In a rare historic moment, Congress understood geospatial technology’s important role would be key to support the new Department of Homeland Security.
Written by Nate Smith; edited and co-written by William Tewelow, GISP
If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger, but therein is the rub: You first have to avoid dying. Nothing sharpens the mind like trying to survive.
On Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001, the United States suffered a near mortal wound. In order to recover, there was no margin for error. Surviving depended upon getting it right. Failing to “connect the dots” again could prove fatal.
The cause, in large part, were organizational silos in the intelligence and security agencies and no structure upon which intelligence data could be shared across the silos. With terminal lucidity at failure’s dire consequences, in a rare historic moment, Congress, seldom praised for innovative thinking, understood geospatial technology’s important role and would be key for supporting the agency’s mission.
Click for an overview presentation on the GMO. (Image: DHS)
The government had to be restructured and given new tools and technologies to ensure our safety. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was the centerpiece of this effort bringing a number of established security focused organizations under its umbrella.
The creation of DHS was an unprecedented task in the modern era. Many of Congress’ recommendations were codified in the founding of the Geospatial Management Office (GMO) established within DHS.
Connecting the Geospatial Dots. The GMO’s mission was to create community, infrastructure, and the sharing of data and ideas ensuring future dots get connected to anticipate trends and stay ahead of adversaries avoiding another shock to our nation.
The early GMO was modestly funded and staffed with employees on short-term assignments from other agencies in borrowed office space at Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) headquarters.
The first geographic information officer, Ryan Cast, developed the work plan, putting emphasis on discovering what data and opportunities already existed and identifying activities that supported and enhanced the component agencies. Integrating the agencies capabilities and optimizing their interoperability was the focus of his leadership laying a strong foundation for future GIO’s to build upon.
Weathering Hurricane Katrina
The GMO was still finding its sea legs when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2004. Since expectations were low, they did not bear the brunt of the critics. The GMO, seeing the negative attention directed towards FEMA, created innovative partnerships with National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA, which was NIMA at the time) and the United States Geographic Survey (USGS) employing their prototype technology to assist the recovery and response community, who were looking for innovations to ensure wide access to data and tools.
Before and after Hurricane Katrina: Photos taken off the coast of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, show how the storm surge, estimated to have exceeded 20 feet in Waveland, destroyed homes and left only foundations. Trees have been denuded of all vegetation. (Photo: USGS)Before and after Hurricane Katrina:In the top image, taken in 1998, notice the Deep South Motel to the left and the apartment building to the right. The bottom image shows the same location on Aug. 31, 2005, two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. A small portion of the motel is only structure left standing. (Photo: USGS)
A key partnership was established between FEMA and Louisiana State University to develop a geospatial data clearinghouse, which proved to be useful to many agencies and researchers.
iCAV. One technical innovation in response to Katrina was the DHS Infrastructure Critical Asset Viewer (iCAV) interactive mapping platform branded as GIS for the Gulf.
iCAV was built on technology borrowed from NGA’s Palanterra Common Operational Picture (COP) system, repurposed for the DHS mission, providing map-based situational awareness.
From this operational experience, additional design elements were identified for improvement, including symbology on the front end and data modeling on the back end. These became central aspects of development for the GMO.
USNG. Katrina also highlighted the need for a more universally accepted referencing framework to assist field operations, planting the seeds for the development of a U.S. National Grid system (USNG).
I personally experienced the need for a USNG, having lived on the Mississippi Coast at the time. GIS in the government, especially the use of it domestically at the federal level was almost non-existent, and with all the landmarks and road signs gone, the entire coastal area was uncharted territory.
More than once I helped a lost Red Cross supply truck return to the main road.
Hurricane Harvey Hits Hard
Fast forward to Aug. 25, 2017, when there was a brief, collective sigh of relief as the full destructive force of Hurricane Harvey’s eye wall missed the highly populated areas of the Texas coast. The pause was brief. Coming into focus through rainfall observations and numerical weather models meteorologists and emergency managers understood another peril was imminent.
Harvey had lost its steering winds and would linger in the Houston area dumping over 50 inches of rain in the coming days. In Houston, there was alarm as this deluge would likely far exceed the engineered capacities of the channels and reservoirs and an epic flood was in the making. This anxiety was shared with the regional FEMA office and in the Washington, D.C. headquarters.
FEMA’s geospatial experts in D.C., having recently demonstrated their successful impact analysis approach in Louisiana, felt assured they could quickly grasp the magnitude of this event with high confidence, but were concerned about another type of flood — the flood of data and tools, as well as inquiries distracting them from their primary focus.
Partnerships, capabilities and expertise. Events such as these attract well intentioned and ambitious researchers and vendors seeking the time and attention of response leaders to share their resources and gain access to FEMA’s data. Even short conversations consume critical time.
These secondary groups often contribute valuable resources and services playing key roles in community learning and development so their outreach efforts need to be balanced.
Rather than ignoring these efforts, FEMA contacted the GMO to leverage their partnerships, capabilities and expertise to facilitate these exchanges. In one day, the GMO developed a publicly accessible portal and assigned a team of geospatial experts the responsibility to catalog and make discoverable all geospatial data related to Hurricane Harvey.
Over the following two weeks, this response became a model of transparency, innovation and collaboration, and the site is still available supporting research and providing an example for future events. The site was a great example of government getting it right, but it came at a price, and still there are two long shadows cast by towers no longer there.
Conclusion
From Greater Manhattan to Katrina’s desolation and the floods of Harvey, significant advances were on the horizon and expectations were on the rise for the GMO. In Part 2, we will explore this growth and see how these lessons and the efforts of many led to the current state of geospatial preparedness and capability in the DHS’ geospatial shop.
Geospatial Management Office, established by Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 Title VII, Subtitle B, Section 8201, Homeland Security Geospatial Information – Implemented through DHS Management Directive 4030, 11/12/2004.
Guest author Nate Smith is an independent consultant who has worked for over 25 years advancing the adoption of geospatial technology to disaster management, humanitarian response and natural disaster risk reduction.
Written by William Tewelow, GISP and Co-written by Jon Gustafson, GISP
Significant focus on infrastructure asset delivery and lifecycle must become a priority so that architects, engineers and construction (AEC) can leverage BIM systems for design, construction and management solutions.
Innovations in BIM applied to infrastructure construction projects will enable “smart” solutions. This article explores BIM for infrastructure insights and brings attention to closing the BIM divide between the vertical (buildings) and the horizontal (linear) infrastructure industries, such as roads, bridges and pipelines.
For smart systems to be applied to infrastructure, CAD needs to evolve to the point where those multi-dimensional models can integrate with geographic information systems (GIS). The larger the project, the more necessary it is for a seamless data transition from the local engineering scale to the municipal, regional or national reference systems.
Autodesk defines building information modeling (BIM) as an intelligent 3D model-based process that gives architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) professionals the insight and tools to more efficiently plan, design, construct and manage buildings and infrastructure.
It is like a GIS in many respects, but applied locally to a structure. It is able to do many common geospatial calculations. It is still an evolving technology, but it is clear that soon it will do for AEC and facilities management what GIS did for surveying and cartography.
A smart move
Systems have evolved augmenting our abilities with built-in applications that can integrate connected data and systems to enhance and extend our capabilities. These systems are termed smart, which has become the newest marketing buzzword.
Everything is getting the smart label. Along with the label is an expectation that the lines between the physical and the digital worlds are blurring as we slip ever nearer the veil wherein we will simultaneously co-exist in both worlds.
Smart also infers it is connected to the digital cloud, that seemingly infinite expanse measured by petaflops, into which artificial intelligent algorithms augment everything with contextually aware information overlaid atop our own experience of the world.
Of course, this view has its pitfalls and cautionary tales, and every step we take into the future we lose some connection with the past. For example, everyone can use a calculator, but are times tables even taught anymore? Automation leads to complacency.
When CAD was unimaginable
Let’s take a brief look backward. The year was 1978, my second year of high school. I took drafting class as an elective and would end up doing so for the rest of the time I was in high school, accumulating enough credit hours to graduate with a vocational degree equivalent in architectural design. Those were the days of drafting tables, slide rules, French curves, triangles, keen eyes and steady hands.
The last year of school, there was talk of something called computer-aided drafting or design (CAD) that would make all we were doing obsolete. It seemed impossible at the time. Especially after I took a brand-new summer course called computer programming. Computers were large, heavy, clunky things that had limited abilities. They were basically responsive text machines. Program something in BASIC, save it, and then from the DOS command window, run it over and over again.
I remember reams and reams of green and white paper two foot wide fed by geared teeth, and pages of pages of our coded programs that we would have to pour over looking for the mistake in the line of code. And, this long and lengthy code was merely to archive and sort information or make the computer draw a cat or some other object using “X”.
We would all stand around the dot matrix printer as line by line the image took shape on the printed page. There was that wondrous feeling of success creating something having first conceived it in the mind then, like digital-smiths, forging it in a non-physical space and holding it in our hands. But I could not understand how that blinking white cursor on a black screen could ever replace the rich colors and smoothed lines of the beautiful architectural drawings I had spent years learning.
I felt confident the stories of our trade being overtaken by CAD were greatly exaggerated. That lesson taught me that change is inevitable and far beyond our rational ability to comprehend what is possible based on our current understanding. I watched as computer-aided design did take over, giving engineering and architectural drawings multidimensional context.
Horizontal lags behind
Now, let’s jump back into the present. The horizontal industry is behind the vertical industry with respect to project management deliverables. In part, this disparity will be aided by the Geospatial Data Act which was passed into law on Oct. 5, 2018.
The linear model is approximately 10 years behind the vertical model, especially for above-ground assets and facilities. However, recent technology advancements — augmented reality (AR), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), indoor lidar and modeling software — and influential advocacy initiatives (such as public agency innovation programs like smart cities) are starting to enable digitally integrated management of asset information more holistically. Indeed, there is urgency for these linear systems to be adequately captured.
The Feb. 6 explosion from a ruptured gas line in San Francisco showed the dangers of not having an adequate map of the subsurface infrastructure. Fortunately, no one was injured, but damage from subsurface infrastructures can be deadly like the San Bruno disaster in 2010.
Gas line explosion damage in San Bruno, California. (Image: U.S. Department of Transportation)
The “Call Before You Dig” law was enacted for this very reason. At the very least, problems with linear infrastructure can negatively impact a city’s quality of life and budget such as a water main break or a broken sewer line.
Looking ahead 5-10 years, horizontal infrastructure designers and installation companies will use 3D modeling tools as standard practice in an open data sharing environment allowing other networks to access the information and add it to their own projects.
Imagine a county’s 811 system, the universal number to call before you dig, and instead of calling, it is an app on a users’ phone. A requester submits a short form and receives a text when the application is approved, usually within minutes, and is then able to view an augmented reality overlay of the subsurface infrastructure in the vicinity beneath the ground where the requester’s project is taking place.
This approach has economic benefits, providing faster turn-around times, increasing citizen engagement and improving the safety of communities. Over time, it is a “collect once and use many times” system — it will reduce demand on city staff and billable hours, saving cities money.
The same technology is also available for construction projects, providing schematics to see pipes, ducts and wires in walls, floors and ceilings. This is not science fiction. Existing condition data is already being collected in 3D, so it is logical to anticipate engineering design will be prompted to support ongoing 3D collection efforts and begin doing work in 3D.
Using BIM from the outset of a project builds this into a system that can be accessed later. However, the use of these advanced augmented reality technologies are limited to certain geographic areas with enough funding and technical capabilities. This is primarily in large urban areas, new growth areas, and redeveloping areas of a city; however, large infrastructure projects such as pipelines, railroads, highways, bridges and hyperloops will have to develop high-resolution models that will capture some of the surrounding areas and benefit all communities along the routes helping to bridge the disparity of the BIM divide.
In time, as costs come down and the technology improves and becomes easier to use, all communities will benefit from and incorporate this emerging technology.
Photo: Krauchanka Henadz/Shutterstock.com
BIM for intelligent infrastructure: sensors and structures
Critical to BIM for smart infrastructure is the fusion of sensors, data and infrastructure. Sensors will be embedded within and affixed to physical assets for the purposes of collecting data and self-monitoring for machine learning, maintenance and repair. Networking internet-enabled devices that actively and passively sense is at the core of the internet of things (IoT). Data from these IoT devices will improve physical asset management, creating unique opportunities for agencies, especially when considering how machine learning can discern patterns in data to detect anomalies, and improve safety such as self-aware systems that can heat road surfaces when precipitation is detected in below-freezing temperatures.
The digitizing of the physical world will take place with greater demand for higher resolution capabilities. Physical structures will require an exact computerized replica, referred to as a Digital Twin. An effort is underway by the Open AR Cloud Organization (OARC) to create an open standard for this digital twin of the world, so that applications and innovation will not be hampered by proprietary systems.
Yohan Baillot, CEO of ARcortex and founder of the Open AR Cloud, explained if there is no open standard, something developed in one system may not align with applications viewed in another system. This could be costly and disastrous for transportation and construction projects. Point in case would be the above example of Call Before You Dig,if a gas pipeline is incorrectly depicted and a work crew ruptured it.
This Digital Twin is both a high-resolution GIS and a basemap for both vertical and linear BIMs to connect into. Knowing the location of subsurface assets is foundational to the increasing investment into smart cities, which is forecast to become a $3.5 trillion industry within the next seven years.
David Rouse (2017) defines smart cities as cities that use information and communication technologies to increase operational efficiency, share information with the public, and improve both the quality of government services and public well-being. Using smart devices, communication among the devices and with the entities managing those devices provide deeper insight on device behavior and the ability to develop algorithms to change device parameters using other sensors in close proximity.
All of this data can be used to optimize asset performance over time. In the U.S., San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Jose all have active smart city projects advancing connectivity (Nominet 2018).
Intelligent infrastructure augments users’ abilities by the multiplicity of sensor arrays (self-monitoring devices, RFID, Wi-Fi, GPS receivers, cameras, etc.) communicating with decision-support systems as well as other sensors — the internet of things (IoT). For instance, high mast cameras combined with artificial intelligence algorithms for object recognition deployed along a stretch of highway allows stakeholders to extract important insights of that physical asset (such as surface condition, traffic flows and vehicle counts) and provide that information in real time to emergency response crews, police and security, maintenance vehicles, network-connected vehicles and others.
Digital integrations
Intelligent transportation systems are entering the next generation enabling vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) interactions. The U.S. Department of Transportation (2018) website states,
V2I technologies capture vehicle-generated traffic data, wirelessly providing information such as advisories from the infrastructure to the vehicle that inform the driver of safety, mobility or environment-related conditions. State and local agencies are likely to install V2I infrastructure alongside or integrated with existing ITS equipment.
The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) endeavors to provide open standards and certification to make connectivity easier, more reliable and more secure by bridging IoT ecosystems.
Specifically, OCF specifications can be used to develop vehicle data model translators that enable remote fleet management for autonomous vehicles, OBD device interactions (vehicle performance monitoring) and crowdsourcing of data models for continued development (Open Connectivity Foundation 2018). Currently, many transit agencies are seeing growth in equipping rolling stock with IoT devices including GPS, Wi-Fi and traffic light preemption, which improves fleet optimization and data accessibility, and enables better congestion management as well as increased system performance (American Public Transportation Association 2018).
