Read Upon Arrival:
By: Kj Masback
Tags: Data Analysis, Geospatial Intelligence, Remote Sensing, Geospatial, Data Visualization

2019 GEOINT Symposium San Antonio, TX

An Insider’s Guide to the 2019 GEOINT Symposium

As I sit on the flight to San Antonio for GEOINT 2019, I ponder what it will be like to be there primarily as an attendee for the first time since 2006. Having led the USGIF staff for over a decade until my departure at the end of 2018, I’m proud to remain a member of the organization’s Board of Directors, excited to serve as an emcee on Tuesday, and I’m confident that the staff is going to knock it out of the park as they always do.

I’ve had a few folks reach out over the past couple of weeks to ask about specific topics related to the symposium. It occurred to me that I’ve got a unique perspective that others might find of value. So, what follows is my personal take on how to get the most out of the coming week. Good luck, drink water, and hopefully you’ve chosen comfortable footwear!

Sunday:

I highly recommend attending GEOINT Forward on Sunday if you’re able. GEOINT Forward has evolved over time to become a uniquely valuable part of the symposium. USGIF volunteers, working with the staff, have consistently pulled together an intriguing mix of speakers and panelists. The format tends to allow for more in-depth, technical treatment of topical subjects, and for meaningful interaction with your fellow attendees. Even if you are unable to attend GEOINT Forward, take the time to register on Sunday to avoid the Monday morning rush. I’d also urge that you conduct a “route reconnaissance” to familiarize yourself with the convention center to the extent you are allowed. Most figure out the layout of the event just about the time they get ready to leave.

Sunday evening’s Welcome Reception is one of remaining formal large social functions that were so prevalent in the early days of the symposium. These gatherings are where the fabric that underpins the GEOINT Community has been steadily woven, thread by thread, year after year since 2003. Thousands of personal relationships have been established and sustained, with attendees making new acquaintances while catching up with old friends and colleagues in a casual, relaxed environment.

Monday:

The first morning — in fact the first day — of the main symposium always seems to have a special energy about it. There is genuine collective affection for this event, with a certain ‘family reunion’ quality to it. The first morning is filled with buzz, and it’s great to get there early to be part of it and to enjoy it.

Unsurprisingly, the symposia which occur in the wake of a change of leadership in the Community, especially at NGA, have a heightened sense of purpose. Everyone is eager to see and hear from the new leadership: What are they like…what are their priorities…what will they leave in place…what will they change…who will they move/replace? The (fairly) new D/NGA, VADM Bob Sharp will be on the main stage Monday morning, and will likely answer many of those questions.

Another highlight will be the CIO Panel. Don’t miss this. These are the men and women who have to distill grandiose visions to translate hyperbole into actions — and funded programs. This is where the rubber meets the road and they never fail to deliver…on the stage, anyway!

Tuesday:

Despite Tuesday’s emcee, the morning program looks superb. Sue Gordon, the PDDNI, never fails to provide compelling, meaningful remarks and she answers questions with unique insight and great candor. She’s followed by another longtime superstar in our community, Dr. Lisa Porter, now a senior leader in OSD DDR&E. Finally, the panel on applying geospatial intelligence to address the massive challenge of wildfires is both timely and important. Wildfires and other consequences of the global climate crisis are our new reality. The technology and tradecraft we’ve developed in our community to fight adversaries and respond to humanitarian crises abroad must be leveraged to meet the challenges of floods and fires here at home.

Wednesday:

Wednesday morning is another great lineup, led by the HON Kari Bingen, of OUSD(I) who has deep experience as an analyst in industry, a highly respected Congressional staffer, and now the number two intelligence official in OSD. She’s known for being thoughtful, bureaucratically savvy, and blunt. Mayor Lyda Krewson of St. Louis will deliver an important message about that city’s plans for the future of geospatial intelligence.

The Exhibit Hall:

This is where your feet and back will suffer the most, but the ROI for focused time and attention in here is undeniable. This is a place to continue to network while being a voracious learner. The Government Pavilion Stage has an unusually exceptional lineup of speakers this year, and the Lightning Talks are even richer in breadth and depth than they were last year. The GEOINT 2019 App is a good place to attempt to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your time in the hall, and at the event in general. You won’t be able to do it all, so obviously it comes down to prioritization. And your plan will inevitably get totally thrown off by myriad side conversations…though these are generally well worth the perturbation to your planning.

There are a couple of neighborhoods worth particular attention, including the New Member Pavilion, where you’re likely to see new(er) companies with exciting offerings, and the Carahsoft Pavilion, where the company gathers and presents its partners. The longstanding relationship between USGIF and Carahsoft, particularly as it relates to the symposium exhibit floor, is a big win for attendees.

Finally, the daily afternoon receptions are a great time to ease into the end of the day and create a more informal environment for networking and for explorations of partnering and teaming.

Training & Professional Development:

While my procrastination has likely precluded this from being as helpful as it might have been some weeks ago due to sessions ‘selling out,’ the bottom line is that the embedded training and professional development sessions at the GEOINT symposia are unparalleled. They offer a tremendous menu of learning opportunities that have been curated by USGIF staff and volunteers to ensure that they are a good use of your time and (modest) investment.

Working Group Meetings:

Topical working groups are at the heart of USGIF’s efforts, and even if you haven’t had the time to participate in one or more of them, they usually meet at some point during the course of the symposium and it’s a fantastic way to get caught up with their activities and/or to kick-start your involvement.

