Between the Poles

Geodesign Summit: Carl Steinitz on the early days of geodesign and organizing education for geodesign

Last night Carl Steinitz, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, gave two presentations.  The first addressed the queston of how to organize education in geosdesign and was the result of Carl being invited to advise a specific university (which remained nameless).  Last night's talk was the actual presentation he gave at the university at the culmination of a week's visit to the university.  The second was a personal history of the early days in the development of geodesign, primarily in the 60s.

Organizing education in geodesign

Geodesign involves bringing together the design professions (architecture and engineering), technology, the geographic sciences, and wha Carl calls the people of the place, the folks that are going to live in the result of a "geodesigned" environment.   A major challenge arises from scale.  Scientists approaach things from the universal anf global, designers from the local, even at the level of  one building or one parcel. 

Carl made the case that the most important thing that all students of geodesign, regardless of their background, need to learn is how to collaborate in a multi-disciplinary project environment involving architects, engineers, IT folks, and folks from geographically-oriented sciences.  He made specific recommendations on how to do this, not generally applicable to all unversities but tailored to the specific unnamed univesity he had been asked to advise.

Early days of geodesign

There is a fascinating book by Nick Chrisman called How computer mapping at Harvard became GIS that describes the early days in the development of geospatial technology and science. 

Carl Steinitz was part of these early developments.  Last night he gave a personal perspective on the early days of geodesign. 

From a technical perspective the developments I found most fascinating were the first computer geographic computer graphics that was created by hooking an IBM Selectric typewriter to a computer and using overprinting to create an approximation of grey scale thematic maps. The program to do this, SYMAP,  was developed by Howard Fisher in 1963.  When the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics was founded in 1966, Howard Fisher was its first director.  Carl also described some of the ways colour printing was simulated in these early days, and early 3D imagery.

An interesting recollection in this fascinating talk was that computing was introduced into the design course via tutorials as and when needed, not as a separate course.

Carl described the development of geodesign methodogies such as moving from traditional programming languages in the direction of what became map algebra, spatial analysis, automating aspects of design and using linear programming to optimize design.  As Carl said they did it all, though some of it was too expensive at that time to be of practical use.

GITA PNW: Reflections on GITA's role in rapid technology change in the utility industry

In 1982 a not-for-profit organization AM/FM International was chartered to provide the growing AM/FM industry with an educational forum to exchange ideas and keep up with changing technologies including the change from paper to digital mapping, called Automated Mapping/Facilities Management at the time.  In 1998, AM/FM International changed its name to the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA). Since then GITA's mission has been to provide education and information exchange on the use and benefits of geospatial information and technology for the world's infrastructure, particularly in utility organizations including electric power, water and waste water and gas. 

In this time of rapid technology change in the utility industry, driven again by the renewed penetration of digital technologies into all aspects of utility operations, the need for an organization like GITA to monitor new technologies and provide education and an open forum for the exchange of ideas is greater than ever. 

But with current limited travel budgets at many utilities, regional conferences are attracting more participants than national events.  GITA has about 15 chapters in North America, and one of the most active is the Pacific Northwest Chapter (GITA PNW), which just held its annual conference.  I have been attending this event for at least five years.  This year's event was again very worthwhile and included a number of presentations on new IT technologies and their application to the utility sector, several of which I have blogged about.

Green construction and the convergence of model-based design and geospatial

Modern web portals for utilities - asynchronously updatable mashups and standards-based

A cloud-based hosted solution for small utilities

Reflections on GITA's role in technology change in the utility industry by the President of GITA PNW

The event was opened by the President of GITA PNW, Zan Strausz.  He reflected on the origins of GITA and why he thinks that the needs that drove the formation of AM/FM International and GITA are just as important today as they were in the 1980's and 1990's.  I found his talk every perceptive and relevant to anyone contemplating the massive technology changes that the utility industry is just beginning to embark on, and I have included some of his remarks here.