Crowdsourcing data from web-based and mobile applications is a popular public engagement mechanism. Crowdsourcing at its most basic level is the aggregation of (big) data from a large group of people. From an asset management perspective, leveraging the general public’s direct and indirect collection of data brings deep insight into asset performance and condition.
The data collected provides the ability to better plan transportation systems with demand modeling, predictive analytics, event response times to identify those impacted and determine where additional capacity is needed, and to provide personalized services (such as through email and text) including weather-related events impacting the commute.
Applications such as Waze empowered the public with the ability to report hazards, construction zones and other concerns on the road and shoulder that DOTs can use to dispatch resources to address the situation/issues quickly. Furthermore, Alavi and Buttlar (2019) identified sensing capabilities of smartphones and their crowdsourcing power for monitoring several distinct civil infrastructure systems such as pavement.
Conclusion
In summary, BIM for infrastructure overlaying a robust GIS plays a critical role for supporting advanced technologies for integrating dynamic IoT and crowdsourced data.
Infrastructure asset owners are encouraged to recognize the importance of BIM-oriented policy and practices and invest in required initiatives that make incremental progress towards a smart infrastructure vision.
BIM is the foundation of intelligent infrastructure and defines the backbone of smart cities.
References
Alavi, Amir H., and William G. Buttlar. 2019. “An overview of smartphone technology for citizen-centered, real-time and scalable civil infrastructure monitoring.” Future Generation Computer Systems 93: 651-672. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.10.059.
Jon Gustafson, PS, CFedS, PMP, GISP is a management consultant with one of the world’s largest professional services companies, WSP (https://www.wsp.com). He is an accomplished business-oriented technical professional consistently recognized as an industry leader in multi-jurisdictional land surveying practice, geospatial policy development and program/project management. He helps his clients address infrastructure technology deployment challenges by developing effective recommendations/guidelines focused on advancing civil integrated management practices and innovations. Some recent projects include developing data governance strategies for major infrastructure programs, conducting applied research on digital project delivery initiatives, advancing UAS integration, and formulating geospatial technology strategies for a public agency.
Geographic information systems and augmented reality are a part of our daily lives, so much so, we hardly notice them. GPS World columnist William Tewelow explores how these technologies will continue to change our lives.
Geographical information systems (GIS) and augmented reality (AR) have become a part of our daily lives, so much so that we hardly notice them. Those of us in the profession make our living by them; millions, soon billions more in the consumer world benefit from them without even realizing they are there.
The world is filled with data. Using AR, that data can be draped in front of us in a tapestry based upon our individual needs and interests. Applications multiply daily.Many physical tools now in use will become virtual tools; workspaces, living spaces and the commutes between them (if they even exist at all) will change almost unrecognizably.
The world is poised to become an amazing and magical place.
Before we jump whole hog into the future — something that AR assuredly enables us to do — a glance back at the past can fill out our understanding of these great tools, GIS and AR — each great in and of its own, but virtually invincible when combined. Come with me down the corridors of history . . .
When Great Swords Clash
World War II was a fight against global domination — mankind’s greatest struggle for survival. Tyranny or freedom hung in the balance. The greatest minds raced to harness the powers of nature and science, plying them towards victory. This culminated in the invention of the ultimate weapon, The Great Sword, able to lay waste entire cities and ending the Second Great War in 1945, the year the world returned to peace. Freedom reclaimed the throne, euphoria spread — but the celebration was short-lived.
Kazakhstan. (Map: CIA archives)
In the summer of 1949, the world split in half. In the United States, families gathered around the radio for comedy and drama before putting the children to bed, but on the other side of the world, deep in the center of a faraway, unknown land, on a cool Monday morning as the sun lazily rose over a barren terrain, a second blazing sun rose into the sky. The Soviet Union unsheathed and brandished its own Great Sword, making remote Kazakhstan the center of the world in that brief moment. The sound of the bomb was heard in Washington, D.C., and phones throughout the city rang into the night. Russian spies had stolen America’s atomic secrets. Nuclear annihilation was a reality. The Cold War had begun.
The threat of nuclear weapons in Soviet hands was too great a risk. The United States had to know the extent of the threat. Satellites did not yet exist. Airplanes had limited capabilities. The only way to know what was going on inside the Iron Curtain was intelligence assets on the ground, but the Soviets controlled the ground.
Play Your Aces High
Penetrating the skies over the Soviet Union became the top priority. In 1954 Operation AQUATONE began to build the first U-2 spy plane to fly at an altitude above the limits of enemy air defenses.
U-2 spy plane. (Photo: U.S. Air Force)
But Operation Aquatone was only half the challenge. In the vacuum-tube and wet-film era, building a camera small enough to fit on the U-2 and able to take pictures at the required resolution from so high an altitude was needed. These two efforts took place simultaneously on opposite sides of the country. Operation Aquatone took place in the Mojave Desert at what is now famously known as Area 51, and Operation HTAUTOMAT, the photogrammetry and photo-interpreters effort took place in Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Both programs came together successfully in 1956 and the U-2 made its first reconnaissance flight over Eastern Europe.
Almost immediately, the demand for photo intelligence skyrocketed. In 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first manmade satellite to circle the Earth. Sputnik’s beeps could be understood in every language. Each of the beeps said, I am here above you no matter where on Earth you are, ultimately asking the question, What if I was a nuclear warhead? This elevated the need to surveil Khrushchev’s nuclear weapons capabilities. The Space Race had begun.
Five of a Kind Beats a Straight Flush
Satellite imagery from Discoverer XIV. (Photo: National Reconnaissance Office)
The U-2 flew unimpeded anywhere in the world for four years. But that ended in May 1960 when Captain Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot was shot down 300 miles east of Moscow. In August that same year the world sat transfixed watching the Soviet show trial of the captured U-2 pilot. President Eisenhower took full advantage of the diversion to launch the Discoverer XIV satellite, the first fully operational reconnaissance satellite under the CORONA program. A day later the satellite dropped its first payload, a 20-pound capsule of film. It was retrieved over the Pacific by a C-119 Flying Boxcar. It contained 1.6 million square miles of Soviet territory, providing more imagery than the entire U-2 program combined.
The Photo Interpreters Division (PID) was established to deal with the huge volume of imagery. It was renamed the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). NPIC used an ALWAC III computer, advanced for its time, but it ran on vacuum tubes and punch cards. It could calculate size and distance in imagery. Over 12 years, the CORONA program collected 2.1 million feet of film, but its processing could not keep pace with the flood of incoming imagery.
Development of the TX-2 computer in 1959 altered this picture, but two problems persisted. First, computers’ limitations prevented an analyst from working directly with imagery. Additionally, finding something noteworthy in an image was only half the problem; the other half was piecing together where on a map the feature belonged. Interior maps of the Soviet Union were vast, featureless, and not well developed.
Let Your Wild Horses Run
MIT graduate student Ivan Southerland solved the first problem, inventing a graphical user interface (GUI) on a TX-2 computer for his doctoral thesis, thereby revolutionizing computer graphics, computer-generated imagery (CGI), and computer-aided design (CAD). Southerland soon found himself heading the government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to further develop the GUI. His innovations greatly advanced programs such as NPIC, allowing photo-interpreters to work directly with imagery displayed on a computer screen.
A visionary, Southerland saw computer-generated synthetic worlds merging man and computer; he created what became known as the Sword of Damocles, the first augmented-reality (AR) headset. It was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling on cables in a big swindling contraption, hence its name. The Sword of Damocles evolved into the helmet-mounted display that military pilots use today, and became the foundation for development of Google Glass, Oculus Rift, Microsoft’s HoloLens and Meta.
Several years later, Southerland went to Harvard as an associate professor, continuing his work with computer graphics. During his tenure, a student working in Southerland’s computer graphics and spatial analysis lab saw the potential of combining CGI and CAD with his own knowledge of environmental science and landscape architecture. That student was Jack Dangermond, who created Esri in 1969.
Solitaire Takes Two
Thanks to Jack Dangermond and Ivan Southerland, GIS and AR are a part of our daily lives, so much so, we hardly notice them. They have changed how we watch sports. Long gone are the days of John Madden with an electronic pen scribbling out plays with great wit but terrible penmanship. Now, football shows a red scrimmage line on every play and the first down line in blue. We wonder why they have to take out the chains to measure the down because we can clearly see it on screen, but on the field they don’t have the luxury of AR.
Game highlights show a player encircled in a column of light for the commentator’s in-depth coverage. Live imagery projects the commentator into the image of the replay as if he or she is on the field in the midst of the action. Further back, advertisements appear on sideboards of the stadium stands, but only to television viewers. To those physically present at the game, the advertisements do not exist. You can observe this during an instant replay. Take notice of the sideboards during the game and then look at them during the replay. It is a blank, green board — same with baseball.
AR makes it easier to watch a hockey puck with a blurred red tail as it zips across the ice. In golf, a light green glow surrounds the ball on long drives enhancing our entertainment experience.
AR works by knowing where the observer is and where the observer is looking and integrating that information with line-of-sight data. Smartphones provide that capability, ushering in the age of personal AR apps. My personal favorite is FlightAware to track airplanes by aiming a phone’s viewfinder at the aircraft to know the altitude, speed and other information.
For identifying celestial objects, SkyMap helps find a planet, star or constellation. Real-world AR gaming is upon us, the most famous being PokemonGo. A more interesting game is Ingress, which uses real-world landmarks (featured in Nov 2017 article, Game-based learning improves training, engagement). MapBox has a location-based AR platform to support gaming.
Figments of Imagination
Museums consider AR the next frontier. Imagine putting on a pair of AR glasses and seeing things come alive. Stand on the Moon or Mars, or fly in the cockpit of an X-1B, the first supersonic aircraft. Go to an art museum and step into Van Gogh’s painting, Starry Night; the world around you becomes iridescent, globular, and thickly swirled in bold colors. (See Alex Mayhew’s exhibit, ReBlink at the Art Gallery of Ontario).
Walk through a park and statues become human, blink their eyes and speak to you. Dinosaurs, typically static monoliths, roar to life. It is no longer imagination. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has an exhibit using your phone to do that very thing. It might seem as if AR is the future, but it is also revealing the past. Archaeology is using AR to see ancient cities as they once were. Those experiences enhance our learning, but what about more practical daily uses?
The world is filled with data. Using AR, that data can be draped in front of us in a tapestry based upon our individual needs and interests. That data can be passive, like location information such as place names appearing in the field of view as icons helping guide you where to go. No more looking down at a smartphone trying to figure out which way to walk. A light blue transparent dotted walking path will lie before you, leading to the icon above the door of the place you are going. Active AR, on the other hand, try to engage you, such as advertisements. A box will seemingly glitter and glow mesmerizing a person into buying it. Another will have tiny figures dancing on it enticing a customer. Look at a menu and the items will appear real for you to inspect before you order. The world is about to become an amazing and magical place.
How about workstations? They’ll be a thing of the past. No need for a monitor in the physical sense. It can be created as large as needed and placed anywhere as well a virtual keyboard. Interface directly and more naturally with the world around you.
Many of the physical tools now in use will become virtual tools, such as a measuring tape, a ruler, a laser level, a GPS receiver, and even pen and paper to some degree. They will just be apps in your smartglasses, call it AR-ware — mere programs, what we used to call figments of our imagination. Grab an AR-ware pen and paper and the handwriting appears perfectly normal but it is just digital text: save it, email it, or print it. Make up new tools or download tools as we do apps on our smartphones. Imagination will be the limiting factor.
Upload CAD blueprints and schematics into an AR generator and look around the house with x-ray vision and see inside or through walls and floors. A plumber can see pipes in the wall, their sizes and what they are made of. An electrician can see the wiring, frames, and pass-through holes. An insurance adjuster can look at damage, take notes in AR then pass everything along to the company who passes it on to the contractor.
Take that same scenario and scale it up to the size of a city. AR allows companies to see the vast network of utilities and assets hidden in the subsurface. The water company can know exactly where its water and sewer lines are located, as well as what other utilities are nearby? Contractors can see exactly where to dig, and just as importantly, where not to dig. INTUS Inc. is a leader in the rapidly growing field of subsurface assets using GIS and AR technology. INTUS’s CEO, Dimitris Agouridis, calls it “intelligent infrastructure.” He goes on to say the technology supports the Call Before You Dig law, and helps avoid costly mistakes that can destroy property, the environment and people’s lives. It saves time, money and resources, and reduces outages due to repairs that inconvenience residents. It also increases a city’s resiliency after a disaster.
The fascinating reality ahead of us is mere moments away measured in months and years. We will walk into museums and experience them in new ways. We will stand in an ancient place and see it reconstructed to its former glory from eons ago. We will work using smartglasses in ways we can only begin to imagine. Road crews will do precision repairs. One day, I will write this article, but not on a laptop, and instead sitting in a world part real, part virtual tied together by a perfect symmetry of place and time. A magical future awaits us created by merging GIS and AR.
My next column, coming in March, will go further into augmented reality and other emerging technologies that rely upon geographic information to build the next generation of intelligent infrastructure.
“The benefits of geospatial technology are truly untold. However, when our federal agencies use geospatial data, different agencies can acquire duplicative information and waste precious taxpayer resources in the process. I am glad House leadership listened to industry stakeholders and included the Geospatial Data Act in the FAA Reauthorization Bill of 2018. This will streamline the collection of this data across the federal government while saving money, improving information accuracy, and providing a more modern system for collecting and sharing geospatial data.”
— Rep. Bruce Westerman, Arizona, introducing the Geospatial Data Act to the House of Representatives, 115th Congress
On Oct. 3, I was at a crowded after-hours event with friends in Washington, D.C., standing in a darkened corner of the room where I could both see and hear the speaker. A man approached me, a featureless silhouette in the dark tapping me on the shoulder. He introduced himself as an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey, and said he heard I was with the Federal Aviation Administration.
He asked if I knew anything about the FAA Reauthorization Bill because it had language from the Geospatial Data Act in it. His mention was the first I had heard of it. It came as a surprise. I expected a few passages from the Bill but nothing more; and, in fact, I did not expect it to even come up for a vote this year because of the divisive political atmosphere.
Two days later, on Friday, Oct. 5, President Donald Trump, along with 11 high ranking officials, signed the FAA Reauthorization Bill into law with overwhelming support. The Senate passed it 93-6, and the House passed it 398-23. The bipartisanship of this bill should have made the news – both sides of the contentious isles coming together to pass so important a piece of legislation. It happened without fanfare or recognition aside from certain circles, but within H.R. 302 was contained the entire Geospatial Data Act 2018.
An email from the Maryland State Geographic Information Committee (MSGIC) alerted me. Not even the FAA sent an email praising the aspects of the bill beyond what immediately applied to the FAA. If the stranger from USGS had not forewarned me I would not have been keen to the press release and overlooked its significance.
