The keynote presentation will explore the dimensions of why GIS is a great career through the lens of Bill's career experiences. Come along for the journey and learn a couple of Latin phrases along the way. You will be challenged to think about whether and how any of what Bill learned might apply to you.

This unique session will take you on a journey through the evolution of lidar technology and how it has been instrumental in a number of significant discoveries throughout history. It will conclude with a focus on one of the most significant milestones as it relates to the user community today: when lidar was introduced to the natural resource arena and how this breakthrough ultimately led to the Congressionally funded United States Geological Survey (USGS) 3D Elevation Program (3DEP).

In this presentation I will explore four recently published maps of Grand Canyon National Park that owe their design inspiration to renowned mapmakers of the twentieth century. 

The first map, the “South Rim Pocket Map,” targets the majority of visitors who go only to the South Rim and stay there for four hours or less. I based this map on the 1972 “New York Subway Map” by Massimo Vignelli, which distorts geography in order to squeeze information into tight geographic areas. Out of necessity I did likewise for the “South Rim Pocket Map,” which had a print run of three million copies last year. 

My next map, “Hiking Below the Rims,” draws inspiration from Brad Washburn’s “Heart of the Grand Canyon” published in 1978 by National Geographic. I used a digital technique called texture shading to mimic the Swiss-produced rock hachuring found on Washburn’s map.

Up next in my talk is a map of the entire canyon made for the official park brochure. It features natural colors similar to those developed in the 1950s by USGS cartographer, Hal Shelton.

I will wrap things up with a panorama of the Grand Canyon that borrows a clever idea from late Austrian panoramist, Heinrich Berann. I warped a digital elevation model on a convex arc to create a hybrid 3D scene featuring a conventional map in the foreground and a panorama in the background. You can decide if it works.

This research investigated the geography and built environments of famous film production sets at the historic film studio Old Tucson in southern Arizona. Some famous movies filmed at this location include The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Three Amigos, and Tombstone. The team consisted of researchers from University of Arizona and Arizona State University. The team utilized the Esri software ArcGIS Pro, Collector for ArcGIS, and Drone2Map in coordination with high accuracy Bad Elf GPS and a DJI Phantom III unmanned aerial system to inclusively map the remarkable site. Additionally a GeoSlam LiDAR unit was leverage to collect street-level data and inside of the buildings. This presentation reviews the mapping methodology taken to effectively capture, processes, and analyze these data in the Esri ecosystem. Specifically the procedures of proper flight planning and ground control layout, effective GPS data collection, appropriate UAV data processing, and comprehensive data QA/QC are reviewed.

According to a 2017 Pew Research Poll, when asked how they would feel if they saw a drone flying close to where they live, relatively large shares of Americans say they would be curious (58%) or interested (45%). At the same time, around one-in-four (26%) say they would be nervous, and around one-in-ten say this would make them feel angry (12%) or scared (11%).   The sentiment in large companies mimics that of the majority of Americans; executives are curious and interested in the benefits of the rapidly evolving drone industry are cautiously moving faster to implement drone strategies. In working with large companies to implement drone programs, Juniper Unmanned has seen that skepticism about the ROI is often not the biggest objection internal champions face when launching or scaling a drone program.  Executives throughout these companies need to see a well-managed, efficient, safe and professional program that provides business value, encourages public acceptance, minimizes liability.

As part of new federal reporting requirements ADOT has been working with HERE and INRIX to collect real time data from personal devices.  This data is being leveraged also by local agenices to better understand system performance. ADOT worked with its local constituents to set targets to improve congestion and route reliability.  This presentation will discuss methods used to properly conflate the data to a route network, lessons learned and best practices that can be used to help others implement with ease.

This presentation provides an update and overview of AGIC and its statewide initiatives. 

