern Hemisphere.

Here's the story:

In my line of work, I develop web-based geographic/spatial information systems for conservation, environmental protection, etc. Cutting out the boring stuff, I recently developed a global alerting systems for wild fires and it became, well, wildly popular. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)-Meraka Institute in South Africa wanted to employ my alerting system for their purposes and asked us to customize our system for them. Now the system is ready, and they invited me to South Africa and sponsored my trip there! The purpose of the trip is to help them install the system and train the folks out there on it. Plus, there will be a good opportunity to share research knowledge from both sides. So, it should be fantastic.

I got my South African visa yesterday. And yes, the visa process to SA is not as crazy as the Russian visa - I just had to go downtown DC and give my passport to the embassy. My visa was ready in 3 days! What a relief! Any lessons learned, Russia? No? OK, I thought so!)

I will be flying to Johannesburg and from there visiting the CSIR-Meraka campus in Pretoria! I will definitely post the stories and photos from that wonderful country! Stay tuned, as always!

Another nice birthday present...

While the wonderful greetings from friends, colleagues, and family made my day on my birthday, I was pleasantly surprised in totally different way.

Last month, we wrote a paper and submitted to the Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial 2007 to be held in Victoria, British Columbia, up in the Canadian land. They emailed their decision on July 15 - my birthday - and our paper was accepted! What a fantastic news to add up to the joy of the day!

This selection was special because the conference used a public voting system to choose what presentation they should accept. People can give a score on scaled of 0-2 (0 - not interested, 1 - somewhat interested, and 2 - VERY interested and won't miss this). The sheer fact that my paper appealed to the public is plain thrilling!

So, I will be heading up there to "Canadia" to present my research and this conference is one of the top-notch spots to present my research! Cool, no?

NASA Meeting

These photos are from the Public Service Recognition Week, held in Washington DC. We were invited to speak about the NASA project I'm working on. It was a great event - many federal agencies (DOT, NASA, Forest Service, Highway Administration, FAA, etc, etc, etc, and, etc) participated. Lots of goodies too though! I loved NASA's exhibits! T'was good. Enjoyable.

OutSourced: The Space Version

India recently successfully reassered it's "Space Power" status by launching and placing a commercial satellite in the orbit (news link). India has an established space program, with some of the best-in-business hi-res remote sensing, weather, telecom, educational, and - I would hope spy - satellites. For a long period of time, India's Space agency - Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) - has launched India's own satellites very successfully and efficiently. ISRO's rockets have also, in fact, carried satellites for other nations up in to the space earlier, but it was a not-for-profit endeavor.

Last week, India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) carried an Italian astronomical Satellite, with clinical accuray and picture perfect launch. All that comes with the well known "India advantage" - great service at a fraction of cost! India already is very well known in the western world as THE destination for outsourcing of business processes for cost cutting, increased efficiency, and high performance. Just ask Dell, they'll tell you. Or, IBM. Or, Google. Or, Microsoft. Or, Accenture. Well, you get the idea.

Now that India's ready to do commercial satellite launches and is ready to compete against the US by offering cost-effective satellite launch options, there are many jokes here in the US about "outsourcing" space science to India, just as it happened with IT. One such joke - from Slashdot's discussion page - caught my attention, and here I produce it:

International Space Station: "Houston, we have a problem."

New Delhi: "Hello, please spell your name and give me your complete customer ID."

Go India!

LIVE from San Francisco : Day 1

This post comes LIVE from my artsy hotel room in San Francisco! I'm here for the AAG conference - the annual meeting for geographers and geographic information scientists all over the world. Well, what can I say - I flew in from cold, windy, and rainy Washington in to warm, sunny, and beautiful San Francisco. So, it is just an awesome feeling! My hotel is right in the middle of downtown - a block away from the Union Square.

The day so far has been great - except that it seems incredibly long. First off, I stayed up all last night to get a 3 AM cab to the airport to catch my 6 AM flight. Then, I traveled for about 7 hours and by the time I got to San Francisco, it was just 10:30 AM (there's a 3-hour time difference between Washington DC and SF). So, the day seems stretched awfully long. But oh well, I'm in California, and I don't have any complaints about getting extra time to see the town.

This is my third time here in SF and my past trips have been very short (those Google interviews, remember?!!). This time I'm in here for a week - for an awesome conference, and lots of free time in the evenings!! As for today, I walked around the super fabulous downtown SF streets, took pictures, and finally settled in my hotel room and taking it easy. I will try to keep a daily report of what I did here in SF. Let us see how much time I get every day to blog.

My Book!