Most people are unaware that the Geospatial Data Act (GDA) is now law. Even fewer realize that the GDA applies not only to the FAA, but to all government agencies except for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.
The Long and Winding Road of the Geospatial Data Act
Attempts at creating a unifying federal geospatial policy can be traced to shortly after the Civil War. There was no powerful, central, national unifying authority before then. The states were sovereign entities with their own maps, and place names did not have to be agreed upon between states.
This is visible today in the names of Civil War battles, many of which are named differently by each warring side; for example, the bloody Battle of Antietam is the same as the Battle of Sharpsburg, and the Battle of Bull Run is the same as the Battle of Manassas. Upon those hallowed grounds so many died that the dual names exist because they were paid for in blood.
War drives the need for intelligence. Geography is of paramount importance for generals. The 1860s was a boom time for surveyors and cartographers because of the Civil War and the American Indian Wars.
Additionally, in the 1860s Alaska was purchased from Russia and America built the first transcontinental railroad. Those geopolitical events changed the country, and the government needed to inventory the emerging nation.
Many companies were employed to do the work, but they were not coordinated, costing excess amounts of money. This prompted the establishment of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1879 to oversee the survey companies.
Roosevelt on a digging machine during construction of the Panama Canal, circa 1908. (Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Problems were identified among the many maps created. Place names and spelling changed from map to map. The country needed a coordinated effort to deal with these discrepancies. President Benjamin Harrison addressed this with Executive Order 28 (27-A) in 1890, establishing the Board of Geographic Names.
In 1906, during the middle of building the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt — who had direct experience with survey and mapping companies — signed Executive Order 493 renaming the Board of Geographic Names to the U.S. Geographic Board and adding to its purpose reducing duplicative survey and mapping efforts.
In 1956 the National Interstate and Defense Highways Bill was signed, beginning the interstate network we enjoy today. Building the interstates was a huge expense, and like before, many survey companies were involved. Anticipating these challenges in 1953 President Eisenhower, the Office of Management and Budget wrote Circular A-16, which identified better coordination acquiring geographic information and reducing duplicate efforts as ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
In 1990 during the months leading up to Gulf War I, which showed geospatial precision’s awesome power and forever changed the face of war, also brought changes to OMB Circular A-16 for more domestic purposes. The circular was revised, reflecting the influence of the digital era and establishing the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to promote the coordination of geospatial data.
Recognizing the importance of geospatial information systems (GIS), on April 11, 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12906: Coordinating Geographic Data Acquisition and Access: The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The executive branch continued to lead the government’s efforts to advance a unified geospatial policy.
When 9/11 Happened
Seven years later, in June 2001, Congress attempted to pass its first federal geospatial policy, but Sept. 11 changed everything. The greatest terrorist attack in U.S. history made everything else pale by comparison. National security and intelligence became the focus.
Congress tried again in 2003, the same year the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) changed its name to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), but Gulf War II and the Global War on Terrorism stole center stage.
In 2005, Congress tried again, but to no avail. The bill changed names several times. The contents evolved. Attempts to introduce the bill went dormant until 2012 when it stalled again without support. Proponents continued reintroducing the bill under various names in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
In 2015 it made a second debut with the name Geospatial Data Act (GDA) and maintained that name going forward. The GDA was reintroduced in 2016, twice in 2017 and again in 2018. In total, the bill was introduced more than a dozen times since 2001. Finally, 139 years since the founding of USGS, a federal geospatial policy is now the law of the land.
You Have an Opportunity
“This legislation will significantly address how location intelligence is organized and disseminated and will foster continued strength in our industry’s partnership with government users.” — Jack Dangermond, Esri founder and CEO
It takes courageous leadership to get legislation passed. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. This great “tech-tonic” shift happened during our working lives. We can all say we were there when the world changed. This is a golden opportunity. Knowledge is power; however, knowledge is only potential power — real power is action. Step up, volunteer, and lead the change. Your agency needs you. The country needs you. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by.
Your first step is to read the Geospatial Data Act 2018 contained within the FAA Reauthorization Act, Title VII, Subtitle F: Geospatial Data, Sections 751-759. Become familiar with the GDA. Learn who the points of contact are for your agency. Make yourself known. Be a leader. When others see chaos, leaders see opportunity.
Economic Impact of the Geospatial Data Act 2018
“The economic benefits of smart infrastructure investment are long-term competitiveness, productivity, innovation, lower prices, and higher incomes, while infrastructure investment also creates many thousands of American jobs in the near-term.”
— White House, National Economic Council and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, July 2014
Since Roger Tomlinson first created a geographic information system in the 1960s, GIS has become a multi-billion dollar global industry. By 2020, it is forecast to be nearly a half-trillion dollars annually. The global GIS market is expected to double in seven years.
GeoBuiz estimates that GIS influences 20 percent the world’s entire $80.7 trillion global annual production. According to the Countries Geospatial Readiness Index, the United States leads the world in GIS. What is amazing is that all these estimates were made prior to the passage of the GDA — the gale force winds that have thus far blown will soon become a hurricane.
The sweet spot of opportunity is the forward edge of a growing industry. In the mid-90, the growth of the geospatial industry was led by state and local government (See GeoIntelligence Insider: In Jack Maple’s Steps – Fighting Crime with GIS, May 2018). In the mid-2000s, growth accelerated due to the intelligence and military communities. The next big boom in GIS begins now as the federal government complies with the GDA. There will be an even longer growth trend internationally as other countries make their own conversions.
It is a common adage that forecasts usually overestimate the near term and underestimate the long-term, especially in regard to technology. Consider how one man’s idea to sell books online in 1995 made him the wealthiest man in the world 23 years later, or how a simple search engine in 1998 is now a global behemoth. Of course, those references are to Jeff Bezos of Amazon and to Google.
And, consider the impact GPS has made since May 1, 2000, when President Clinton discontinued Selective Availability, opening GPS to the masses. Four years later, in June 2005, Google Earth was launched. The iPhone came out two years later. Then, a year later, Google Maps with real-time navigation was released.
Businesses like Uber that depend on GPS and GIS began in 2012. Now, industries such as drones and autonomous vehicles are on the verge of exponential growth.
Apply a similar trajectory to GIS and combine it with smart technologies like the internet of things (IoT), open data, data science, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other emerging technologies and the growth potential is unprecedented, not to mention the infrastructure rebuild of America about to take place.
An Economic Analysis of Transportation Infrastructure Investment – White House, July 2014, National Economic Council and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. (Image: WhiteHouse.gov)
Smart technologies will play a huge role in rebuilding the United States infrastructure like sensors, advanced materials, self-aware neural networks, IoT devices, energy recapture systems, smart lighting, and more; many such technologies will be connected geospatially.
This will require an advanced 3D Smart Grid Reference System (3D SGRS), a term I coined in 2015 when I worked at the Department of Transportation and began developing a crowdsource application for the National Address Database. I saw it becoming the framework for a 3D SGRS, enabling pinpoint accuracy of locations in X-Y-Z.
I can cover the 3D SGRS in a future article. I write about it here because it will be required in order to modernize America’s infrastructure.
Before passing any infrastructure bills, it is necessary to have a sound geospatial policy to avoid the misspending identified by the previous administrations mentioned earlier. The GDA, in essence, is the first step to modernize America. A brief overview of proposals sitting before Congress is an indicator of the economic tsunami about to be unleashed now that the GDA has been established.
Legislation has been introduced for establishing infrastructure bonds and banks for investing in infrastructure projects. Individual bills are for railroads, land, air, and sea ports; intermodal freight transfer stations, highways, critical infrastructure, rural development and stormwater systems, including water retention ponds and reservoirs that make up a large part of city and suburban green space. There are bills to fund pollution prevention programs.
Infrastructure cybersecurity is also addressed. There are bills for job creation, including employing disabled veterans in transportation. There is even a bill for proclaiming a National Infrastructure Week.
Once these legislative efforts begin getting passed, a tsunami of economic growth will be released unlike few alive have ever seen.
The Geospatial Data Act – A Matter of Necessity
“The Geospatial Data Act will save taxpayer dollars, increase government efficiency, and unlock innovation in the public and private sectors.” — Congressman Seth Moulton, Massachusetts, co-signer of the Geospatial Data Act to the House of Representatives, 115th Congress
Rebuilding America is one of the boldest, grandest and costliest undertakings the country has seen. Being one of the costliest, one has to ask where the money is going to come from.
The GDA will create entrepreneurs, new products and services, and job growth, which will generate revenue. Many infrastructure-related bills have tax incentives built into them. Money will come from the economic restructuring of trade deals currently taking place with many of the United States’ trading partners. Money will also come from America’s oil and gas renaissance.
Outline of the Geospatial Data Act 2018
This article put the Geospatial Data Act into context, but it would not be complete if it did not at least outline the major provisions of the new law.
These are the primary tenets of the GDA:
It establishes the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
It establishes the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC)
It establishes the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)
It establishes the National Spatial Data Asset data themes (NSDI-dt)
It establishes GeoPlatform as the clearinghouse for geospatial data
It sets Geospatial Data Standards.
Senator Orrin Hatch, who introduced the bill to the Senate four times since 2015, called it, “…a good-governance bill that will bring structure and Congressional oversight to federal geospatial data spending, accounting, and usage. The GDA will:
Dramatically reduce duplicative spending and, according to the Government Accountability Office, save the federal government billions of dollars;
Bolster federal emergency response capabilities by enabling smarter, more efficient disaster relief;
Improve infrastructure planning nationwide by providing state and local governments with access to higher-quality, more robust data.
The bill is supported by over 65 universities, industry groups, trade associations, companies, and state and local stakeholders, including the National Association of Counties and National League of Cities.”
Some of the stakeholders Sen. Hatch referred to are Bert Granberg, president of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC), who stated, “From transportation, to natural resources, to homeland security, map-based digital information has quietly become mission critical to how work gets done and to future economic growth. We need an efficiency and accountability framework to build, sustain and share geographic data assets for the entire nation. The GDA delivers just that, and our members appreciate Representative Westerman’s leadership.”
Molly Schar, executive director of NSGIC, shared her thoughts, saying, “The Geospatial Data Act has been a top legislative priority for NSGIC for several years. We have worked with state governments, Congressional offices, federal agencies, and many other stakeholder groups committed to building more resilient communities by ensuring they will have access to the consistent high-quality data they need to do their jobs,”
And, after the bill’s passage she proclaimed, “It was a big win for the entire geospatial community and quite a team effort!”
For more information
This report has given you the background and the context of the Geospatial Data Act. To become intimately familiar with the GDA, I highly recommend reading the Congressional Research Service Report about GDA 2018, released Oct. 22.
June’s Geointelligence Insider article on Jack Maple was the human interest article. One of the readers of June’s article had the opportunity to meet Jack Maple. I appreciate the feedback. This month’s article is based upon the recommendation of Geospatial Solutions Managing Editor Tracy Cozzens to cover the technical side of GIS and crime fighting.
Recap
Fighting crime with GIS sounds simple enough — map where the crimes are happening and where the bad guys are and send in the cops. That would be a gross over simplification. As always, there’s more to the case.
The first CompStat was founded in the pre-internet days of 1994 on a Commodore 64, harkening back to the days of 128-MB floppy disks and MS-DOS, a Jurassic period of computer evolution that marked some of the first steps into crime fighting’s digital era. The graph above is the current CompStat 2.0 from the NYPD. It is a GIS-based system, interactive, user-friendly and available to the public. Take note of the highlighted number.
Since CompStat was introduced, crime has fallen precipitously. As of this writing (Aug. 25, 2018) New York City has 183 reported murders year to date. By comparison, in 1990, prior to CompStat, there were 217 murders per month on average. More murders were committed per month in 1990 in New York City than what it will experience in all of 2018. Murders have dropped nearly 90 percent. In other words, nine out of 10 who would otherwise have been killed are alive to return to their families, parents, classmates and colleagues, and friends. The difference is staggering, providing tangible proof geospatial science is a benefit to humanity.
The arsenal of geospatial applications available for the crime fighter is enough to make any superhero envious. The list of these high-tech, integrated intelligence systems push the limits of science fiction.
The underlying strength of these systems is the robust GIS/GPS platform they are built on. Security cameras are geospatially connected to the network with dynamic mapping capabilities. This allows the surveillance video to be overlaid on GIS software in order to interact with more information and create actionable intelligence.
Cameras use a host of software algorithms that are able to recognize aggressive behavior, patterns, anomalies, change detection, biometric features, objects and text. Systems can integrate real-time information like social media feeds as well as live video, including facial recognition software scans for wanted individuals in real time. This information is shared with police officers in the field.
Police cars are becoming mobile command centers outfitted with a suite of sensors, and will eventually include drones. Police officers wear smart glasses augmenting information about who they are looking at in an intelligence and location-based context.
The police officer’s belt is Bluetooth enabled, connecting all these devices, as well as monitoring the officer’s vital signs. The officer’s gun is also Bluetooth enabled, reporting when it is drawn, the direction it is pointed and if it fired. The gun also comes with a chip for tracking purposes and to ensure only the officer it belongs to can fire the weapon.
The vest-worn camera is woven into the seamless geospatial network of sensors and records the officer’s experience from a first-person perspective.
Imagine this scenario. A crowd gathers at an intersection triggering an anomaly detection sensor due to the number of people gathering in that location at that time. Out of the thousands of security cameras being monitored at the Command and Control Center (C3), this video scrolls around and flashes yellow, bringing attention to the possible situation. Other mounted cameras that have that intersection in the field of view automatically align along the edge of the main security video projecting their imagery onto a 3D data model of the area. Police officers in the field nearest to that location are simultaneously alerted. No action is taken at this point except the police begin heading in that direction. Facial recognition software scans the video images for faces of known suspects. Social media and texts scroll next to the video and geospatially link to those in each frame of the video. Colored sentiment indicators showed levels of concern. Boxes outlining people in various colors correspond to threat levels determined by datamining multiple databases. Semi-persistent motion trails lag behind each box showing the speed and direction of people in the video. Pattern identification looks for convergence, divergence and synchronous movements.
Video analytics identify several people converging on a car that just pulled up. The license plate reader linked to the security camera reports the car as stolen with two traffic violations. Based on this preliminary information, the situation is elevated. A police officer is dispatched but before arriving, a drone launches from the police car outfitted with a true color camera and a stereographic infrared camera. The stereographic imagery pair is streamed live to the police officers entering the area of interest through their smart glasses and to a team of imagery specialists at the C3. The video analytics of the police drone are seamlessly integrated with the security camera videos focusing on the car and the individuals as it arrives on scene and surveils the area. Object recognition identifies three possible weapons on the persons of interest. The boxes around those individuals turn red. They are tagged for persistent surveillance by all security cameras in the area. The order is given to apprehend them for probable cause. More police officers are called in and before they arrive they know who they are looking for, where the person is located, and that they may be armed and dangerous. In less than a minute, the police arrive. The suspects flee. The drone follows one of them up the street into an alley. Two of the officers pursue him. The other two suspects jump into the car and drive away. License plate readers and security cameras track the car on a map showing the vehicle’s route and speed with corresponding real-time video as the vehicle passes into view of each camera. As the vehicle travels south a police officer steps out from a cross street and shoots an electromagnetic dart into the speeding vehicle, disabling it. The police officers approaching the car shine a disorienting laser light weapon called a dazzler at the suspects, preventing their eyes from focusing. The occupants are apprehended without incident. They are searched for probable cause and arrested for carrying handguns without a permit.
