Category: Conferences

The Largest Conference For Mapping and Geospatial Developers – Esri DevSummit 2012

I’ll be presenting at the Esri DevSummit next week so if you are attending please swing by my sessions and say “hi”. If you aren’t familiar with Esri or the conference, about 1400 developers and other technical experts converge on Palm Springs, California every Spring to learn all things technical about building commercial and enterprise geographic information systems. There will be everything from introductory Dojo workshops to deep dives into the heart of our APIs.

If you’re around here’s my schedule. I’d be very interested to hear about what you are working on:

Monday,  March 26

Getting Started with the ArcGIS Web APIs – 8:30am – 11:45am, Pasadena Room. I’ll be presenting the portion related to our ArcGIS API for JavaScript.

Gettings Started with Smartphone and Tablet ArcGIS Runtime SDKs – 1:15pm – 4:45pm, Pasadena Room. In this session, I’ll be presenting on our ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android.

Wednesday, March 28

Flex the World – 10:30am, Demo Theater 2. I’ll be presenting with my esteemed colleague Sajit Thomas on Apache Flex.

Presenting at the Esri Developer Summit

I’ll be presenting at the Esri Developer Summit this week (March 7 – 9, 2011) . So, if you are at the conference in Palm Springs, California stop by and say “hi”. If you aren’t familiar with this conference, it is the largest geo-developer conference in North America with over 1200 geo-geeks basking in all manner of technical geographic goodness. There will be 63 technical sessions and around 29 sessions presented by non-Esri, ArcGIS developers. What better way to learn than to hear it straight from the developers on the front lines…right??!

I have three sessions: a pre-conference session on Getting Started with the ArcGIS API for Android (beta), Localizing the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex, and integrated Volunteered Geographic Information and Social Media into your GIS. A GIS, is a Geographic Information System, for all you non-geo-geeks. Hope to see you there!

Random Hacks of Kindness #2 – Hacking for Humanity

This weekend I attended the Random Hacks of Kindess (RHoK) Conference in New York City. I even hacked a little and did a short presentation. It’s a conference for hackers who want to contribute free and open source software to help with humanitarian crisis response efforts around the world. The conference was held simultaneously at 21 global locations. The majority of the apps have some sort of mapping component. In attendance were hackers, project managers, fire chiefs and others from as far away as Sudan.

A variety of projects were worked on at the conference including  a mobile Incident Command app for responding fire agencies, hospital status monitoring app, and a Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping tool for the United Nations World Food Program. For a full list of problem definitions go here.

My project is a Twitter Search widget built for use with the open source ArcGIS Viewer for Flex. It monitors and maps Tweets for a geographic region, returning all Tweets within a specified radius. The ArcGIS Viewer for Flex is a mapping and visualization tool and it lets you integrate and display real-time data from multiple sources. In other words, you can use this tool to map Tweets alongside things such as earthquake data (GeoRSS), weather data (REST) and anything else with a geographic attribute, all in real time. Decision makers for emergency response agencies can use this visual fusion of real time information to help paint an operational picture, identify problems and see trends.

Many people opt-in for sharing their location information when they Tweet. If they have opted-in, the widget retrieves this information through Twitter’s Search API. You can see a live version here.  I originally built the widget for RHoK #0, right before the Haiti earthquake. This widget was used in the Haiti earthquake and the Tennessee flood. It has also been adopted by a variety of emergency response agencies that are using it today.

If you want to contribute to one of these humanitarian projects, check out the RHoK website for more information: https://www.rhok.org/

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