ASPRS 2011 Roundup

If there was one theme from this year's ASRPS 2011 conference it was death by PowerPoint.  I'm no Steve Jobs when it comes to presentations, but I know enough to not make it miserable for the audience.  The graduate students in my GIS Practicum class deliver far superior presentations than many of the seasoned faculty at ASPRS 2011.  Slides with endless bullet points, more formulas on a single slide than a person could read in 20 minutes, tiny graphics, the list goes on.  This would be bad enough, but for a geospatial society you would think members would realize the value of a good picture.  Compared to the quality of the presentations at the urban forestry conferences I have been going to, the ASPRS sessions were, for the most part, a massive disappointment.

That being said there were a number of top-notch presentations.  I particularly enjoyed the session I moderated on "using multiple data sources."  Tommy Jordan and his team at CRMS are doing fantastic work training the next generation of geospatial professionals by integrating undergraduate students into the production workflow for a recent LiDAR and imagery collect.  Although the sensors and techniques we used are wildly different, I learned a lot from Ken Stumpf's work on land cover mapping in Alaska.  Ken is with Geographic Resource Solutions.  I am glad I stuck around for the final LiDAR session as two grad students, Colin Gleason from SUNY ESF, and David Kelbe from RIT, gave presentations that were filled with useful information and fantastic graphics.  I attended the AmericaView session, and although I had seen much of the work before it was still inspiring.

Paul Ramsey gave a brilliant opening keynote on open source software.  He did not pull any punches in going after Esri et al.  I think all of us left his presentation questioning why we ever purchased commercial software.  The problem with open source - they don't have the money to sponsor conferences like ASPRS.

Episode 4 of the Geospatial Revolution project premiered on day 1.  Impressive is an understatement.  It left me proud to be part of this profession and yet humbled by the great things others are doing.  The theme of the conference was "Ride of the Geospatial Revolution," but I cannot help if ASPRS might soon find itself drowning in the location-based geospatial tidal wave.  The largest booth in the exhibitor was Microsoft.  That's right, the same people that sell Office were showing off their remote sensing capabilities.  Who would have predicted that five years ago?  I can't help but wonder what will happen to all of these companies whose business model is to sell imagery.  Why, in these difficult economic times would an organization pay vast sums of money when Microsoft or Google will provide them with the data for free or at a much lower cost.  No doubt there will always be the need for mapping companies, but the Bing Maps Global Ortho Project is going to change the remote sensing landscape.

Although the presentations were largely a let down I thoroughly enjoyed the Hot Topics session on the challenges involved in breaking the 85% accuracy barrier.  Joe Knight from UMN was an amazing moderator.  Chuck Olson, a man whose work on the elements of image interpretation serves as the basis for everything we do was in attendance.  He offers a fantastic perspective from decades of experience, but it was disappointing to hear him say that all automated techniques rely solely on spectral information.  WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.  More than a few folks, us included, are using object-based approaches to incorporate spectral and spatial information into an automated process.    Just check out Infoterra's work for proof.

Although Paul Ramsey's talk made me want to check out PostGIS, the proprietary vendors are doing some awesome work.  I got a preview of the enhancements coming in the next release of eCognition.  Amazing!  The transition to Trimble has not slowed things down one bit and eCognition continues to redefine what is possible in terms of image analysis.  Had some great conversations with teams from MDA, Trimble Geospatial, and ERDAS.

Keith Pelletier and I ran an Object-Based Image Analysis workshop on Monday.  Over 30 people attended, and it was a lot of fun.  I learned a lot from their questions and I hope they learned a lot too.  Thanks to all of you who attended.  I hope you will stay in touch.

You can check out all of the Tweets from ASPRS 2011 at #asprs11a.  A lot of the tweets are me complaining about the presentation, sorry, but someone has to speak up.

Will I go next year - maybe.  ASPRS really needs to post some guidelines to the presenters or better yet, make them all watch Death by PowerPoint the night before.  Scientific presentations can be enjoyable.