The other suspect fled on foot. The drone followed him relaying live imagery to the police officers’ smart glasses. Their smart glasses showed a real-time map of their locations and the suspect’s. They cornered him in a fenced area. Guns drawn, the smoky red light of the laser cutting through the air pointed at the suspect. He surrendered. No gun was found on the suspect but the drone video the gun being thrown into a dumpster. One of the officers went back and retrieved the gun.
Gun traces were run on the three confiscated weapons and one was identified as stolen, matching a description of a gun used in a recent homicide. One of the suspect’s fingerprints match those found on shell casings at a nearby location reported by gunshot acoustic sensors. Based on this information, there is probable cause and a tap and trace is approved electronically by a special task force judge. The phone records of the three suspects are searched linking them to the el Diablo gang. Several unknown numbers are also in the call logs. Those numbers are added to the case file to be investigated later.
Only one of the suspects has a known address. The other two have no known location. Activity extracted from phone records show their whereabouts over the preceding days pin pointing their main locus of operation. Search warrants are issued. Within hours of arresting the suspects, the locations are raided and searched. Officers discover a cache of weapons, drugs, laptops and other useful information.
Everything described above is already available — it is only a matter of time and money. And, if Dubai is any indication of things to come, police could soon be arriving on hoverbikes.
The police arriving within minutes is key to the success of preventive policing. Time saves lives. The goal is to intervene before crime happens. But how is it possible? Before answering, let’s look at some numbers.
By the numbers
In 2017 almost 84 percent of the population of the United States was considered urban residing within 106,400 square miles. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports there are only 758,854 sworn officers in the United States. Maintaining the same 84 percent ratio as the population means only 634,847 officers cover those urban areas. Specifically, it breaks down to six police officers per square mile. It is one police officer for every 431 residents except that police, like all of us, work 40 hours a week, have days off, take vacations, etc., so, only one out of every six police officers is on duty at any given time. That is one police officer for every 2,153 residents; however, police often operate in pairs, so 4,306 residents depend upon two brave souls to protect them from danger.
Victims of violent crime are 2.1 percent of the population. In a sampling of 4,306 residents that equals 90 victims of violent crime every year. In the top 10 cities it is far worse. Police officers have an incredible responsibility placed on them and they rightly deserve our praise, support and respect for the dangers they face every day.
Why not more officers you ask? Police protection comes at a cost of $100 billion annually. Our relative safety is not cheap. Crime is a huge expense. Jails, trials, public defenders, prosecutors, judges and incarceration all cost money. Safety is expensive. Budgets are stretched thin. The answer for increased safety and security isn’t more police. The answer is integrated and intelligent technology systems leading to increased efficiency. Technology has benefitted most other professions. Now, the field of law enforcement and crime prevention are benefitting. Cost is the driving need. These efficiencies are being realized on a grand scale. Making matters more urgent is the worldwide mass migration as populations move towards cities. It is imperative to manage crime now rather than later.
Enter predictive policing — putting the power of open data, cloud computing, machine learning, geoscience and artificial intelligence in support of law enforcement and prevention. Basically, cities are broken up into grid patterns, typically 500×500 feet. Within each grid, crime data is compiled using multiple factors and resources, such as historical data, 9-1-1 calls, recent crime reports, and residences of known offenders and parolees. Even considerations such as the time, day of week, celebrations and cyclical events are taken into account. Information derived from security cameras, license plate readers, social media and financial transactions help the algorithm. The algorithms take into account information collected by authorized wire taps, call logs and other confidential sources. The goal of the algorithms are to include all available resources to develop the most complete and reliable dataset upon which the heatmaps base their probabilities. This helps police departments allocate their resources, know what to prepare for and, most importantly, know where to be to protect the public at large.
University of Montana, Research and Training Center (Data: U.S. Census Bureau)
Police tighten their patrols around the hotspots. Throughout their shifts those hotspots are subject to change depending upon new data. Mobile units simply focus their patrol efforts accordingly. Once a threat is reported, automated navigation routing systems show police the fastest route to the incident and their expected time of arrival. Officers continue to receive intelligence about the incident while en route to anticipate the situation prior to arriving. Knowing where the areas of highest probability are expected to occur focuses non-human assets too, such as geofencing the areas of interest and monitoring more closely for key indicators. This technology is not too different than numerical weather forecasting models predicting what and where weather events will occur in the next hour, three hours, six hours and so on. Numerical models continue to evolve making forecasting more and more reliable. And, although the past does not predict the future, it is a strong indicator. The disclaimer would be similar to the ones most have seen before, “Past performance does not guarantee future returns.” Sometimes preventing a crime is saving a life, sometimes it’s protecting property and almost always it is stopping someone from doing something they will later regret. All crime cannot be prevented but for every crime that is prevented there is a family spared from tragedy.
Preventive policing does more than help keep communities safer. It improves economic viability. Crime has an inverse relationship with a community’s vibrancy. As crime increases, prosperity decreases. Real estate values go down, the tax revenue goes down, employment opportunities go down, and safety, happiness and well-being go down. Crime is a societal disease. Reducing crime reverses those affects. Home values, employment, affluence and the quality of life all go up, which correlates to increased tax revenues. Thus, reduce crime and the city’s revenues increase. That means politicians can divert money into other programs to benefit the citizens. For these reasons there is bi-partisan support for computer based policing.
If you do the research you will see opposition efforts against artificially intelligent systems to fight crime, but those opponents are not well supported. Communities want to feel safer. Politicians want to be able to say they are using the latest technologies to keep the community safe. Companies want to prove their systems work in decreasing crime and capturing criminals. Crime prediction causes the greatest concern because it borders on Minority Report, but it is the echo of Jack Maple and William Bratton putting police where they need to be to support the people they need to protect. It is the essence of community based policing.
This article only touches on the front side of GIS and law enforcement, but there is another world on the back side piecing crime scenes together with forensics in artificially replicated environments. That too is a fascinating topic to explore.
Do yourself and your neighborhood a favor. Thank the police officers in your community for the job they do. They are foundational to the fabric of our society.
Who better to know about connections than a GIS professional whose very job is discovering them? Weaving a thread through time from decades ago isn’t a typical geospatial connection, but this one is, and it is connected by a person.
Let’s reflect on who we are as a profession and how we, the geospatial community, has made the world a better place.
Let’s also take a moment to learn about one of the leaders who led the way and what he had to overcome to help us appreciate who and what we are. It is an oft-repeated refrain: “Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it”, and, my personal favorite, “The future flows through us becoming the past so that we remember it and do not repeat it.”
Jack Maple. (Photo: Newsday Photo, 1986 / Bruce Gilbert)
In 1961, the trend in crime began climbing. Many people lived in fear, especially in big cities. New York captured many of the nation’s headlines in a long, tragic list of brutal, horrible crimes. Hope was bleak. It was expected to get worse. But, it didn’t. The fever had broken. It peaked in 1991. The crime spree lasted 30 years.
By contrast, the Vietnam War lasted 20 years. The total number of troops serving on active duty during Vietnam was 9.1 million troops and 58,318 lost their lives in combat, yet fewer people died on the streets of America during the same period. In fact, on average, during the 30-year crime wave, every 22 days the number of victims of violent crime in the United States equaled the total number of soldiers killed in Vietnam. America was a battlefield and ground zero was New York City.
What happened in 1991? What stemmed the tide? That year, a new type of hero emerged, a crime fighter, unlike any before.
It began at ground zero, in the most dangerous areas of New York City — the subways, referred to as the “caves.” Thugs, rapists, murders and thieves roamed the depths. Police could do little. They were outnumbered and operated under strict rules. It was preferable to be a regular police officer, above ground, dealing with routine crimes, even the murders, rather than be a transit cop covering a beat in the dark, rough, unforgiving underworld of the subway. Only four types of people dwelled there: criminals, victims, transit cops, and those who got away.
Sometimes, transit cops or criminals were the victims. Transit cops were difficult to recruit, but New York needed more of them. This provided an opportunity for those with few other choices. Sometimes, those who have no other options are the ones who make the most of an opportunity. They work the hardest because it is their only way out. Success lies with the willing — those incendiary hearts waiting to be ignited by a challenge that gives them purpose. Life is too often fraught with peril and strife. It is vision and the courage to pursue them that manifests dreams into reality.
This new hero didn’t fit the caricature. He was short, balding, overweight and lacked a high school diploma. He was street smart, cocky, unpolished and would rather fight than prove his point. He didn’t come from a privileged background. He just had his wits. He knew right from wrong and had the courage to stand his ground. He took on the criminal element lurking in the subterranean worlds. He worked hard, earning his GED at night. It served him better that way like a badge of honor, the hard way being its own reward.
His name was Jack Maple, the crime fighter, and he understood the streets in ways others didn’t. He knew, like a hunter knows, to find the deer trails. Animals are creatures of habit. They prefer to stay where they know the area, the smells, the rhythms, the sounds, where the food is, and where to run for cover. Criminals measure their risks too. They prefer familiar places. They are territorial and keen to their surroundings. Jack knew if you look for their patterns, you’ll find them. He covered his walls with subway maps, placing pins where and when the crimes happened.
The criminal’s habits and behaviors began taking shape. With this knowledge, Jack had become the hunter. Knowledge is power, but real power is action, and Jack took it. He would not have become the hero otherwise. He staked out their patterns of place and time, setting traps and luring them in with their weaknesses.
One by one, and group by group, he reclaimed New York’s subways. Crime dropped by 69% over the next five years. Putting that in perspective, two of every three victims were spared. Unfortunately, 629 people were still murdered in New York City, but it was a drastic departure from the peak of 1,946 just five years before, meaning 1,317 men, women and children did not suffer a violent crime that year or any other year thereafter.
The values of crime are most often represented as a 1:100,000 scale ration; however, this chart shows three different categories, each represented by a different order of magnitude. (Data from Disastercenter.com)
Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York, recognized the value of what Maple had developed. Maple called his maps the Charts of the Future. His colleagues called it wallpaper. The mayor called it amazing and gave Jack Maple his full support, praising him by saying, “One of the truly great innovators in law enforcement, who helped make New York City the safest large city in America.” Maple was promoted to Deputy Police Commissioner of Crime Control Strategies.
Maple founded CompStat, Computerized Statistics, calling it his electronic pin maps to support his four precepts: accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment of forces, effective tactics, and relentless follow-through.
New York’s CompStat program for the NYPD.
CompStat changed policing to a data-driven business. GIS professionals will recognize CompStat as a geographic information system, and Jack as a self-trained geospatial developer and analyst. Geospatial science was still a very niche technology at the time.
Jack Maple’s success continued to grow. Two men, William Bratton and John Timoney, both police commissioners and senior to Maple in the police hierarchy, became evangelists of Maple’s CompStat, spreading it to other cities throughout the world, and through those two men, predictive policing and crime mapping evolved.
Maple, Bratton and Timoney became independent consultants helping cities worldwide establish their own CompStat programs.
His success did not end there. Based on his experiences fighting criminals on the streets and fighting change in the antiquated police system, he wrote the book, The Crime Fighter: How You Can Make Your Community Crime Free. The book is an excellent read and readily available online. He also co-wrote the TV series The District, based on his exploits in the book.
If you haven’t seen the series, the show is worth watching. Season 1, Episode 3, shows a 1990s projector screen with a large GIS display and the city’s police chiefs being held to account for telling their district’s crime stories in accordance with the map.
Jack Maple was a modern-day rags to riches story and a pioneer of the GIS profession. When he passed away in 2001, he had become a beloved character in New York. When he died, each of the major New York City publications covered the story of his life crediting him for reducing crime and giving the citizens back their city. The CompStat room at 1 Police Plaza CompStat, New York, was renamed after him in tribute. Craig Horowitz, writer for New York Magazine, penned a worthy tribute.
CompStat would be further developed with more advanced crime mapping and crime analysis methods, predictive analytics, environmental criminology and geographic profiling. Kim Rossmo coined the term geographic profiling, based on his patented Rossmo Formula, which is a form of predictive analytics that takes location, time, social behavior and the psychology of criminals into account and turns it into a mathematical equation that can be fed into a GIS. This narrows down the probable location of a suspect, allowing investigators and police to better focus their resources.
Geographic profiling was used during the D.C. sniper case. The Rossmo Formula was featured on the TV series Numb3rs. I hope to write a future article on Dr. Rossmo complete with interviews.
The trend in crime has continued decreasing ever since the peak in 1991. Crime in New York City has now dropped back to 1940s levels as of 2017 and continues to decline.
The power to change the world lies with those fervent, intrepid souls — the unrelenting dreamers, who seek a better world and through innovation, creativity and courage, and manifest it into reality.
It is a great time to be in the geospatial profession. The United States leads the world in geospatial science. Take heart, because opportunities abound in this industry. I hope you become a hero in the field, and someday I have the opportunity to write about you.
All of us aspire. It is the voice in our heart — our calling, the bud of our true self wanting to bloom. In each of us a seed is planted and when that seed begins to prosper another shoot springs forth. It is how we know we are on the right path. As we approach our true purpose goals and accomplishments align, there is clarity of vision, resistance wanes, and a virtuous cycle lifts us up.
But what if that calling was having every disaster that befalls a nation laid at your feet? Who then among us would willingly take on so great a burden? You might imagine anyone wanting to do so must first pass beneath a door upon which are inscribed the words, “Only the strong of heart may pass and they too shall be challenged.”
Who would be brave enough to enter knowing the lament and sorrow of a nation would be their sustenance? And yet, there is one who willingly accepted the call. He is a giant, forged, not born, in the fires of calamity, chaos and crisis.
But who within the geospatial community would bear such a heavy labor? Would it not be Christopher Vaughan, geospatial information officer (GIO) of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA)? He is the first person to hold the GIO position for FEMA.
I had the great honor to speak with him recently as he enters his eighth year at FEMA. Being the first GIO meant there was lots of work to do. The geospatial infrastructure for FEMA had to be developed and integrated into the operational core. Operational units needed training to use GIS and learn to become proficient with it. It is a process that could not happen overnight.
There was also the cultural mindset to overcome whenever new technologies enter the workplace, and, no matter how valuable GIS has proven to be there is always resistance to change. These were barriers Chris had to deal with while at the same time doing what he came to FEMA to do — support emergency management operations as disasters occurred; and, as you will see, there is never a reprieve from the whims of Mother Nature. Her wrath is unquenching, unceasing and unrestrained.
Chris became the FEMA GIO in May 2010, after the Haiti Earthquake, arguably one of the worst humanitarian crises in the northwestern hemisphere. Death tolls reached 220,000 according to FEMA’s Earthquake Response Report (FEMA 2010)[1] and over 1.1 million people were displaced; plus, making matters worse, a cholera epidemic broke out during the earthquake recovery efforts. That was the job he walked into.
