Deep Dive Sessions

Safe & Smart Communities

This session will focus on improving efficiencies of community service provision, infrastructure management, public safety, smart growth, and resilience via the application of geospatial information, technologies, and workflows/processes. A range of public and private sector perspectives and use cases will be featured.

The Imperative for Resilient/Precise Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT)

PNT technologies are far more deeply imbedded across national and global society than commonly understood. PNT systems such as GPS provide everyday personal navigation services, support emergency management and response operations, safety of flight, military operations. PNT timing capabilities are also heavily used in financial and other business and government systems. However, current PNT systems have significant potential vulnerabilities. This deep dive will focus on providing real world case studies that address:

  • Current PNT technology capabilities
  • PNT vulnerabilities (e.g., jamming, spoofing) to government and private sector operations and civil society
  • Emerging precision PNT approaches autonomous operations, indoor navigation, emergency response, business applications
  • Approaches for establishing PNT resilience

Addressing Climate Change, Achieving Climate Resilience

Climate change is now a major national security and global threat to society, the economy, and the environment. This session will engage leaders from government, academia, research, NGOs, and industry in discussing impact of climate change and work underway to leverage geospatial data, tools, and infrastructure to address climate action and climate resilience from the local to national level.

Innovative Partnerships to Leverage the Best in Industry and Government

Panelists provide insight into innovative non-traditional partnerships for geospatial services and projects that deepen cooperation and the sharing of risk and reward among public and private sector partners to reduce the overall costs of providing public services. Focus is placed on the advancement of public-private and innovative partnerships to address key topics of interest:

  • Innovative partnerships to better leverage public-private resources, expertise, data/content, tools, and methods
  • Types/examples of successful National, Regional, and local partnerships
  • Building common purpose and trust
  • Role of commercially produced and maintained geospatial data assets and services (including licensed, priced data) for the NSDI going forward.

Healthcare

Health and geospatial experts discuss the lessons learned regarding the diversity of public and private location information available to identify vulnerable populations, disease hot spots, optimum placement of patient care centers, and mobilization and staging of essential medical supplies and services to achieve desired health outcomes. Issues of privacy, data sharing, interoperability are also discussed. The recent COVID pandemic is also discussed as an illustration of the critical role of integrating geospatial and health information and associated geospatial technologies to achieve positive patient and societal outcomes.

Public Safety & Security / Emergency & Disaster Mgt

User community and industry experts discuss the latest approaches including the application of space, UAS and in-situ sensing, 5G and enhanced indoor location in urban environments. Rapid response times require that emphasis is placed on the application of AI/ML to integrate and process multiple sources of geospatial and other information into actionable form - Analysis Ready Data and Decision Ready Information.

Risk Management for Resilience

Understanding and managing risk is a fundamental goal for government to help ensure public safety, economic stability and growth, and environmental sustainability. Risk management is also fundamental to the insurance industry. This session focuses on the ways in which geospatial information technologies, and infrastructure are being applied by government and industry to forecast and mitigate risk across a range of user industries to create new levels of actionable knowledge regarding risks, along with discussion of emerging capabilities to address forecasting risk amidst an increasingly dynamic environment.

The Role of GeoAI in the National Geospatial Strategy

Artificial Intelligence or AI is fast becoming the most disruptive technology trend we are witnessing as a society. The potential benefits of AI within the public and private sectors are nothing short of transformational, offering opportunity to sift through vast sources of data and processes to identify and offer insights at speeds never before achieved. In addition, advancements in AI allow for dramatically improved geospatial discovery and delivery services to the public. This session will discuss current Federal AI policies, how the NSDI can contribute to national objectives, and where the Federal geospatial community requires or would benefit from collaboration between government, industry, and academic partners.

Infrastructure/ Roadmap to a National Digital Twin

The application of digital twins – realistic 3D representations of aspects of the physical world – are increasingly being applied to more efficiently and effectively plan, design, construct, operate and manage built infrastructure. Digital Twins can also be applied to the natural environment to improve understanding and stewardship of natural resources. The pace of innovation is leading us to the vision of a National Digital Twin – a federation of digital twins linked/connected via shared data and infrastructure to support better national to local level decision making. Panelists will provide examples of successful digital twin projects, will voice their perspectives on the definition of a National Digital Twin, and will discuss what is needed as part of a roadmap to achieve this vision.

Space Domain Awareness

Space has become an important domain for various federal agencies including civil space agencies including NASA, NOAA, DOE, FAA and others with space enabled technologies providing critical services to public citizens including GPS, GNSS, weather, earth observations, connectivity (5G and broad band) and others. Establishing and maintaining coordinated Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Space Traffic Management (STM) technology, data, and services for civil and commercial entities is critical for US Department of Commerce’s efforts to ensure the continued safe and sustainable growth of the commercial space industry. This session explores the importance of our space activities 100+ miles above the earth and how government agencies need to address space infrastructure as a critical domain for national and homeland security as well as promoting a vibrant commercial space industry.

Earth Observation From Space to Surface

This session focuses on current and emerging approaches for leveraging public and private space, airborne, and ground sensing platforms for enhanced decision-making, and to better understand the value of automating the processing and integration of earth observation assets to create enhanced insights.