"Data deluge" has become common phraseology for the phenomena sweeping across virtually every geospatial and remote sensing sub-discipline. Data from imagery or video, via high resolution cameras, or active sensors (i.e. lidar), deployed on drones, manned aircraft, or cube-sats, as well as instrumented field equipment and hand held devices are producing information at a historically unprecedented rate. Meanwhile, a gap in the knowledge of managers, stewards, domain scientists, and data scientists threatens our ability to adapt to rapidly warming climate and a growing population. Closing these gaps requires collaboration across disciplines: an understanding of cyberinfrastructure and computational thinking in order to tackle big data with large shared resources. This talk will provide a roadmap and a broad overview of exemplar communities that have successfully established their own cyberinfrastructure with open software, and strategies for harnessing the big data revolution.

https://github.com/tyson-swetnam/agic-presentation

ArcGIS Urban is a new product being developed by Esri to orchestrate urban development and make planning more creative and more productive. It is a collection of web-based and desktop tools to help you create and manage plans and projects, engage with community stakeholders, and reduce risk - resulting in timely decision-making. In this session we will introduce ArcGIS Urban and demonstrate how it can be used to streamline plan creation, visualize current projects, and support collaboration between the public and private sector.

The AZ Geocoding and Imputation Tool is a new (open source!) full service geocoding platform developed by the Arizona Department of Health Services. We all know the importance of good spatial data, but do you know how accurate your data is? When you see a 75% match do you really know what that means, do your data stewards? What happens with missing addresses and P.O. Boxes? AZGIT does much more than run a table through an ESRI product and take the results at face value. The AZGIT was designed to streamline the geocoding of large datasets, while enhancing the results, and empowering data stewards and analysts to get the most out of their data. Preprocessing, address standardization, and logging‚ -Check. Multiple data sources for better accuracy‚ -Check. Imputation at any scale‚ -Check.  Come learn about this awesome new tool, how it was created, and discover the ways it can help you.

AZGeo clearinghouse has fulfilled the role of providing a data clearinghouse for the State of Arizona for many years. The platform that it was built on has not seen a refresh of its hardware or software for almost four years. This has led to a stale environment that is difficult to use and lacks many of the features users have come to expect. To plan a sustainable path forward for the platform, the AZGeo Workgroup was formed. Join us to see what exciting changes are planned and learn how you can provide feedback.

Blockchain technology has been touted as the backbone of the new Internet. The potential disruptive nature of this technology behooves us, as government officials or GIS/IT professionals, to understand its technical constructs, its transformative implications as well as its current limitations.

After introducing the key concepts and the ecosystem of blockchain, the presenters will lead the audience in building a blockchain from newspapers. Hashing and mining are demonstrated along with comparisons to centralized constructs.

While Open Data itself can be about transparency, at a greater scale it's about building a better and more informed society. With ArcGIS Hub powered by Open Data, organizations can create Hub sites and pages that report progress via dynamic visualization capabilities as well as solicit feedback regarding the initiatives that matter most to their constituents. Come learn how organizations around the world engage with their communities to turn data into knowledge, after unlocking the data they work with every day.

Brian Brady will discuss cloud-based approaches to validating and maintaining NG data, including workflows, types of tools and illustrate the power of collaborative data editing via the Cloud.

Describe what information from ArcMap project is then translated into the properties displayed in an ArcGIS Rest Service.  I want to educate GIS professionals where details come from in the REST Service properties.

The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) is the surface water component of the U.S. Geological Survey's The National Map.  NHD is a detailed hydrographic network containing point data (springs, rapids), linear features (streams, canals) and polygons (lakes, reservoirs).  Recent enhancements to NHD have improved the data for AZ.  First, NHDPlus High Resolution (NHDPlus HR) adds detailed catchments for every stream segment and many value added attributes to enhance network navigation and analysis (such as flow volumes).  Stream classifications have been revised to identify more ephemeral streams.  The NHD content has been updated within National Forests and for other regions in AZ.  Finally, the new Markup Tool allows NHD users to submit suggested NHD edits to USGS for review and inclusion in the national database.  This presentation provides a review of NHD and details on these recent enhancements for NHD, all of which are available to users now.

The size and complexity of high resolution lidar topographic datasets can pose challenges for both end-users, as well as agencies tasked with curating these open datasets. OpenTopography is an initiative that strives to streamline hosting, discovery, and processing of lidar (and other topographic data) by leveraging high performance computing to enable data discovery, hosting and processing.   OpenTopography has partnered with several state and national agencies to increase the visibility, usage, and return on investment of their lidar collections. We will present several case studies demonstrating how streamlined access to lidar data  better serves organizational goals and stakeholders. With a growing user base of over 93,000 unique users, our goal is to continue to partner with public domain data holders to provide an intuitive platform for quick, and easy access to high resolution topographic data.