Even though Haiti is not a responsibility of the United States, it is in U.S. interests to help stabilize the region and provide goodwill to our neighbors. This put Chris up close and personal with the devastation, challenges and aftermath. Several lessons emerged from the Haiti Earthquake which continues to shape Chris’s view of Disaster Response and Recovery (DR&R) to this day, one of the most prominent being, crisis mapping, using crowdsource efforts involving a worldwide audience.
Chris shares that the International Conference of Crisis Mappers held a meeting in 2010 right after the earthquake, “There were about 100 to 150 people from all over the world. I still run in circles with about 40 to 50 of those folks. It was sort of like a Who’s Who of disaster operations.” International volunteers working remotely mapped Haiti in the aftermath so well that Craig Fugate, the FEMA Administrator at the time, recognized Crisis Mappers as having created, “the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available.” Chris would later draw upon this lesson in future emergency management operations.
The Haiti Earthquake stretched FEMA’s responsibilities beyond U.S borders and Chris understood that FEMA needed to prepare for operations in neighboring countries if needed. Chris will most likely be involved in providing much of the geospatial support for those efforts because of FEMA’s advanced technical capabilities and its organizational strength.
That first year was daunting, but there is no respite from the storm, so to speak, and within one year, Chris was faced with the most active tornado season on record. Over 360 tornados touched down in April over a three day period killing a total of 348 people in 21 states in what has been named the 2011 Super Outbreak. Not a month later, Chris was met with yet another defining moment in his career.
On Saturday, May 21, 2011 a storm system developed over the Midwest. Local news reported two tornados had touched down in Kansas — nothing unusual, but storms in the Midwest always cause concern. The next day, Sunday, May 22, 2011, there was more tornado activity. Weather warnings covered the map from the Great Lakes to Texas. Several tornados touched down throughout the day, but for all appearances by late afternoon it looked less severe than the previous month’s outbreak.
Early that evening, the phone calls began and didn’t stop coming in. Reports were that a tornado had devastated Joplin, Missouri. Details were scarce. Communications into Joplin were down. Chris couldn’t get any answers. He needed a clear picture. Where did the tornado touch down? What was the tornado’s track? How big was it? How many people were missing? Where was the damage? What was damaged? Who needs support? Who can be brought in to provide that support? News poured in getting worse with each successive call.
“I needed that GIS perspective so I could see. It was like a surgical knife went right through this town and in that boundary were two nursing homes, one school, a fire station and a hospital. That is what GIS brings to the fight – clarity and context. I didn’t have that.”
The Joplin Tornado turned out to be the deadliest in over 60 years and the most expensive in U.S. history. It was nearly one mile wide and almost 22 miles long killing 161 people. “Joplin, Missouri will always color me for the rest of my career, in how I approach Disaster Response and Recovery Operations, not knowing how big that event really was until we got our arms wrapped around it. We struggled for a long time with just how big that storm path was. We were waiting days on those tornado tracks. We’ve gotten a lot faster. We are down to hours now. The storm prediction center has done some amazing things. They’ve got a whole innovation lab using radar to determine where the tornado touched down. It’s not perfect but it’s far better than where we were.”
The year of 2011 was the worst tornado season in U.S. history. In all, there were 1,697 tornados reported throughout the U.S., the Joplin Tornado being the most significant. Out of that crisis social media evolved as a tool for DR&R operations. This would further develop Chris’s vision for FEMA.
Chris calls 2011 his most difficult year. He has dealt with many of the most infamous events in his eight years as the GIO. Following is a short list:
the Mississippi River flooding (2010),
Hurricane Irene (2011),
the tornado Super Outbreak (2011),
the Joplin Tornado (2011),
Super Storm Sandy (2012),
The Yarnell Fires (2013),
Moore Oklahoma Tornado (2013),
the Oso mudslide (2014),
the Northern California wildfires (2017),
blizzards throughout the U.S. (almost every year)
and most recently
Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria (2017).
In fact, in total, since Chris became the GIO, FEMA has declared 1,003 disasters. On average, that is one declared disaster every three days, and disasters last for weeks, and months, and sometimes years, so these have compiling effects.
Dealing with so many disasters, so often, in so short a period of time, Chris has developed a disaster consciousness as he discusses, “There are obviously natural cycles. There is a rhythm to it all. We are pretty accustomed to the rhythm. The snow pack begets the flood season. We are watching the snows and where they build-up because that leads into the flood plains, or drought as the case may be. Our timelines span months. So, we watch El Niño and La Niña. April and May bring the tornados. Then that slides right into wildfire season. But, you never know when that earthquake is going to hit.”
Even with all the real disasters taking place FEMA runs exercises preparing for those rare, cataclysmic events happening once every several hundred years. It’s been over 100 years since a major cataclysmic event of that magnitude has occurred. Scientists predict we are due for one.
Yellowstone, for example, is a huge volcanic caldera. It’s been quiet for hundreds of years even though it remains very active.
The New Madrid seismic zone is also an area of concern. It has been over 200 years since a major event occurred in this area. In 2008 FEMA wrote an in-depth report on the New Madrid and has been conducting exercises on the region ever since.
USGS just released a report focusing attention on the Hayward Fault near Oakland, CA which includes videos of ground shaking simulations (USGS 2018) . The USGS study is not forecasting an event is imminent, but it is a prediction that a 72% chance of a 6.7+ magnitude earthquake will happen in the area within the next 25 years.
“I can promise you this,” says Chris. “If we aren’t involved in a big event we are preparing for one. We are always preparing for the next big one. Right now we are laser focused on earthquake planning. A lot of our time is spent thinking about the worst case scenarios. We’re talking about a Cascadia Subduction event. What would happen if a New Madrid seismic zone event occurred and how would we move that much logistics and people and resources? Where would we put limited resources to affect the most good? We can plan for those types of events. We know where the major faults are. We rely on our partners like USGS to give us their risk assessments of where we should be paying attention. We haven’t had a catastrophic event like that in over 100 years. Getting the emergency management community to think in those terms is probably in the neighborhood of 100,000 people dead. That is a huge task at that scale. That is why we are training.”
FEMA just released their 2018-2022 Strategic Plan and the three key goals are to
Build a Culture of Preparedness,
Ready the Nation for Catastrophic Disasters, and
Reduce the Complexity of FEMA.
FEMA’s exercises are building a culture of preparedness, but for the strategic plan to work FEMA has to engage the population. DHS has a volunteer force called the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and all interested citizens are encouraged to join. There is most likely one in your area. (Learn more and find out how to get engaged).
CERT is an area Chris would like to tap into. “I think organizations like CERT, the National Map Corps, and other large volunteer based groups that are geographically dispersed are who we need to tap into for crowdsourcing. We are looking at ways to harness this collective power. They are there for a reason. They want to be part of the conversation. So, we want to engage them and are figuring out ways to pull them into our efforts.”
Shortly after the interview with Chris, FEMA announced the 2018 National Level Exercise (NLE) will be incorporating CERT in preparation for the upcoming hurricane season. By the time this article is published the event will have passed, but plan ahead for next year and register for CERT. The information on the website will benefit you, your family and your community. You might even see me there as I will be getting involved too. In the future, those with special skills such as remote sensing, GIS and data science might develop into a specialized corps of volunteers as FEMA works more closely with CERT.
There are some successes Chris celebrates. One of those is the advancements in dealing with floods. Chris states, “We were getting our tails handed to us on floods. No one could really figure out floods. Now, I feel like we’ve got a good handle on it. It was to the point where they’ve stood up a new National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with a joint venture between U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA, FEMA, and I am sure USGS is involved. I would put it on the same scale as the National Hurricane Center. It is building out the National Water Model and it will tell the risk for a given area and provide information on where the flood is actually occurring.”
Another success Chris is excited to talk about is the geospatially enabled alert system called the Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) that FEMA created. In Chris’s words, “it is an elaborate community where NOAA, the National Weather Service, the state, county and local level feed information into the system and it alerts people in specific areas using geofencing. There is a new REST API the geo-community can use to embed the information into webpages.”
The Making a Difference Award given by Esri. (Photo: FEMA)
Chris is building a legacy in disaster recovery and response by harnessing the power of the crowd. It first happened with the Haiti Earthquake. It was further developed during the Joplin Tornado, and it evolved further during Superstorm Sandy earning Chris and FEMA the Making a Difference Award from Esri in 2013.
Jack Dangermond presented the award, saying, “FEMA supports our nation during crises, and its leadership and staff at all levels work extremely hard to carry out that mission every day. We want to recognize their tremendous work during Sandy. The agency supplied intuitive mapping applications that allowed people to understand the emergency as it unfolded and to begin the process of rebuilding.”
Chris continues advancing the use of GIS in disaster operations and harnessing the power of crowdsourcing, most recently using it during the 2017 hurricane season for operations in Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
NOTE: January’s Geospatial Solutions article covers many of those advancements: How GIS and You can Aid In Disaster Response. This article is a follow-on to the January article.
When asked about the success of crowdsourcing efforts Chris shared his views, saying, “You’ve got all kinds of walks of life participating in this. Never before in the history of mankind have we had this speed of communication. I can conference call someone anywhere in the world and have no delay in our conversation. Look, we’ve always had millions of people sitting on the periphery. This is just the explosion of communication we are seeing. I mean, the internet has really only been in wide use for the last 20 years, so we’ve got to put things in perspective. Google Earth came out in 2005, the iPhone in 2007, ArcGIS Online in 2011. So, we’ve come so far in just the past 10 years… it’s really amazing.”
Building on lessons learned from engaging the crowd FEMA has an app that everyone needs to download to their smartphone. You can receive National Weather Service alerts, locate shelters, talk directly with FEMA, and upload pictures about where you are in the event of a disaster. It is an app providing information that can potentially save your life.
After speaking with Chris I left the conversation understanding the only thing bigger than Chris’s responsibility is his heart. Many times during the conversation he talked about ensuring FEMA was there for the most vulnerable populations and that the job of the GIO was to make operations more efficient and save time, because in disasters time saves lives.
Chris Vaughan is a giant in the geospatial world and worthy of the title. He has been forged by calamity, chaos and crisis; and, through it all, remains humble in service to those most in need. Harnessing the power of GIS and the crowd he has forever altered emergency management operations connecting the “Federal” to the “Individual.” He is a leader of the Geospatial community, both by title and by deed. Surely, people’s lives have been saved through Chris’s efforts and countless more will be. When we seek relief because some catastrophe has found its way to our door we can turn our hope towards FEMA that we might be rescued in our darkest hour thanks to the power of GIS and the vision of the FEMA GIO.
William H, Tewelow, GISP
Further information
If you would like to pad your resume FEMA has several free online courses that offer college credits. The courses which most pertain to readers of this article are IS-103: Geospatial Information Systems Specialist; IS-922: Applications of GIS for Emergency Management; IS-63.b: Geospatial Information Infrastructure (GII); IS-60.b: The Homeland Security Geospatial Concept-of-Operations (GeoCONOPS) for Planners and Decision Makers; IS-61.b: The Homeland Security Geospatial Concept-of-Operations (GeoCONOPS) In Depth; IS-62.b: The Homeland Security Geospatial Concept-of-Operations (GeoCONOPS) In Use; and, IS-42: Social Media in Emergency Management. Visit https://training.fema.gov for more information on these courses. If you are a GISP this will afford opportunities to earn points towards certification and renewal.
Information on FEMA’s text alert program
Subscribe to FEMA text: INFO to 43362
Locate open shelters text: SHELTER +Zip code to 43362
Locate Disaster Recovery Centers text: DRC +Zip code to 43362
FEMA’s U.S. Coast Guard Retiree to FEMA Reservist Initiative has nine GIS Specialist positions available: Salary ($15.82–23.69/hr) Position Description: The PLAN GIS Specialist (PLAN0001) conducts basic geo-processing, develops geospatial products, uses specialized geospatial software, operates and calibrates GPS units and mobile data collection devices, and supports customers as needed.
“The blockchain cannot be described just as a revolution. It is a tsunami-like phenomenon, slowly advancing and gradually enveloping everything along its way by the force of its progression.” — William Mougayar *
A kidnapping in Kiev
War-torn and ragged, the once glistening jewel on the Dnieper River adorned in Christmas lights bustled with Yuletide celebration. But further from the city center, the streets were quieter, more demure as the dark night settled in. A black Mercedes Benz pulled up and parked along a poorly lit street. In the car sat four men wearing facemasks and carrying Kalashnikovs. In the cold Kiev night, they waited.
Across the street a large, husky man pulled shut the security curtain, turned out the lights and locked the front door of his store. He turned, his briefcase hanging at his side, and walked a few steps toward his car.
The four men crossed the dim street, forming a semi-circle as they moved toward the man. He slowly raised his hands. He was Russian; his accent gave him away. One of the four men placed a thick black bag over the Russian’s head. With gun barrels pointed into his back, he followed their orders, climbing into the back of the Mercedes Benz.
The four men got into the car and sped away into the cold, dark Kiev night. The man was Pavel Lerner, a blockchain expert and owner of a digital currency exchange in the Ukrainian capital. His captors demanded a ransom of $1,000,000 paid in Bitcoins, the highest valued cryptocurrency.
Three days later, on Dec. 29, 2017, safe and unharmed, Pavel’s abductors released him along an unmarked road in the middle of nowhere.
Cryptocurrencies and crime. Crimes involving cryptocurrencies have been increasing; perhaps the most widespread is hackers using ransomware demanding payment in Bitcoins. The worldwide WannaCry virus is the most pernicious of these attacks, costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
Other crimes of the more traditional variety are also on the rise such as kidnapping, as in the case of Chloe Ayling, a British glamour model held for $500,000 payable in Bitcoin.
Blackmail and money laundering are also on the rise; all of them are using Bitcoin as the currency of choice, as are black markets lurking on the darknet.
The fall of the dark web marketplace Silk Road netted unexpected surprises, capturing two rogue FBI Agents and a DEA agent found to be peddling in the underworld’s vast enterprise. Silk Road’s net worth when it was shut down was 614,305 Bitcoins.
As December 2017 came to a close and Pavel Lerner paid his ransom, the value of one Bitcoin peaked at $19,843, making Silk Road worth $12.2 billion and the Dread Pirate Roberts the second wealthiest criminal in history. Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road, is serving a life sentence.
The 2015 documentary Deep Web describes the government’s takedown of Silk Road. View the trailer below.
When currencies fail
Governments have always been slow to act, or at least slow to comprehend. Such is the case with cryptocurrencies. The government sees the phenomenon as a mechanism supporting criminal enterprise, but the trending use in digital currencies represents a seismic shift in the way people think about money and where they are placing their trust.
There is a decline in the faith of fiat currencies as the countries backing them fall into mounting debt. Concern is fueled by the instability of national and international politics and the threat to the U.S. dollar by the unraveling of the petrodollar.
As well, the euro has been hit by wave after wave of bad news by the economies of Greece, Italy and Portugal and the so-called Brexit, as the United Kingdom withdraws from the European Union. What does that spell for the future of the euro?