About a year and half ago, I was requested to write a book chapter based on my grad school thesis. The editor of the book saw our (the professor I work for as grad assistant and I) presentations in a one of the conferences and contacted us to write a chapter in his book. Named "Emerging Spatial Information Systems and Applications", the book holds an impressive collection of cutting-edge GIS research from various parts of the world (including mine, of course! :-) ).

I was entirely thrilled and humbled at the invitation to write a chapter in this book. After our submission and the routine formality of "acceptance", the book is finally published and out for purchase! I received a complimentary author's copy! Can't tell you how happy the feeling is! If you get a chance, check out this book. Click on this link for more info on the book

Related Posts / Links:

• Author Me!
• http://www.idea-group-ref.com/books/details.asp?id=6184
  

Go Open Source!

Since I joined my current job last year, I worked hard to convince my bosses to employ Open Source components for all our products. Considering the research environment we work in, and the target audience, I was convinced that opting Open Source is the best bet for us. The legacy systems was have are all based on commercial software. Well, it is just about to change and I'm quite excited.

This will be a 180-degree policy shift for our products - until now, the products have been using commercial software for all purposes. The operating system, the Internet Mapping Server (IMS) for WebGIS, the relational database, etc are all the flagship products of some well known corporations. My drive to move to open source stemmed from essentially two reasons:

• Our products are primarily developed for folks in the developing world (like Africa), and the heavy costs of commercial software inhibits them from owning these products. Also, we can not distribute the products we developed because of licensing restrictions.
  
• The commercial GIS products we use - in my opinion- are of very less quality and are unable to handle large loads of data. Plus, in our case, it really came down to "watching" the software, especially our IMS and spatial data gateway, manually and restarting the crashed processes almost 10% of time! Imagine that!
  

Going for Open Source is definitely an chartered territory, especially many research and government institutions heavily opt using commercial software. With open source software, in my opinion, not only can we have better software at no cost, we can freely distribute this product to people in the developing world without worrying about any hefty fees or nasty licenses. What more? All the software we use is platform independent, so if some of our partners use a commercial operating system (like Microsoft's .. what's the name of that operating system?), they can still run our software out-of-the-box!

First line of our products are ready to be out late December. Some of them are already running as "beta" (a la Web 2.0). They all run on Linux and use open source software like Minnesota MapServer (WebGIS), GDAL/GRASS (GIS), PostgreSQL (relational database), PostGIS (spatial gateway), PHP (Web-CGI), etc. We are certainly going to be one of the few people that are going 100% Open Source in phases, and I'm quite proud of pushing the agenda of Open Source! Quite a few of our big-name partners are interested in going Open Source and I only hope that this will continue the success of Open Source GIS.

Conclusions with Open Source GIS and software? We found Open Source GIS to be far better than their commercial counterparts, and so was our impression with the relational database, and operating system (Linux needs no introduction!).

Free world, free people, free speech, free software! How sweet!

India's own GPS: IRNSS

As an established space power, India has been planning to develop it's own satellite-helped positioning and navigation system to help cater the domestic audience. The American version of satellite navigation system called Global Positioning System or GPS is a constellation of 24 satellites that circle the earth and provide accurate position details - like the latitude-longitude coordinates, speed, direction, and even elevation (height), etc. If you want to learn more about GPS, google it.

Russia has it's own "GPS", called GLONASS - a cluster of 21 satellites. EU is developing it's own version of GPS, called Galileo. Now, India is going ahead with developing it's own version! Awesome! The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has developed great expertise in developing and launching powerful remote sensing satellites. ISRO also has an established expertise in launching polar satellite launching vehicles - even offering to carry payloads for other countries for a much cheaper price than other space powers like France, etc. (Yep, you can call it "space outsourcing!")

The Indian navigation system will be known as "Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System" or INRSS for short. Now, I'm not quite sure how they should "acrnomize" it for pronunciation purposes... "In Ress"?, "Iners"?. Whatever they call it, it is a great step forward for the Indian space program.

This report in Space News, quotes ISRO spokesman S. Krishnamurthy saying, "...these satellites will be built by ISRO’s Satellite Centre in Bangalore and launched aboard indigenously built Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles. The first launch is scheduled for 2008 and the entire constellation is expected to be in place by 2011."

One of the reasons for going ahead with IRNSS is to have a full control on a navigation system. Another major reason is the precision of the position data available in India through GPS and GLONASS. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to have a navigation system that is fully under India's own control, especially considering the data could be used for military, defense, and even civil aviation. Speaking of civil aviation, India has completed a pilot project for civil aviation called GAGAN (GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation). More information on this available here

Besides, folks in India will have their own navigation system for civilian use! Heard of geo-caching yet? Check it out if you are interested. It's fun!

Way to go India!