Before we launch into our program I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the venerable tradition you as conference attendees are a part of. I'm speaking of the long history of GITA providing a forum for education, promotion and innovation in the geospatial world. Its roots in the utility industry reflect the early adoption of geospatial technology going back 50 years. With the development of what was then known as Automated Mapping/Facilities Management, or AM/FM, utilities were pioneers in applying geospatial concepts to analysis and asset management, way before the term Geographic Information System became the ubiquitous concept it is today. It was around this technology that GITA, originally called AM/FM International, was organized. Over the years the focus of the organization has expanded beyond just the utility industry to include a more broad base of infrastructure users and service providers involved in the application of geospatial technology. But the core purpose of the organization remains to provide a forum for the dissemination and sharing of geospatial technology concepts as they relate to increasing the efficiency and value of the services our  organizations provide.  

I would like to provide one example of an issue that I have observed in my own industry which I believe can be mitigated by benefits of the forum provided by GITA. I refer to what I would term "technology inertia" by which I mean the cumulative effect of bureaucratic momentum and ingrained habits that prevent the adoption of new and particularly emerging technology. This is not necessarily a  bad thing; a responsible organization needs to wisely and considerately adapt to new technology, as  steward of their investors' or customers' interests. However, it becomes a problem when it delays the  application of technology that can definitely improve the efficiency of the organization. It is ironic that  this problem would appear in the utility industry, which has a history of innovation in the application of geospatial technology ... I'm certainly sympathetic with the conservative ethos of not changing with every shift in the winds of technology, and if something works, why change? But, often, this can retard innovation which would benefit  everyone.

Forums such as GITA provides can be an antidote to this ossified conservatism by giving us insights into emerging and successfully applied geospatial technology, provided by our peers and  industry experts; insights that we need to advance our enterprises into the future.  That future holds some immediate challenges to the utility industry in particular. The many  technologies embodied in the concept of the Smart Grid are going to need to be implemented in the  very near future if we are to meet the huge challenges of providing power, water and other basic  infrastructure in a world whose exploding demand is rapidly running up against the realities and  imperatives imposed by the finite nature of the resources of our increasingly small world. Geospatial  technology will certainly play a key role in the management of the huge amounts of data processing  and analysis that will need to be applied to provide any hope that we can we can solve the  infrastructure challenges that absolutely must be met before we can leave future generations the legacy  of a clean, prosperous and healthy world.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Reinventing the toilet

An estimated 2.6 billion people around the World do not have access to safe and sustainable sanitation. As part of its US$370 million Water, Sanitation and Hygiene program the Gates Foundation has announced the second round grant awards for its Reinventing the Toilet initiative.

Four grants were made totaling US$3.4 million to public and private organizations in the United Kingdom, India and USA.

Could flexible AMOLED replace paper for construction drawings ?

Streamlining construction workflows would be significantly advanced by replacing paper construction drawings with digital drawings. To be practical for use in the field digital devices need to be flexible, durable and shatter-proof.  Until now there has not been any technology that has looked very promising.

According to a report originating in a Korean language news source, Samsung has begun producing flexible AMOLED displays that are 0.6 mm thick compared to  current 1.8 mm panels. The first commercial displays using this techology will be inflexible because glass will be used as a protective covering.  There are rumours that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 2 will have a flexible AMOLED display with an inflexible glass covering. 

But the same report says that Samsung is planning to begin mass production of truly flexible displays by 2014.  The other requirement for practical construction field work is affordable large formats, up to ISO A1 and A0 or ANSI D and E size.  Current flexible AMOLED displays are relatively expensive, and appear to be only affordable if small.  But LED initally was also very expensive, and currently Samsumg is producing 60" displays for the consumer market.

Augmented reality technology preview

There is a new technology preview at Autodesk Labs, Augmented Reality for Showcase.  Augmented reality makes it possible to overlay information (graphics, text, video, sound) on to a live video feed of the real-world in real-time.  Based on Autodesk Showcase, which is an application that produces photorealistic high quality interactive 3D real-time rendering of design models, the Augmented Reality plug-in makes it possible to visualize models in the real-world as viewed through your web or video camera.

The process to overlay a design model on the real world as seen through your video camera is pretty simple.   You prepare your model in Showcase and then associate a supplied marker (jpg file) with your virtual object.  You print the marker and place it in the real world and point your web camera at the printed marker.  Then Showcase replaces the marker in your video recording with the model you've created in Showcase.  The technology preview will be available until October 31, 2012.  There is a video on Youtube that gives you an introduction to the augmented reality preview.