Plus, with sanctions, Russia’s Ruble has lost 50% of its value since 2013. The farcical worthlessness of a Zimbabwe 50 trillion dollar note proves there is no limit to the loss in value a fiat currency can suffer when it implodes.
Photo: iStock
Venezuela’s currency collapse. And now, Venezuela is in a plummeting currency death spiral, officially falling in value from a par of 10 Bolivars to equal one U.S. dollar to 25,000 bolivars, all in the month of February. Unofficial reports are that the value has sunk to 230,000 bolivars to the U.S. dollar.
As of Tuesday, Feb. 27, in a desperate attempt to salvage itself, Venezuela announced an initial coin offering (ICO) for a national cryptocurrency called the petro. The irony in this is that the digital currency will probably survive because it’s on the blockchain, but Venezuela will not.
If anyone wants to learn about what happens when a nation’s currency collapses, Venezuela is a terrifying case study. It is no wonder people around the world seek refuge in an asset that promises freedom from government meddling. It is also no wonder governments are terrified of blockchain’s potential, yet fascinated at the same time, like so many other technologies holding great power for both good and evil.
There is a stalemate of sorts, a stand-off between those early adopters with the courage to invest and risk it all for the hope of great fortunes, and governments who hold the power to regulate, fine, confiscate and imprison. Tension separates both sides. Who will budge?
The United States and Europe have so far been measured in their response, while China and South Korea are cracking down on cryptocurrencies. Most people, curious and cautious, sit waiting it out. These stories represent the darker side of bitcoin, blockchain and the rise of cryptocurrencies, but there is another side, the more benevolent, useful and hopeful side.
What are cryptocurrencies?
Unlike gold, which has traditionally been considered a store of value, cryptocurrencies have no physical existence. They are digital assets held in a digital wallet. They are an asset with a finite number of tokens. They are driven purely by supply and demand. If there is a greater supply than there are traders, the value is next to nothing as there was in 2009 when Bitcoin first came into existence.
May 22, 2010, marks the milestone when a digital currency first purchased something in the physical world. Two pizzas sold for 10,000 Bitcoins. Now, there are more traders than tokens, and the demand has driven the value to unprecedented heights. One Bitcoin was worth $19,499 on Dec. 15, 2017.
Bitcoin is the most explosive financial instrument ever created. But Bitcoin is not the only digital currency. In all, there are more than 1,800 cryptocurrencies. The term “crypto” implies they are secretive and have a layer of anonymity, but there is an irony. Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain technology.
Blockchains have an unalterable integrity system built into them, leading to the adage “What happens on the blockchain stays on the blockchain.” That creates a conundrum and begs the question, just how is it that what provides a veil of secrecy also holds the promise of open transparency?
Blockchains
Image: iStock
To answer that question, we need to explore blockchains. What exactly is a blockchain? A blockchain is a digital, decentralized, distributed, open and immutable ledger. Each transaction has a string of characters called a hash. Each hash includes a date/time stamp, a unique ID, a code linking it to the previous hash, and a private key identifying ownership, albeit anonymously.
Each transaction is another link in a chain that can be traced backwards to the previous link, all the way back to the origin of the entire chain, called the Genesis Block.
What makes the blockchain decentralized is no single computer or entity controls it. Hundreds and thousands of computers make up a blockchain network. Each computer is called a node. A blockchain is distributed because all the nodes work together in a peer-to-peer network. Nodes on a network record each transaction, and these transactions are mirrored on every other node throughout the network.
The transactions can be accessed and downloaded from any node on the network. This makes a blockchain an open and distributed ledger. When a node is out of sync with other nodes on the network, it is rejected until it is reset to match the other nodes. That makes it impossible to alter any records, making a blockchain immutable.
For these reasons integrity, is built into the blockchain. Anonymity is provided by a private key that ties it to a digital wallet that can only be accessed by the owner. The digital wallet connects to the owner, but not the blockchain itself. As a result, a blockchain identifies what, when and who about each transaction. A blockchain does not provide where the transaction occurred.
At this time, blockchains lack a geospatial capability.
“Anytime there’s some data that needs to maintain its integrity, blockchain is definitely there. Essentially, what you would do is get the hash and you would have a hash key and then any changes or alterations are made fully aware at all times.” — Reem El Seed **
Geospatial blockchain benefits
Image: FOAM
A company called FOAM is working to change that, creating a geospatially enabled blockchain using a crypto-spatial coordinate (CSC) system. Location in a FOAM blockchain doesn’t just record a specific time, it also validates proof of location and gives a spatial context that regular blockchains lack.
This functionality creates an immutable digital connection to the physical world. Kristoffer Josefsson, CTO of FOAM Inc., confirms this, saying, “We can securely connect offline spaces to online assets.”
If digital currencies based on blockchain technology are going to be considered a safe and viable medium for conducting business, they must include location. Blockchain’s abilities are what the world needs to curtail crime and corruption and be able to follow the money trail from whom and to where it flows.
“This is what we are working on at FOAM and believe that such a system is needed as a crucial infrastructure in our decentralized future and can open new marketplaces of privacy preserving location data.” — John Ryan King, CEO, FOAM Inc.
Adding a geotag to a blockchain is like adding ribonucleic acid to a cell bringing it to life. Something can’t exist until it exists in time and space. A blockchain with a geospatial tag makes that possible and allows mapping of events in a temporal sequence. This inhibits criminal activity.
If a crime were committed using a geotagged blockchain, the location of the crime would immediately be known. The hash code from the blockchain would be extracted with a date/time/location stamp and would be flagged on the network to all the nodes, making that hash code “hot.” A hot blockchain means that particular hash in the chain would be monitored. If it were involved in a transaction, an alert would be broadcast throughout the network, focusing on the location.
Security cameras and other assets would converge, putting eyes on the target, and the transaction would be rejected. Authorities would then be able to trace the digital wallet’s owner like running license-plate tags for a car, and, shortly thereafter, descend on and apprehend the offender.
Did George Orwell dream the dream we are now living, “Big Brother is watching you,” while he himself mocks us from his eternal sleep?
Empowerment with location. Mansour Raad, senior software engineer and Big Data advocate at Esri, sees location-enabled blockchain opening up opportunities for people to interact with their representatives. He is excited about the prospects saying, “We can envision dozens of potential use cases in geospatial contexts, from fine-grained citizen engagement in smart-city initiatives through to activity-based military intelligence applications.”
Certainly, this is a more empowering view. Some of the largest companies in the world are also exploring uses for blockchain and geospatially tagged ledgers. This mass effort and focus on innovation will have some magnificent results.
Mansour goes on to add, “The influx of companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and forward-thinking communities like Dubai are searching for blockchain-based solutions to their problems.” This will drive innovation. Both ends of the spectrum are there, from the frontline developers to the back-end buyers with large pockets.
Latitude and longitude has been the backbone of location and navigation for more than 2,000 years, when people navigated primarily by landmarks and the stars. That worked well for those not venturing beyond their familiar locales; but as knowledge of the world expanded and monarchs ruled larger and larger empires, and trade spread to further and further regions, and wars and conquest extended to unknown realms, maps were necessary. A grid system for maps was created by Hipparchus, another of those great Greeks upon whose shoulders the world still stands. That coordinate system, known as latitude and longitude, has served well for two millennia, but the digital age demands another solution.
And so it is with change. It happens over many years, but the transformation happens all at once. The change has been taking place for years with location-based formats such as the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) and the more universal digital Degrees Minutes Seconds (DMS) supporting GPS-based systems, as well as the more novice friendly what3words (W3W), which is especially useful for disaster-relief operations. All of these serve their purpose, but fall short of providing a concise code that is critically important to make geotagging a blockchain possible. That is of great value considering blockchain’s potential in logistics and transportation, both of which are dependent upon precise location data.
Photo: Port of Rotterdam
Add the growth of IoT (the internet of things) and one gets a sense of the demand for a location-based blockchain and how enormous such a system would be. The Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest shipping facility, is testing blockchain for logistics. Companies like Ford, IBM and PwC also are looking at its potential.
Mansour Raad adds, “Some data scientists see a benefit to utilizing an addressed reference system such as the Open Geospatial Consortium Discrete Global Grid System (OGC DGGS), due to its holistic ability to fit into existing hashing algorithms. This also turns map algebra into map-set mathematics with drastic advantages to speed, computational resource usage and distribution.”
Get ready! Blockchain is a disruptive technology. It is so powerful that it is difficult to predict its impact, but it will touch everything.
“The old question ‘Is it in the database?’ will be replaced by ‘Is it on the blockchain?’” — William Mougaya
Governments will be more accountable to the people tracing where their expenses are actually going. The government could post an annual tax bill for each person online that could, in theory, show each taxpayer where each dollar was spent. This is an empowering new model for transparency.
A digital wallet is virtual, but it can be connected to the physical world through a smart key, like a SIM card. And, if the blockchain were geospatially enabled, it would create a layer of security preventing any use if the owner of the digital wallet were not nearby. That’s automatic two-step authentication.
A geospatially embedded blockchain could make that possible. Cash can transfer hands and no one is any wiser about where the money came from, but transfer a blockchain-based currency and the new owner is part of the permanent record.
Tough on crime. What would that do to crime? How would it affect blackmail, kidnapping, human trafficking? Perhaps the smart key is attached to the owner’s cellphone, or a smart watch, or a smart ring? Most likely it would be a smart chip implanted in the owner’s arm or thigh.
A smart chip implant. (Photo: Escape Alert, LLC)
The technology would also be useful for password tokens, building access security cards, passports, etc. It holds great promise for warding off theft and increasing security.
Uses for a blockchain extend beyond currency and are not necessarily associated with financial transactions. Transactions are events: a download is a transaction; clicks on a webpage are transactions; passing through a checkpoint is a transaction; an image capture is a transaction; IoT-triggered events are transactions; and electronically signing a document is a transaction. Blockchains can be coded into software to track downloads of digital copies such as songs, movies, audio, video, images, programs and documents. The obvious implications are copyright protection.
Blockchains can also provide information security for trade secrets, military secrets and even national secrets. Companies that contract to the government would be able to lock their trade secrets from hackers and spies by controlling digital copies with a blockchain. A geocoded blockchain could encrypt data outside of geospatially approved areas or if accessed by anyone other than approved private keys. The contents of secure packages could never fall into the wrong hands even if the package was intercepted. The encryption could not be unscrambled without being in the proximity of the smart key.
Additionally, every download would record what, when, who and where any attempts at access occurred. Blockchain technology also enables smart contracts such as medical records, land ownership records, shipping manifests and notaries. Blockchains can be made a part of physical inventory.
Geocoded-embedded blockchains make asset management more secure, restricting transactions to within specific locations. This would be beneficial in a store for controlling inventory, or at a facility for tracking movements of assets, whether the facility is a military installation, an industrial complex, a government facility, a school campus or a penitentiary. In the case of a penitentiary, the prisoners themselves can be tracked.
Closing Thoughts about Blockchain
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ― George Orwell
Elections. In a free republic, the integrity of elections must be protected and made fully transparent. Geotagged blockchain election ballots would be an immutable record of the election. A little geospatial analysis could easily detect locations with multiple votes making it highly suspect for voter fraud. Add the requirement to have a private key associated with each voter and voter fraud would be eliminated.
One of the benefits would be eradicating the months of post-election bickering wasting time, tax dollars and sanity. It’s hard to argue with a transparent, decentralized, distributed and immutable ledger; so, no matter which side of the political divide someone is on, removing reasons for conflict should benefit everyone.
Immutable record. If you look at the non-stop news cycle about the government missing texts, missing emails, possible collusion, a dossier, possibly two, and who knew what, and when did they know it, all of that could be resolved with blockchain technology. An immutable record would make it nearly impossible for anything to come up missing, and a geospatially tagged blockchain would show exactly who knew, what they knew, and where they were when they learned it. Deception would be made much more difficult.
Blockchain has the potential to sterilize corruption in politics. The ideal for an open and transparent political system is worth holding on to.
Learn about blockchain, because it will become more and more prevalent in conversations, on television, in movies, and on the news. I hope this article helped shed some light on the technology and its future and the advantages of adding a geospatial component to a blockchain.
* William Mougayar is the Voltaire of the blockchain revolution. He applies his visionary intellect to the merits of a trust-based, information-sharing system prescribing it a cure against the ills of business, politics and society. Mougayar is stoking the coals of the digital transformation just as Voltaire helped light the torch of the French Revolution.
** Reem El Seed is the coordinator of the Blockchain Users Group for the Washington, DC Chapter. She is a prodigious and enthusiastic proponent of blockchain and cryptocurrencies and a well-known figure in the Washington, D.C., area.
Whether you are on the helping end of a disaster aiding in the rescue and recovery, or on the receiving end being aided, GIS is supercharging the rescue efforts.
How can I help you if I don’t know where you are?
Hurricane Harvey hits. The storm was worsening. Winds were sustained at over 120 mph. Landfall of Hurricane Harvey was expected in 48 hours. Worse, the storm was forecast to stall once overland creating the single worst rain event in United States history.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott encouraged people to evacuate, especially those in low lying areas. Mayor Turner had only hours to decide the possible fate of millions. Making the call not to evacuate a category 4 hurricane approaching the city could be political suicide. Consider the fallout after Hurricane Katrina. The models clearly showed the extent of flooding and how many people would be trapped in their cars on flooded roads.
“You cannot put 6.5 million people on the road,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. The mayor’s ultimate decision not to issue an evacuation declaration was based on geospatial models, and as devastating as they were, it showed a better outcome if everyone stocked up, stayed put, and helped each other out after the storm. At least by staying home we will know where people are after the storm.
Gov. Abbott fully mobilized the National Guard and another 30 state agencies responded to the crisis. U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) calls to action went out to the Coast Guard and volunteer organizations. Small boats, raised axel trucks and Vietnam-era looking personnel carriers were brought in for support, along with helicopters, drones and search and rescue airplanes.
First responders were issued full body waders and foul weather gear. Thousands of hypothermia blankets were stockpiled and cargo trucks carrying food, water and cots headed south. Volunteers from the Cajun Navy, Team Rubicon, the Red Cross, Open Street Maps, Samaritan’s Purse and others positioned their able-bodied forces along the periphery of the storm’s path ready to move in as soon as given the word.
Thursday afternoon the winds and rains began getting increasingly worse. Darkness fell and by 10 p.m. the eye of the storm had made landfall. Rivers and streams began overflowing due in part to the storm surge moving waters upstream. Streets no longer drained the waters. The flooding continued to rise.
Tremendous thermodynamic forces. Hurricanes aren’t a single, solid storm, though they may look like it from satellite imagery. They are enormous atmospheric depressions like a hole formed in the sky and air masses from thousands of miles around rush in to fill the void. These converging air masses create immense thermodynamic forces extending outward from a central vortex in long sweeping radial bands like blades of an enormous turbine.
A hurricane is the cumulative fury of these destructive forces storm after storm after in rapid succession. Winds increase and decrease as the radial bands pass overhead becoming stronger and more constant as the eye approaches. Every plank, nail and screw is tested. Immense gusts like giant hammers breaks away loose thing. Strains of timber and steel shriek in the wind. In seconds sounds of groaning trees and the air fills with flying debris. Rain comes down in torrents.
