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Highlights from Purdue GIS Day 2024: Exploring GeoAI

November 8th, 2024

Purdue GIS Day 2024, with the theme of “Exploring GeoAI,” was a success and brought together over 180 students, academics, and industry professionals in a day filled with insightful talks, poster presentations, and networking opportunities. The event, hosted by Gang Shao, showcased the latest advancements in geospatial analysis and its applications across many disciplines. 

The conference featured two keynote speakers—Gregory Brunner, an experienced scientist, award-winning professor, and principal data scientist at Esri, a global market leader in GIS software; and Michael Johns, a lead geospatial product specialist at Databricks, a global data, analytics, and artificial intelligence company. Brunner spoke about the rapid growth of the AI model ecosystem and the potential impact it has and will have on GIS, and Johns discussed how to use Databricks to perform scaled spatial analysis while retaining full visibility and control over all of the underlying processes, code, models, and data lineage. Both Brunner and Johns enjoyed getting the opportunity to connect with students throughout the day and share their insights and professional experience with GIS. 

After his talk and having an opportunity to connect with students, Brunner said, “I think they are making the connections between the trends that I’m seeing, the direction Esri is going with GeoAI generative AI and what they’re doing with their own work. I hope that work continues and that they continue to make these observations and connections between what they see going on in the broadview spatial community and how it impacts their research, their work, and their interests.”

The schedule also included 14 five-minute lightning talks, presented by undergraduate and graduate students, demonstrating the depth of our student body’s research and innovation in geospatial fields. Additionally, 21 undergraduate and graduate students presented posters at the event, tying in their respective disciplines to the field of GIS. 

“I was really impressed with the quality of the posters and presentations. It feels like there’s a lot of grounding around real-world problems that speaks well of how students are being set up here through the program and I think there’s a lot of good questions that are being asked about how students take what they learned at the university and apply it at the level they aim to achieve,” said Johns, reflecting on his experience viewing the student poster presentations and lightning talks. 

We were also honored to hear from industry partners during four research and industry presentations and a career panel discussion that connected the practical applications of geospatial technologies between academia and industry. From learning about how to build an open geospatial data ecosystem to finding and accessing statewide GIS data, the speakers highlighted the relevance of these tools in real-world scenarios.

A special thanks to the following individuals for their involvement, participation, and professional insights shared with attendees during the panel discussion and/or their research and industry presentation:

• Gregory Brunner, principal data scientist at Esri
• Michael Johns,  lead geospatial product specialist
• Ryan Bowe, aviation project manager at Woolpert and president of Indiana Geographic Information Council
• Joan Keene, GIS director at Hamilton County, IN
• Phil Worrall, geospatial consultant at Philip Worrall LLC
• Brian DeKemper, enterprise account executive at Amazon Web Services
• Jinhin Cai, Ph. D. candidate
• Jinha Jung, associate professor of civil engineering
• Minyoung Jung, postdoctoral researcher in civil engineering
• Benjamin Hancock, senior web developer in agricultural and biological engineering
• Shaun Schooler, GIS program director
• Daniel Council, geographic information outreach coordinator

The day concluded by recognizing the best graduate and undergraduate student who had an outstanding lightning talk or poster presentation. Each winner was presented with a certificate and a $100 reward for their unique contributions to the field of GIS. 

Undergraduate award winners:

• Lightning talk: Shrithik Sekar, Environmental and Ecological Engineering | “Nonpoint Source Pollution Analysis Using ArcGIS Pro”
• Poster presentation: Andrew Thompson, Computer Science | “Evaluating the Use of LiDAR Traffic Data for Assessing Infrastructure”

Graduate award winners:

• Lightning talk: Margaret Deahn, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences | “How to (safely) land a robot on another planet: Mapping planetary missions from Venus to Mars”
• Poster presentation: Adebola Esther Adeniji, Forestry and Natural Resources | “Modeling suitable habitat for the Near Threatened Cerulean Warbler in the contiguous United States using ArcGIS and MaxENT”

Congratulations to our winners for their outstanding achievements, and to all of our GIS Day 2024 participants for their commendable successes and contributions to the field of Geographic Informations Systems. As we look forward to another inspiring event, please mark your calendars for next year’s conference, which will be held on November 6, 2025.