Indoor location tracking and mapping are developing rapidly

One of the new generation of geospatial-related conferences that I have attended for two years now is Location Intelligence for Enterprise USA.  It is not a traditional GIS conference but includes talks about vertical business challenges in the commercial space that have benefited from geospatial data and technology.  This year it was hosted by Natasha Léger, Editor, LBx Journal and included speakers from Fedex (managing infrastructure), IBM Business Analytics (business intelligence), Walgreens (retail), Microsoft Azure (cloud computing), Jones Lang Lasalle (Healthcare), Thomson Reuters (predictive analytics), Piteny Bowes (business rules in the cloud), Nate Hole of Loeb and Loeb (privacy), and I talked about gaming and data visualization.

Indoor mapping and tracking

One of the panel discussions focussed on indoor location and mappping.  It was moderated by George Percivall, Chief Architect and Executive Director of the OGC Interoperability Program, and included Kipp Jones, Chief Architect ,Skyhook, Ankit Agarwal , CEO, Micello Inc, Corey Mandell, Chief Technology Officer, Point inside   and Chris Galo, Regional Director of Sales, Aeroscout.

To kick it off George Percivall gave an overview of where things stand wit respec to indoor location.  He mentrioned that the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has initiated an IndoorGML Indoor Location Standards Working Group.  The objective of the working group to provide a common schema framework for interoperability between indoor navigation applications as well as to integrate indoor space and outdoor space in a seamless way.  Indoor mapping is already supported by Google and Bing.  Micello is in the business of creating indoor maps of major venues around the world.  Most of the activity seems to be focussed on consumers and locations such as malls, airports and department stores.  A typical indoor application would help you find particular products in a mall or department store.

Challenges

The major problem that distinguishes indoor from outdoor location and mapping is that there is no indoor equivalent of GPS.  When you are outside of buildings on most of the Earth's surface you can use GPS  to determine where you, other people and things are.  As soon as you walk into a building, GPS no longer works and it is difficult to automatically track people and objects.  For example, to be able to track a firefighter in a building  that has not been prepared in advance remains a challenge.

There have been a number of attempts to solve this problem.  Aeroscout, recently acquired by Stanley Black & Decker, uses Wifi signals from transmitters with known locations to triangulate locations to with an accuracy of 10-15 feet.  Other technologies involve tracking cell phone location by triangulation, RFID, accelerometers, or tracking by low frequency radio frequency waves that are not as affected by walls as high frequency waves.  Recently magnetic anomaly-based indoor positioning using smart phones has been developed by IndoorAtlas. 

Another challenge is 3D location in tall buildings, translating an elevation in meters or feet to a particular floor and vice versa.

The industry is also facing a serious lack of standards right now like, for example, the CityGML standard for everything outside of buildings.  So the OGC's IndoorGML working group initiative is opportune.  In the Netherlands there is a working group associated with Geonovum and the Dutch 3D cadastre that is attempting to align the CityGML ADE GeoBIM standard and the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) BIM standard maintained by BuildingSmart.  IFC is intended to enable the exchange of BIM data between applications developed by different software vendors in a vendor-neutral way.  The objective of the work group is to define a standard, semantically meaningful mapping between IFC and GeoBIM. 

The business benefit of indoor location is significant because it increases the value of your assets - when you can locate equipment and facilities easily, you will use them more.  In the case of hospitals it can be a matter of life and death to find the "crash cart" in seconds rather than minutes.

Colorado wildfires: technology is changing how utilities respond to disasters

June 2011 to May 2012 was the warmest 12-month consecutive period in the continental U.S. in recorded history.  This extreme heat has created conditions conducive to wild fires.  In one day NOAA reported thirteen new large fires.  Nationally, 52 large fires have burned more than 900,000 acres.  Residents near several large fires across the country remain evacuated. 

A fire that has attracted national attention is the Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs where 347 homes have been destroyed and more than 20,000 homes and 160 business have been under threat.  Another fire, the High Park fire west of Fort Collins has destroyed 257 homes.