But in between these spiral bands it slows, sometimes stopping all together, even sunshine or moonlight might break through, but to believe the storm is over would be wrong — maybe dead wrong. Another band will sweep in with gusting, howling wind, thick, heavy clouds and dark skies, and rain, more and more rain, and the rising waters turning into gushing floods. Moments of endless terror turn into hours, the waters rising higher ever higher.
Finally, 49 inches of rain and three days later the storm ended moving offshore. Its destruction shut down the fourth largest city in the United States.
“…Texans have suffered a great hardship, their warmth and resiliency is truly inspiring,” said Gov. Abbott. The overwhelming willingness of people and organizations to help once the storm passed brought its own challenges. A convergence of rescue and recovery teams began.
Leaders needed. It was obvious a coordinated effort needed to happen. Volunteers and organizations needed to work in unison. FEMA had to establish that order. The coordination center was formed, not unlike other disasters, but this time another dimension was added to it. FEMA was aware of social media’s ability to positively impact rescue operations tapping into briefly during Superstorm Sandy, the last large scale disaster to hit the United States, but FEMA lacked the necessary skills and expertise to capitalize on the technology.
It is times like these that the greatest of all resources is realized. When asked what is the greatest asset, the answers most often given are manpower, money, equipment or supplies; however, even if there are plenty of the above, it is quickly realized the greatest resource is leadership. In times of crises, normal authority is laid aside and given to those who can bring order to the chaos.
Christopher Vaughn, the geospatial information officer for FEMA, and Adrian Gardner, the chief information officer for FEMA, were those individuals stepping up to the task at hand. They understood getting better data faster and putting it into geospatial context held the answer. Once done that would be the foundational layer. All the other elements could then be added, like imagery, lots and lots of imagery, both before and after; and then overlay crowdsourced data.
Vaughn, working with his counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security, brought in Homeland Infrastructure Foundation Level Data (HIFLD) layers, along with the Civil Air Patrol and DigitalGlobe’s Open Data Program. Launched in 2017, the program provides before and after imagery. Vaughn understood that the citizen-as-a-censor model provided raw, real-time and relevant information. It had to be tapped into to get control of the rescue operations.
Sophia Liu, Ph.D., an Innovation Specialist and expert in crowdsource efforts was brought in from the United States Geographic Survey (USGS). Liu was the key to unlocking the crowd. She shared her greatest challenge was the misconceptions around the use of social media and an apprehension to using it without proper approvals from public relations. It took some convincing to change these mindsets.
What helped tip the scales in her favor was Hurricane Irma coming right on the heels of Hurricane Harvey and then Hurricane Maria. The disasters were coming in way too fast and the detractors were drowned out by the need for information. Once they saw the value of crowdsourcing, there was little resistance.
Challenges in Puerto Rico. The results spoke for themselves. In Puerto Rico, within only a few weeks of Hurricane Maria’s devastation, 1.4 million homes were analyzed for damage and 24,000 miles of roads were digitized through volunteer groups like GIS Corps and OpenStreetMaps.
One of the greatest challenges in Puerto Rico was the lack of street addresses. That is more common than one might realize. In many parts of the world there is no established address system and locations are more or less oriented to significant landmarks. It is difficult for Americans to understand, but in other cultures generations of families grow up in the same neighborhoods. Everyone knows everyone else. Location is personal. In the case of disasters this poses a huge challenge, especially when roads and landmarks are destroyed, and people have evacuated.
The company What3Words (W3W) is tackling this issue. W3W works uses a pixelated Earth system of 3 meter by 3 meter squares. Each grid can be defined by a set of three words. As I write this I am sitting in bump.cans.dome.
W3W does away with traditional numerical latitude and longitude. It works in any language, in fact, eight countries have partnered with W3W as either the nation’s official addressing system or an alternate system, and the United Nations has it among their disaster reporting tools. Art Kalinski, the former writer of this column wrote an article last year about W3W, what3words: The geospatial advancement of the year?
In Puerto Rico, since there aren’t addresses except in urban areas, the remainder of the island had to be geospatially configured to communicate “where” something was located. Digitizing Puerto Rico is a huge geospatial effort that would take years through normal government protocols and cost millions of dollars.
Instead, by enlisting the support of the crowd, it was accomplished in weeks, proving the power if crowdsourcing operations.
Crowdsourcing to the rescue. The power of the crowd was unlocked even more by using geoforms for filling out damage reports like bridge assessments, damaged roads, debris removal, etc. This allowed navigation apps to route around impassable areas saving time and ultimately lives. No more sending a rescue vehicle out only to find it can’t access the area because a tree is down, a bridge is collapsed, or flood waters are too high. Those delivering food could do so to where the people were.
Interactive, real-time, geospatial, command and control forever changed dispatching. Instead of waiting for teams to return before retasking them with new assignments dispatching could be of done on the fly as survivors were identified. The nearest rescue craft with available space could be routed to the exact location.
GIS allowed dispatchers to see where all the rescue teams were and how many survivors they had onboard and how many more they could take on. Data about each survivor was recorded allowing preparations for the arrival of anyone with special needs and the person’s information could immediately show up on a notification board that they had been found and rescued, important for family and friends to know.
The information also helps with forecasting needs of shelters and the reporting of numbers to those in operational authority.
Daily coordination calls were conducted over a variety of platforms with all interested and active participants. Important information was posted on a shared cloud drive. Slack, the peer to peer online collaboration platform was used so FEMA and the various groups were able to collaborate and keep the three different hurricane rescue operations segregated.
Recovery continues. The recovery efforts continue in Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. In efforts to increase the attention GIS played in mitigating damage from these disasters and the value of crowdsourced information FEMA hosted several events. The final event was held on Saturday, October 21, 2017. It was information about the situation on the ground in the multiple locations and the ongoing operations. It was also a celebration of the successes achieved during these crises; and, a tinge of sadness marked the event bringing to a close to some great working relationships.
If you are interested, there are still ways to get involved no matter what your skillset or expertise. If you have a desire to help, there are opportunities either on scene in the theater of operation, or remotely working from your computer at home. Check with the organizations mentioned below. Even a couple hours of your time can help.
What GIS offers next. GIS in the future of disaster response will make greater use of emerging technologies. Drones will fly preprogrammed paths ahead of a disaster if given enough time, and the imagery and the drone’s flight path will be stored. Then, immediately after the event passes drones will fly the same programmed path capturing imagery with the exact oblique and nadir angles as the original dataset.
Change detection analysis can then be used to find the exact locations of change. This method will become increasingly valuable using high resolution 3D imagery point clouds and used in a change detection system.
Geospatial artificial intelligence systems will identify the areas of greatest damage and assist by directing other resources such as mobile data signals to direct rescue operations towards possible survivors even using the last reported mobile data signal. It can direct human analysts to those specific areas that are inconclusive or require manual verification. This will increase analysis from several weeks to several days.
That is in the future, the near future, perhaps next year’s hurricane season, or tornado season, or snowstorms this winter.
This year, in total, there were 10 Atlantic hurricanes resulting in 431 deaths and an estimated $3.17 billion in damage; which by comparison, is 1/10th the number of casualties from Hurricane Katrina yet nearly twice the level of damage. It just so happens, I went through Hurricane Katrina living along the coast in Bay Saint Louis, Missouri, at the time where the eye the storm passed over. I tried to evacuate but being caught in a 13 hour traffic jam I was unable to outrun the storm. I personally experienced a category 4 hurricane. You may have picked that up in the opening of this article. Those experiences were very real. You might have also picked up my meteorological background from my days in the U.S Navy as a weather analyst.
By the end of 2017, more than hurricanes had inflicted damage. Wildfires in the western U.S. killed another 36 people and destroyed 6,000 buildings. Now, with winter upon us, there will be snowstorms, and GIS will help with those recovery efforts as well.
We are lucky to live in this day and age. Whether you are on the helping end of a disaster aiding in rescue and recovery, or on the receiving end being aided, GIS is supercharging the rescue efforts.
Most of us know about serious games that teach real-world applications.
Flight simulators are the most well-known example. Learning to fly multi-million dollar aircraft is simply too costly and too dangerous to train in the real world. Pilots spend hundreds and thousands of hours in flight simulators going over basics and learning to deal with emergency situations.
Doctors are another profession that spends many hours doing simulated procedures.
The military is another.
So are police and emergency responders.
The risks are too great in those professions for real-world training. Immersive training in virtual, simulated environments is the only way to become fully proficient.
The term serious games describes a type of game-based learning, but serious games don’t have to be associated only with jobs that are high cost and high risk. Other examples of fields using serious games include fleet logistics operations, air traffic control, shipping port operations, unmanned aerial systems and driver training.
In all of those games, GIS is a crucial component because it allows game-based learning to transition from the virtual world to the real world.
Back to the Classroom
What was became what is because someone asked what if.
“What if,” two words the dogmatists abhor and the idealists herald. The idealists (aka visionaries and dreamers) drive change at an ever-increasing pace. There is never a respite.
I am admittedly a dreamer, but only in my waking hours. From midnight to sunrise I am very much a conservative (aka dogmatist and traditionalist), lest in my sleep I am overtaken by a swifter, stronger, more technically savvy idealist and awaken a dinosaur: Tewelowsaurus Rexus.
So it is in this age of disruption, an economic stalwart in one quarter and a bearish pariah in the next. The archeological rubble of traditional industries piles up.
The education system is such a behemoth, sluggish and dying, unable to compete with emerging technologies and immersive learning. Education RIP — another victim of the internet. But it is more than the battle of brick and mortar versus e-commerce. This extinction is happening because of style over substance.
Traditional schools simply are not attracting the generations of students who grew up in an increasingly connected digital age. What’s in it for me? Is now, what’s here, relates to me? We screamed when we were young and going through the system, but the alternatives were not there. Now, the alternatives are fascinating, engaging and wondrous. Students and the curious line up, wanting to participate.
To understand the difference between the two schools of thought, let’s consider a traditional subject: algebra — a favorite of millions of students year after year. Perhaps you too recall the joys of X over Y and the endless hours enraptured in sheer delight solving for “why,” as in why in tarnation does anyone need to know this?
If you were like me, then you too believed the title mathematician was synonymous with masochist, except that these instruments of mental torture were leaked to the government and, through public schools, were inflicted on innocent children posing as students.
But I digress. Probably due to latent psychosis: Post Algebraic Stress Disorder (PASD). It doesn’t have to be that way, except dogma dictates that our successors suffer the same.
A GIS Classroom Tale
The following example illustrates what a typical game-based learning environment might look like.
Professor Hamill, wearing a sports blazer over a dark blue T-shirt that reads “Data, the new bacon” and a comfortable pair of jeans, stands in front of the class. The Earth slowly rotates behind him on a large, multi-panel screen. It is the students’ second year of their Geospatial Science curriculum.
The professor addresses the students warmly and asks if anyone knows Xnite21? He explains it is his online gamertag and his GitHub user name. Most of the students, being coders and gamers with a background or an interest in GIS, immediately identify and begin calling out their own callsigns.
After a brief open discussion about favorite games and name familiarity, Professor Hamill explains their first assignment. They will be mapping all the trees in the campus commons — a typical task for an Applied GIS class, but this time is different.
The class is going to be using game-based learning. Each student is issued augmented reality (AR) glasses and a GPS-enabled tablet loaded with geospatial software. The students form into five six-person teams, each assigned a color. Each team has to geospatially tag unmarked trees by collecting attributes about the types and estimating height and diameter.
Looking through the AR glasses, if a tree has been tagged a translucent, colored column, the height and diameter taken from the attribute table will appear around the tree in the color of the team that captured it. When a total of all the tagged trees reaches 120, the assignment (game) is over.
Back in the classroom — converted to a command center — the students focused on a large, multi-panel screen showing the color-coded players as they moved around the campus and color-coded trees as they’re added. The overall score of each team is in the upper right corner. Individual stats on players are in the left.
The green team was ahead by a sizable lead. The red team and white team were fighting for second place, while the purple team trailed behind and the yellow team struggled to get started. The professor knew that he would have to spend some time with the students on the purple and yellow teams. The goal wasn’t to win, but to learn and have fun while doing it. By looking at the individual student’s metrics, the professor could see where the students were having challenges and then teach to improve those areas.
In the above example, the assignment usually takes five to six hours, but the gamification of the task cut the time in half. The students were more engaged, more motivated and had more fun; additionally, they learned leadership and teamwork and how to use the technology more creatively.
Students also develop camaraderie faster, usually beginning with the first assignment. Another added benefit is reduced absences. Students look forward to their assignments, and because they are usually part of a team, they feel a sense of interdependence that helps to motivate them to make it to class.
Because the students were able to finish the assignment faster than their traditional learning counterparts, they were given another assignment. Usually, that would be met with angst. But in game-based learning, as long as the assignment is fun, won’t take an inordinate amount of time, and has a relevant purpose, the students are more than often happy to do it.
After meeting with the class and going over the areas that the professor saw the students having the most difficulty, he sent out the same teams as before. This time they were tasked with sectioning off the student parking lot into five equal areas. Each of the teams were then to collect information on the each of the cars in their area: GPS location, make and model, and estimated value. After collecting the information, the students were then able to calculate the average value of all the vehicles, and thus, an average net worth. They were also able to run geospatial analytics to visually look for patterns and anomalies.
The students did not see the assignment as work so much as a game of discovery about themselves and their school, and appropriately enough how to apply GIS to everyday life.
The knowledge and experience acquired through game-based learning happens at a deeper level. The students are actively engaged in the learning process rather than passively engaged and emotionally charged with higher levels of energy.
Speaking with Giants
Phaedra Boinodiris
Writing this article gave me a great opportunity to interview Phaedra Boinodiris, a 20+ year leader in the game-based learning industry. She led IBM’s first serious gaming venture into a multi-million-dollar business unit. She is an expert in how to use game theory to promote user engagement and motivate students and employees to modify behavior toward more positive outcomes.
Phaedra is the author of the book Serious Games for Business: Using Gamification to Fully Engage Customers, Employees and Partners. Phaedra explained that elements of gaming are typically thought of as points, badges and leaderboards; but in reality, what motivates most people for long-term engagement is autonomy over their own lives, mastery of their craft and having a sense of purpose greater than themselves.
Phaedra also said that gaming is entering the workforce. It is beyond just training and education. Companies are already using game-based systems to engage employees. The return on investment (ROI) to the company is greater employee engagement, better moral, a more appealing workplace and higher retention rates, especially for Millennials and Gen-Xers.
Phaedra went on to say other advantages of game-based systems are the ability to curate user data to learn what motivates them. Knowing what drives a person means the system can hone the user’s experience.
Phaedra explained that game-based systems make data science actionable. She said what fascinates her the most is the intersection of artificial intelligence and play, and the advancements in human-computer interface. There is so much happening right now; it is an exciting time to be in the field.
See Phaedra Boinodiris at the 2014 gSummit in San Francisco speaking on gaming the workforce.