Each October for the past 11 years the Pima Association of Governments conducts a Bicycle and Pedestrian demographics and activity survey across the greater Tucson Region to provide usage and assessment statistics to assist in evaluating regional needs, street safety, and awareness. Averaging 95 locations per year with a total of 224 unique locations assessed, this effort provides fundamentally unique and critical information to a variety of transportation programs and initiatives conducted by PAG, member jurisdictions, and university researchers. This presentation focuses on the development and distribution of count locations across the county, the demographic variables assessed, how the data is stored and analyzed, and how the that information is made available to the public through our Bicycle and Pedestrian Data Explorer web application.

Many GIS professionals have been tasked with taking one polygonal dataset and attempting to convert it into another set of polygons, e.g. taking Census data collected by tract or block group and assigning it to Zip Codes. This process of assigning attributes from one set of polygons to another set of polygons with different sizes and shapes is called areal interpolation. The so-called "area-proportion" method is one of the simplest ways to do this. Unfortunately, our data almost never change predictably across our polygons, much less exhibit a uniform distribution. We know that aggregating or grouping data will inevitably cause bias depending upon the zones or districts used. This is true no matter which areal interpolation technique we use. However, there are many ways to substantially improve the quality of this process. Come to this session to learn about additional areal interpolation methods, the pros and cons of using them, and specific areal interpolation software tools.

Our Flood Control District sends out some 3,000 paper based Flood Hazard Information Sheets a year so at least partially automating the process can save much time. Modelling our business logic using ESRI's Survey123 and python has been a challenge. The talk will go over the development of a complex project using Survey123 and what we've learned along the way.

Half of annual precipitation in southern Arizona falls in convective thunderstorms associated with the North American Monsoon season (June 15 - September 30). Monsoon precipitation varies widely over distances equal to or smaller than the spacing of institutional rain gauges and the resolution of precipitation raster products. A more detailed spatial characterization of monsoon precipitation data is desirable for emergency responders and flood planners.  Denser point precipitation data for Arizona are available through the Rainlog citizen rain gauge network. A geospatial comparison of these data to institutional rain gauge data and a widely-used raster dataset was conducted using open-source tools to determine the fitness of Rainlog data for direct comparison with institutional data. Despite key differences in the datasets, the Rainlog data were found to represent a valuable supplement to institutional data that can be merged with institutional datasets for analysis.

This presentation is a review of the GIS Professional program by the GIS Certification Institute. We will discuss the certification process, history, exam and the vision of the future. We will discuss what it takes to become a certified GIS Professional today, what to expect from the test as well as some advice to students and young professionals.

Have you ever wished that you could assign attributes to GIS polylines based on their direction? Like, let's say single-line road networks. Attribute values can differ depending on the direction of travel: certain uphill segments of a road network may be impassable in the winter, while those same segments in the downhill direction would present no problem. There are cumbersome workarounds (like two-way linear referencing), but wouldn't it be great to have a GIS database structure that took linear directionality into account? Enter graph databases, a database model that focuses on node-to-node data relationships instead of just their connectivity. Attend this presentation and learn about a geospatial data storage technology that offers orders of magnitude faster processing times over traditional database systems.

This educational presentation will detail how mapping and GIS professionals are using high accuracy Bluetooth GNSS receivers with smartphones and tablets to collect and map GIS field assets at a level of accuracy and efficiency like never before. The latest advancements from US GPS, Russian GLONASS, European Galileo, and Chinese BeiDou will be detailed, as well as the latest developments in field Apps such as ESR Collector and Survey 123.  In addition, attendees will learn how mapping and GIS professionals are now achieving centimeter level accuracy, in real time, using local RTK GPS base station corrections. Finally, 3 different user success stories will be highlighted. The challenges faced, workflows transitioned, and successes achieved will be discussed.

ArcGIS Pro is a great tool to complete a brand new GIS project, but how do you deploy ArcGIS Pro within well-established teams of GIS professionals with decades of combined experience with other GIS applications. Come see how we created a grass roots effort to begin to test, study and deploy ArcGIS Pro within our organization.  We will provide insight into our journey towards adopting ArcGIS Pro, and offer some tips as to some of the things that worked (or did not work) for us.