Waldo Canyon Fire gas restoration

To give you some idea about what is involved from a utility perspective this is a summary of Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) gas restoration efforts as of July 3 at 11 am.  CSU is responsible for electric power, water and gas services in the Colorado Springs area.  CSU reported that about 3000 CSU customers are back in their homes and businesses in the evacuation areas of Peregrine and Oak Valley Ranch.  CSU has restored gas service to a little over a half of these homes and will continue working through July 4 to restores the rest.  Crews from Xcel Energy have arrived and are helping.  In the particularly hard hit area of Mountain Shadows which remains evacuated, engineers have determined that 1200 homes are habitable, but that the fire has ravaged the gas system.  In this area the restoration process will take much longer than in other areas. 12 miles of distribution line are going to have to be restored and 350 service lines to homes that were destroyed or damaged need to be capped. Federal regulations require these caps be tested for 24 hours to ensure that they are safe.  During this process the hard hit areas of Mountain Shadows areas must remain evacuated for safety reasons.

I must add that we at Autodesk recognize the tremendous commitmment and effort that utility folks, both in the field and in the control center, make in dealing with these emergencies.

Technology is changing disaster management

Technology is changing how utilities respond to disasters like the fires in Colorado.  One area that has changed dramatically is how the utility communicates with the public during and after a disaster.  The other area is new sources of geospatial data that can provide much more timely information, what some refer to as near real-time data, during both the disaster and the restoration period.

Data quality

One of the problems that utilities face is data quality, especially relating to the location of underground facilities.  The infamous gas explosion in Belgium in 2004 immediately comes to mind because poor data meant that the construction crew did not know that there was a gas pipeline where they were excavating.  In many disasters such as the fires in Colorado, it is crucial that you know exactly where underground infrastructure is. Colorado Springs Utilities has been making a major effort to implement standards-driven processes, built-in analysis, and materials management to improve workflows which helps field crews during disasters by contributing to improved data reliability. 

Social media

One of the areas which has dramatically impacted how utilities respond to disasters is communication with the public.  Not only does CSU have a web site with up to date information about the fires, areas affected, and restoration efforts, but CSU is also on Facebook.  For example, this was posted just Tuesday evening.

"As of this evening, we've restored service to 2,400 homes. Crews will hit the road again July 4. Thank you for your patience and support. We are proud to serve and call this community home. - Patrice"

As another example, Southern California Edison (@socaledison) uses Twitter to report extreme weather alerts, outages, and restoration progress.

Near real-time data

Queensland floods

Extensive flooding occurred in many areas of Queensland during late December 2010 and early January 2011, exacerbated by Cyclone Tasha, a category 1 tropical storm, with three quarters of the state, or 1 000 000 km² declared a disaster zone.  In some areas flooding was so severe that mandatory evacuation was imposed on several towns.  At GITA ANZ last year, Mark Volz of Ergon Energy gave a fascinating presentation on how Ergon monitored flooding and managed electric power during the disaster.

Ergon had to identify facilities where the power needed to be turned off and also had to keep the police informed of the status of electric power facilities across the state.  Mark used a digital elevation model (DEM) of Queensland from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) global digital elevation model.  Satellite radar images, produced by the COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation, of the flooded regions of Queensland which has been supplied to the Australian authorities by e-GEOS were used by the University of New South Wales in Sydney, with the support of the Land & Property Management Authority and of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, to compile temporal maps showing how the extent of flooding changed with time.  The maps were sent to the Australian authorities within six hours of the images being received.  Using the DEM data and the satellite imagery Mark was able to identify Ergon facilities that had been inundated.

Alabama tornadoes

 April 27th 2011 thirty tornadoes hit Alabama Power's operating area completely destroying two substations, flattening transmission pylons, breaking 7500 poles, and leaving 400,000 customers without power.

Prior to the tornadoes Alabama Power had deployed about 1.4 million smart meters in its operating territory.  By looking for smart meters that had been read the day before and comparing them with the meters that could not be read after the tornadoes, Alabama Power was able to put together a detailed picture of where power has been lost, without making telephone calls.  The application could also tell emergency response officials whether the power was on or off in specific buildings - critical information that first responders require before entering a damaged building.  In addition, Alabama Power could track power restoration as customers started coming back on-line.