Nathan Elequin
In addition to interviewing Phaedra, I also had the opportunity to interview gamification specialist Nathan Elequin, a graduate research assistant at Syracuse University. Nathan’s primary interest is moving the education system toward a more robust learning experience using game-based design. He authors an online column, EduGames.
According to Nathan, training is most effective when game theory is applied to learning. Gaming is the synthesis of science, skill, behavioral psychology and art, and when done right allows a student to figure out problems on his or her own, ensuring the learning is experienced internally, and thus, to a much deeper level than rote and recall.
GIS in gaming is important because rich gaming environments deal with massive amounts of information, and GIS has already overcome that challenge by creating spatially aware interactions of different types of complex variables to visualize patterns.
In regard to GIS and gaming, Nathan shared that one of the most popular games of the past several years was Pokémon GO, which made national news several times. It is an augmented reality game built on a geospatial platform.
A far better game is Ingress, where players are in one of two teams battling for world domination. The whole world‚ the real world, is the gameboard.
Ingress is a geospatially augmented reality game. It is described as bringing a video game into real life. Seeing the world through the lens of Ingress is to see magical things in the world around us that otherwise would go unseen. It is a fascinating game; you can see the trailer here.
Nathan spoke about a fascinating future using a geospatial-like system described as an objective-based navigation system similar in design to a GPS-based navigation system that takes a person from point A to point B along a course the computer determines based upon available data.
The objective-based system helps steer a person towards their chosen objectives, or goals. The person selects their own objectives. Using an artificial intelligence-based information system similar in design to a GIS allows complicated and massive amounts of data to interact and plot a course of action, helping navigate the person towards their objective.
Let sleeping dogma lie. Awaken the lucid dreamers of tomorrow. We exist on the precipice of potential, and it only takes a few of us to turn what if into what is. Find ways to teach that are more active, more immersive, and more engaging.
If it’s worth learning, then it’s worth spending the extra time to gamify the experience. It’s a win-win for students and teachers. This is a future we need only open our hands and grasp, for it is within our reach.
So, let the games begin.
Encore: The Cutting-Room Floor
Games in School
Returning from her first day back to school her phone rang as she opened the door. The familiar voice of her friend Conner asked in a hopeful voice, “Hi Jill. Want to come over?”
Sadly, after a moment’s pause she had to decline. “I can’t, Conner. I’ve got so much math homework. I can’t believe how much they gave us.”
“I do too, Jill,” said Conner explaining he was in a game-based learning curriculum. “My homework is to finish level 1 called Euclidian Dreams. Some of my friends are over and we are all playing, plus we’re going online later to compete against the rest of the class to see who’ll be the champion tomorrow. I was hoping you could come over, too.”
Jill sighed. In her voice was a tinge of disappointment. “It sounds fun, Conner, but I don’t know how well you’re going to be able to learn algebra playing games.” Jill’s answer sounded more like what his mother or father might’ve replied. Or the more harsh, disgruntled criticism of his grandfather who would’ve added how the world is going to pot playing games instead of studying.
Dejected, Conner hung up with Jill. He knew there was more than just a “no” in Jill’s refusal to come over. It was accusatory, as if she were judging him to be a miscreant because he was in the test program.
Conner went on that evening to have a great time with friends playing the games that were teaching algebra without actually doing math. The game taught algebraic concepts using a storyline, puzzles and challenges. There were characters, of which Euclid was the main one, guiding the journey and revealing insights and clues to find and reach the Elements, Euclid’s treasure.
As Conner progressed through the course, the games incorporated races, battles, adventures, stories, philosophies and mysteries of the ancient mathematicians whom he had to come to know through the games. The great mathematicians became friendly figures as they guided him through games with names such as The Riddle of Archimedes, The Mystery of Cheops, Code of Pythagoras, Plane of Descartes, Newtonian Revelations and the Visions of Einstein.
By the time each level was completed, the formulas didn’t seem like math so much as they appeared to be keys to unlock the secrets of the world around us.
NOTE: The characters in the story are fictitious. The games mentioned in the story are not real, but are based on DragonBox’s educational games.
Please provide your feedback. Specifically, are you interested in more on this subject? Did you enjoy the article? What topics would you like to see covered? All feedback is appreciated. Thank you.
Main hall of the NACo Conference. (Photo: Art Kalinski)
After retiring from the Navy in 1993, my first GIS-related position was with the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). I was tasked with building the agency’s GIS and promoting GIS within the 10 member counties.
Some of our counties were excited about building their own GIS capability. But some were timid if not hostile toward the new technology because of horror stories heard from a few early adopters in other parts of the country. I soon understood why.
Horror stories for county GIS efforts
Some of those counties were victims of ambitious sales representatives. The sales reps talked them into a GIS “dive into the deep end.” They recommended flying and collecting ortho imagery of the entire county, contracting for creation of data layers such as streets and parcels, buying ArcInfo running on Unix stations and hiring a GIS manager who was most likely the only one in the county who could run the GIS.
Then the fun began. There was a shortage of Unix/ArcInfo programmers, so head hunters had a field day tempting GIS managers to jump ship for higher salaries. This played havoc with some counties that had only one person able to run the GIS. Those counties found themselves in the position of not even being able to print out simple maps despite an investment of several hundred thousand dollars.
Hearing those horror stories, we acted quickly at ARC to make sure our counties understood the issues. We helped them by publishing some Atlanta regional data such as streets, hydrography, land-use and imagery on DVDs that could help our counties get started cheaply.
We also set up an ArcView Learning Center and trained more than 1,200 individuals in the entry-level GIS. This helped counties avoid some of the early and costly pitfalls by starting small and simple using readily available free GIS data.
It took years to shake the bad image that some had formed about GIS being too complicated. With that early experience I was happy to see that GIS had finally settled into playing a key role in county operations.
Today, with revenue being so important, GIS is well established in most county tax assessor operations and online access is available. However, other potential county users are still somewhat hesitant to adopt the technology. A significant portion of the conference and exhibitors were focused on new applications and users of GIS.
The conference was very well attended with a surprising amount of time devoted to geospatial issues. GIS and related technologies are clearly major tools for most counties, with use and importance growing each day.
Key topics discussed at the GIS sub-committee included use of GIS by first responders, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), tackling the opioid crisis, public access and even new developments in artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
Highlights of the NACo Expo
The expo area had a wide variety of vendors ranging from first responder/public works hardware, to accounting software, human resources software, legal and medical services support. My focus was several exhibitors in the geospatial field who were working to make GIS more accessible primarily to first responders.
The geospatial “500-pound gorilla” has its technology in almost every county in the United States and is working to make GIS even more accessible to all county departments. Esri had a large booth at NACo — in the following video, Philip Mielke explains some of the latest tools of interest to counties including police, fire, opioid response, public works, economic development, drone data collection and even virtual and augmented reality.
I was hoping to see a demonstration of Esri’s photos-to-3D-model data-collection system, but the weather was too severe to venture outside the building. Last year, I did see their “drone to map” capability that spawned this system, so it should work well.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
I was surprised to see that NASA had a large display at NACo. Although not trying to sell anything, the booth was informational so other counties understood the impact on counties where NASA has a presence.
Todd May, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, explained that most people think that NASA’s efforts are focused in only a few locations. In reality, more than 43 states are involved in the space effort producing hardware, software and capabilities needed by NASA.
As a side note, one of his staffers explained that Huntsville — which has the highest per-capita number of master’s degree holders, Ph.D.s and engineers of any city in the nation — also has more than 70 geospatial firms in the city.
GlobalFlyte
An exhibitor that especially caught my attention because of its number of innovations was an Ohio geospatial firm called GlobalFlyte.
GlobalFlyte is working with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to bring some AFRL innovations into the public sector. Working with Esri and Pictometry/Eagleview, GlobalFlyte augments GIS data and oblique imagery with live UAS video.
One source of the video was from a tethered UAV; the tether permits an off-the-shelf drone to say aloft for hours.
GlobalFlyte also showed off a fast-deploying compact mast for communications, lights or video cameras called a zippermast. As implied by the name, three coils of spring steel “zipper” together to create a rigid self-rising three-sided mast.
The company also uses the Plum Case “network in a box” that I saw a GeoHuntsville last year to provide Wi-Fi and cellphone service in devastated or very weak service areas.
The most impressive part of GlobalFlyte’s solution is the seamless integration of the above resources with an innovative radio communications management system developed by AFRL to clear up the chaos of complex fast-paced military communications. The solution creates a 3D-like aural environment that separates and clarifies multiple radio conversations by putting them into a 3D space.
Wearing the earphones significantly reduces the confusing radio traffic by creating a 3D-like spatial environment. It’s surprising how the human ear can separate and focus on specific conversations like we naturally do in a crowded room.
The same audio was also simultaneously transcribed and displayed as text on the geospatial display screen with surprising accuracy.
Ricoh
Until the capability became ubiquitous on most smartphones, Ricoh offered the first affordable digital camera in the ’90s with built-in GPS that stamped each photo with a location. This facilitated the mapping and linking of photos to a GIS layer.
Ricoh still makes high-end digital cameras with both GPS and barcode reader accessories to facilitate data capture; however, at NACo, the company demonstrated a Virtual Self-Service Hologram.
Although labeled a “hologram” by Ricoh, this is really a rear-projected image that acts as a virtual receptionist. It’s similar to a point-of-sale projector I saw last year at the eMerge trade show.
The difference with the Ricoh unit is that it interacts with the viewer in real-time to provide information based on the needs and input of the viewer.
Blue Marble Geographics
Blue Marble Software tools support many different GIS data types (raster and vector) while serving as an all-in-one solution for data creation, visualization or conversion. Global Mapper GIS permits county employees with just a basic knowledge of GIS to develop and manage a fully functional GIS easily and at low cost to the county.
There was an interesting start-up food vendor in the Columbus Conference Center food court that may be a sign of things to come. They grow their own produce, on-site hydroponically. Top on their list were tomatoes, greens and some fruit. The vendor, “Homegrown Market,” is not fully operational yet but was attracting a lot of attention.
Last year, Huntsville, Alabama, was the site of the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency’s (NGA’s) first HackAThon — just one outreach event to take advantage of talent and skills outside the agency that could enrich the efforts of NGA.
The HackAThon was an initiative of both previous NGA Director Letitia Long and current Director Robert Cardillo. It was so successful that NGA had four other HackAThons in major cities, including New York, Boston and San Francisco, with a repeat this year in Huntsville.
The weekend HackAThon led up to the GeoHuntsville Summit, a geospatial conference that has been an annual event for more than 10 years. The conference was opened by long-time geospatial professional and advocate Chris Johnson and Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, who both have had supportive connections with NGA. The mayor highlighted the fact that for its size, Huntsville was somewhat unique in that it had a higher per capita population of Ph.D.s and engineers than any other city in the U.S. That same wealth of talent extends into geospatial, with more than 70 geospatial firms in the area.
New GeoHuntsville Director
GeoHuntsville Executive Director Jorge Garcia
Chris then introduced Jorge Garcia, who is taking over as the GeoHuntsville Executive Director. Jorge retired from the FBI, where he served as assistant director, Directorate of Intelligence. His 16-year military career includes combat tours in Iraq, which preceded 21 years with the FBI, and later intelligence work in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Jorge highlighted the goals of GeoHuntsville that were his marching orders, including the advancement of geospatial tools to prevent and/or mitigate natural and manmade threats to the region while fostering research, development and education of the geospatial tradecraft.
Presentation Highlights
Ken Graham, Director, Platform Services Division, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)
As a sponsor of the event, and active part of GeoHuntsville, there was heavy participation by NGA staff, including NGA recruiters eyeing the 15,000-plus geospatial talent located in Huntsville. Ken discussed the success of the HackAThons and other outreach efforts developed by NGA’s Enterprise Innovation Office. Its focus on unclassified open source tools is changing the culture away from “that’s the way we always did it” to completely out-of-the-box thinking including “Shark Tank”-like evaluations of tools developed outside the agency, without the very slow and expensive procurement methods that took years to place new innovations into the hand of NGA users.
Ken explained that rather than NGA developing exact descriptions and specification of what the agency wanted, it instead describes a problem or need. The NGA then leaves it up to the creativity of outside developers to think of new approaches and solutions to the problem.
Most of the solutions can be created in unclassified environments and then tested by NGA staff using real agency data. In many cases, this negates the need for outside developers to have TS/SCI clearances, which are expensive and time consuming to obtain. The NGA goal, which sounds very ambitious, is to be able to get new tools into the hands of users less than 24 hours after a problem is identified!
Dan Koch, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Koch demonstrated a system developed by ORNL that integrates various GIS tools in one easy-to-use environment called the Incident Management Preparedness Coordination Tool Kit, or IMPACT for short. This system was initially designed for EOD use during potential bombing events, but the system also proved useful to a broad audience of first responders.
The system can be used with web services, but also can operate in a disconnected environment, since much of the needed data resides locally. IMPACT includes traditional GIS tools and external data access augmented with bomb-blast patterns, crowd evacuation animations, plume models, contagion spread simulations, active shooter view-sheds, antenna placements and patterns and real-time live data feeds.
The afternoon breakout sessions included a detailed demonstration of IMPACT. You can see a demonstration of IMPACT in this youtube video. Some of the attendees mentioned that the system would be even nicer if it used the new CESIUM WebGL virtual globe to show 3D data.
Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT)
J.D. D’Arville of the ALDOT explained ALDOT’s use of off-the-shelf UAVs (DJI Phantom 3s and 4s) with eMotion software and senseFly S.O.D.A. cameras to capture very high-quality aerial imagery in multiple spectrums (see the senseFly video.} The imagery was then assembled into metric 3D models using Pix4D that permitted them to monitor contractor work. One early success was discovering poor “cut and fill” procedures by a contractor.
John Russell of ALDOT then explained survey data collection using what I believe is very disruptive technology —AeroPoints, developed by Propeller Aero. AeroPoints is a very accurate automated system that uses UAVs with innovative ground control pads to capture 2-cm-accurate aerial imagery. See a video of it in operation here.
Mike Botts, OpenSensorHub
Botts presented the latest examples of work he and his colleagues have done to advance the practical use of remote sensors. He pointed out a key advantage of working with GeoHuntsville, in that both developers and end users had the ability to learn from each other.
One example he cited was showing the display of live UAV video on a static map to a participating local fire chief. Since the video was related to the geography but not accurately geo-referenced, the fire chief said that it wouldn’t be useful. He explained that trying to figure out exactly what he was looking at and from which direction would be too time-consuming and potentially confusing. Botts and his staff took the problem in hand and developed a simple way to place the video footprint in the exact location and orientation that was spatially correct. This had been done before with high-end military systems, but never so simply and effectively.
UAVs
There were also several presentations by UAV users and the UAV users’ group that addressed both hardware and software. However, the UAV topics that still dominate the discussions are the administrative and legal issues that still cloud the use of the technology.
These were only the highlights of the conference. Although lasting one day, this was an information-rich conference worth attending.
His success did not end there. Based on his experiences fighting criminals on the streets and fighting change in the antiquated police system, he wrote the book, 