YPG / Golden Ticket:

Every year, USGIF hosts a cohort of 25–30 young professionals who’ve been nominated by their supervisors and gone through a comprehensive application and selection process which has become highly competitive. Among these young women and men are the future leaders of our GEOINT Community. You can identify them by a distinctive ribbon on their name badges and I urge you to speak with them if you have the chance.

Student Worker Program:

Annually, USGIF brings about a dozen students to the symposium who have applied and been endorsed by their respective school faculty to attend the event. They have a schedule which requires them to work during the event, but which also allows them time to participate in sessions and to get around the exhibit hall. They are easily spotted by their distinctive t-shirts, and I encourage you to engage with them and ask them about their studies. Of course, many of them might be happy to offer you a resume as well!

K-12:

This is a great program, conceived and executed over time by junior USGIF staff members, interns, and volunteers. There’s something especially energizing about seeing the students running around on the giant map, and for me is about as good as a cup of coffee to give me a boost in the midst of a long day at the symposium. This year, as part of the program, local Girl Scouts will be earning STEM badges in the course of their participation in this activity.

Technology:

I’ve had the opportunity this year to attend myriad geospatial intelligence related events over the last 6 months, including GeoBuiz, DGI, and the Geospatial World Forum. Geospatial Intelligence is taking the world by storm, across almost every sector of the economy. (For instance, this past week alone, we saw major moves with Salesforce acquiring MapAnything and Foursquare acquiring Placed.) There are some interesting topics emerging repeatedly, and I’d recommend making sure that GEOINT 2019 attendees don’t find themselves at the airport at the end of this week without making sure they’ve gotten some exposure to the following four areas (a list which is by no means exhaustive):

1) Open Source SW/services: This area continues to grow in popularity and adoption, and there’s been churn in this space including the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, Planet of Boundless, and the continued growth of MapBox. It seems to me that for large enterprise users, and those with complex and varied mission sets, the right solution will likely be some sort of hybrid model of the very capable integrated solutions offered by companies like Hexagon and Esri, and unique tailored applications of open source options. Additionally, the type of synergistic teaming that has been a hallmark of Esri and their partner network is becoming more prevalent elsewhere, and the MapBox — Spatial Networks lash-up is a great example of that.

2) Remote sensing: This area continues to be an exciting one to watch. As a self-described radar junkie, I love the energy being generated (pun intended) around this particular phenomenology. There’s something especially gratifying to me about the way the competitors in this space (sorry) rally together with the explicit understanding that a ‘rising tide floats all boats’ when it comes to creating more awareness of the unique attributes of sensing with radar, and the ability to expand market demand. Airbus has been on a long journey with TerraSAR-X and Tandem-X, in parallel with development by e-Geos and MDA/Maxar. Newer entrants like Capella are bringing additional excitement to this field.

Of course, there’s no shortage of additional activity well beyond radar. We old timers are (almost) getting used to reading about launches with 20+ satellites aboard, and Planet, BlackSky, and others have all been impressively hustling new capability into orbit. Planet is now capable of (previously unimaginable) daily revisit. The loss of WV-4 was a setback for Maxar, but they keep chugging away with their integrated constellation of high-resolution birds, including WV-3 which also collects SWIR.

Also particularly exciting is the emergence of RF from space with Hawkeye360 and Kleos Space. While many of us generally anticipated the arc of commercial imaging (I recall playing out scenarios in space wargames in the early ‘90’s), I think the RF ‘thing’ has caught people by surprise. Spire is also pursuing a unique approach to collection. Next over the horizon will come hyperspectral. Of course, it’s not all about space, and Woolpert and others are providing global airborne coverage as well.

3) Analytics as a service: This is an interesting area, with lots of excitement building. Built on the thesis of developing a more efficient, effective way for companies, organizations (and markets) to get answers (versus simply pixels), Orbital Insight, Space Know, Descartes, Ursa, Slingshot, and others are working hard to create partnerships with multiple data providers while seeking to craft strategies for the right market fit for their products and services. Much like the government has had to sort out over time what imaging they will do with “national” assets versus what they can/should outsource to commercial, they will also have to sort out what analysis they need to maintain internally, and where they can buy answers from others. There’s tremendous opportunity for these companies (well beyond government customers) and much that remains to be sorted out.

4) Processing & Analytics: We’ve relied on Moore’s Law for so long as a helpful guide in terms of our thinking about this area that I think we’re suffering from a bit of cognitive dissonance regarding its fading utility as a guide star. We’re having to recalibrate our perspectives on the trajectory of advances in both the speed at which we can process data and information, and the scale of the volume we can manage as we aspire to apply analytics to get answers. The ability to leap forward with GPU’s from companies like segment leader NVIDIA is critical for realizing benefits of things like AI, deep learning, and computer vision. Further, layering in a platform like OmniSci can massively accelerate that scale and speed on GPU’s (and other processing architectures) truly enabling the longstanding lofty vision we’ve been collectively espousing for our future analytic environment. Clearly, we’ve also got to sort out how the analysts best take advantage of these advances in speed and scale.

5) Other companies to watch: As you wander the floor, it’s almost impossible to get to every company or organization you’d like to investigate. A couple that are on my list: Vricon, Percipient.ai, Tableau, AGI, Palantir, Decision Lens, Nutanix, and Peraton.

So, this piece got far longer than I anticipated, and the flight attendants are eager for me to wrap things up as we get lined up to land in San Antonio. I hope this is of use to you whether you’re a grizzled GEOINT Symposium veteran or a first-timer. To be clear, these random thoughts are mine alone and do not represent the perspective of USGIF nor anyone else. I look forward to seeing you all around the event!