Real-time network monitoring

One of the most important challenges for modern grid control is being able to monitor a large number of intelligent devices in real-time.  Burlington Hydro has implemented a real-time monitoring system that integrates their SCADA system, 65 000 smart meters reporting power use every 15 minutes, the supporting automated meter infrastructure (AMI), power line sensors, customer information system (CIS), their ERP system, engineering analysis, and other systems.  It utilizes bidirectional communications to both receive information from and control smart devices. The system has to handle very large data volumes.  For example, some devices are reporting 60 times per second.  A web browser, either on the desktop or on a mobile device, is all that's required to access tools for asset maintenance, cable locate, asset management, operations, financials and drill downs, automating network pinning and work protection tagging, SCADA, schematic views, automated CAIDI, SAIDI and SAIFI reporting, an outage management system (OMS), mobile workforce automation, automated as-built management, real-time asset monitoring and analytics, and an executive dashboard.  For example, this allows live monitoring of all transformers on the grid.  The transformer status monitoring dashboard not only shows a map with transformer loading in real-time in the form of a heat map, but also reports historical loading and can even estimate, based on the history of oveloading on a particuler transformer, how much the lifetime of the transformer had been shortened as a result of the overloading.  It also allows the operator to reconfigure the grid in real time to reduce the load on overlloaded transformers and redistribute it to others with available capacity.

Post-disaster imagery

Post-disaster high resolution imagery helps governments quickly and cost-effectively assess and manage damage assessment and rescue efforts following a disaster.  For example, Pictometry will image up to 200 square miles of affected areas of Federally declared disasters caused by hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes to customers at no charge, often within a few days.  Pictometry even provides change analysis software to help quantify the impact of a disaster for several months following a disaster.

Crowd-sourcing

One of the novel developments that is changing how information is collected and disseminated is crowd-sourced data, data that is uploaded directly from the field.  It the case of the Queensland floods a web site was developed by Mark Volz's team at Ergon Energy.  The web site became the single source for all information relating to asset damage. The source of this information was what Mark called "internal crowd-sourcing", asset damage reports from operations staff in the field uploaded daily to the site.

Autodesk announces Project Artoo for geospatial data cleanup

Project Artoo for AutoCAD Map 3D is a free technology preview available on Autodesk Labs.  Artoo is designed to cleanup geospatial data to correct common errors that can be introduced during digitizing, importing, surveying, scanning, and drafting such as duplicates, undershoots, snapping, dangles, node removal, sliver removal, and removing zero-length and short lines.

Project Artoo supports cleanup operations on FDO-connected data stores, including Oracle Spatial, Microsoft SQL Server, SDF, SQLite, and ESRI SHP files and geodatabases.

Autodesk releases Sketchbook Ink

SketchBook Ink for the iPad, which was announced back in March at the time of the release of the new iPad, has been released and is available on iTunes.

Unlike traditional vector drawing apps, SketchBook Ink is dedicated to pen-and-ink drawing. The inking behavior gives it a distinct feel but builds on the Sketchbook Pro interface.  The app supports importing images from the photo library on iPad that can be used as references or backgrounds.  SketchBook Ink enables users to produce very fine detail in their artwork on the new Retina Display independent of resolution. This new technology also supports the ability to export and print large, high-quality images directly from the iPad.

Project Stimulus: Mechanical simulation in the cloud

Project Simulus is a free technology preview that suppots some innovative approaches to mechanical simulation. The project provides an intuitive simplification environment to prepare CAD models for different simulation analyses as well as using the cloud for computationally intensive computations.

Project Stimulus supports simulation analyses for Inventor, SAT and STEP based models:

• Linear static stress offering a variety of contact types, loading and constraint options
• Modal frequencies
• Steady state thermal offering temperature, heat flux, convection and radiation type loadings
• Thermal-stress coupling

The Project Simulus Technology Preview is now available as a free download and trial. The technology preview will operate until January 1, 2013.  Introductory videos are available.