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I haven’t been to a conference since I left academia, so I was interested to see how a corporate sponsored conference would compare. I, along with a few colleagues, attended the Spatial Data Science Conference (SDSC). The whole shindig was sponsored by Carto, a SaaS company specialising in no-code mapping applications. I’m not entirely sure what they do, but it seems to be a platform for plotting spatial data aimed at companies that may not have experience themselves (example 1, example 2).

There were three stand out talks for me:

  1. “The Emotions of Building Geospatial AI to Save the Earth” by Craig Mills. On the surface, this seemed like a wishy-washy “save the planet” kind of talk but the speaker really grabbed the audiences’ attention. The main result was a model that could track the height of trees from satellite images. Although he didn’t really explain how this worked (I’m guessing shadow lengths + local drone mappings?), he wove the results into a larger narrative about how we talk about the climate. It was a good mixture of serious discussion and impressive data science.
  2. “Mobility Data Analytics for the Cloud: Introducing Trajectory Analysis Extension” by Anita Graser. This was by far and away the most technical talk of the day and I loved it. The speaker is the developer behind a successful open-source project, Moving Pandas, and she spoke about integrating another one of her Python packages into Carto. I wonder if they pay her…
  3. “Transforming Out-of-home advertising: VIOOH’s Geospatial Innovation” by Rémy Prom. Obviously I am biased because Remy is my colleague, but this was a great talk about using new technology to wrench the commercial team away from Excel.

Being a spatial data conference, the talks had some of the most beautiful slides I’ve ever seen at a conference. Even as I approached a comatose state after hearing AI for the 37th time, it was nice to have a pretty map to soothe me.

Towards the end of the conference, they revealed that an artist (ScribeYak) had been doodling a representation of the whole thing. What an amazing idea!

As a fortunate coincidence, the conference was held at the Royal Geographical Society, which happens to be a stones throw away from the Blackett building (where I got my Master’s and PhD). After the talks, we went to the Union bar for some drinks. I couldn’t resist getting out my old captain’s tankard from my football days…

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