Between the Poles

Is BIM a challenge or an opportunity for SMEs ?

The UK Government has mandated BIM on all Government construction projects regardless of size by 2016. The Institution of Structural Engineers (IST) has released the results of a survey of its 900 members.  Some of its key findings are

• 73% agreed or strongly agreed that BIM implementation presents serious cost and commercial challenges for small businesses

• 71% agreed or strongly agreed that BIM is here to stay and that in the future clients will expect it to be incorporated into their work.
• 58% agreed or strongly agreed that BIM implementation presents significant opportunity for new business and improved efficiency.

• 76% of respondents from businesses under 10 employees said they are just starting their BIM journey and have little understanding of the finer details.
• 9.6% of respondents from businesses under 10 employees said clients regularly ask about their use of BIM, (Compared to almost 50% of respondents from businesses with over 50 employees).
• 66% of respondents from businesses under 10 employees agreed or strongly agreed that the government BIM initiative will make it harder for small businesses to compete for government contracts.

The survey suggests that there is a divide between large and small consultancies, with larger organisations taking the lead on BIM. It also suggests the need to help smaller businesses (SMEs) to make a success of BIM.

The BIM4SME working group is designed to help SMEs in understanding the BIM process. Its objectives are to raise awareness of BIM, articulate the value proposition / business benefits, and provide a clear understanding of the requirements of Level 2 BIM within the SME marketplace. It is also intended to provide a voice for the SMEs back to the BIM Task Group.

Masters program offered in geomatics for BIM

University College London (UCL) Engineering is expanding its curriculum to include the geomatics aspects of building information modeling (BIM) and the integrated management of geospatial and BIM-related data.   The new masters program in Geomatics for BIM builds on UCL Engineering's experience in laser scanning, geographic information science, photogrammetry and 3D imaging.  The program introduces students to real-world applications of BIM, along with leading edge 3D GIS and BIM-related research.

Other universities also offer courses aimed at the cross-disciplinary area where geospatial and architecture, engineering and constrcution (AEC) converge. The College of Architecture and the Built Environment at Philadelphia University offers a M.S. in GeoDesign.  The University of Southern California's  Spatial Sciences Institute offers a B.S. in GeoDesign.

Penn State's MOOC courses include Maps and the Geospatial Revolution

I have blogged frequently on the workforce challenges facing the utility industry resulting from accelerating retirement among engineers and skilled workers and by the technology transformation  associated with the smart grid.  Community colleges in partnership with utiltiies have been the quickest to respond to this challenge.  But universities, encouraged by program like the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus program, are responding as well, though they are also facing an aging workforce problem. 

Now something has appeared on the horizon in education that may provide a way of ramping up more rapidly to the challenge of training the next generation of engineers and skilled workers.

From October 10th to December 18th 2011 Stanford offered a free, on-line course, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence", open to anyone, that  attracted 160'000 students.  The term applied to this type of on-line education is massive open on-line courses (MOOCs).

In August 2012, the online education company Coursera began offering free college courses.  Since Coursera launched, the company has registered a total of almost 2.8 million users, with approximately 1.45 million students enrolling in courses each month. Coursera also recently began offering students opportunities to receive credit and recognition for their work through organizations such as the American Council on Education (ACE).

Earlier this year Penn State joined Coursera, making it possible for the University to provide courses to hundreds of thousands more students than was previously possible. Penn State's initial MOOC offerings will focus on five courses including  Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, taught by Dr. Anthony C. Robinson.  Last year Glenn Letham interviewed Anthony Robinson about geospatial education at Penn State.

ESRI UC: 3D and other themes of this year's conference

According to Jack Dangermond who led the plenary sessions on the first day,  this year in San Diego 12000 people from 130 countries were in San Diego for the 33rd Esri International User Conference.

I gravitated primarily to the utility sessions.  According to Bill Meehan, who is responsible for ESRI's utility business, there were 750 utility folks at this year's UC.

GIS is everywhere

GIS is being used in diveerse areas including environmental monitoring, climate change, permafrost melting, sea level rise, agriculture, water resources, aquaculture, pollution remediation, energy resources management, land information systems, urban design, utility network management, wasteshed modeling, utility pole inspection, sewer rehabilitation, port management, indoor GIS, iInsurance risk management, health-related mapping, law enforcement, mapping where space debris might fall, flood risk mapping, storm tracking and damage assessment,  geodesign, crowdsourcing for collecting a variety of data, interoperabilty, citizen engagement, government transparency, cartography, geology and mining, automatic generalization of different scale maps, story maps, portals for infrastructure, and open data, to mention just a few of the things that were singled out in the plenary session. 

Some of the areas that were singled out  for special recognition were

• Special Achievements in GIS award went to the Dartmouth Atlas for showing geographically how outcomes and the cost of medical procedures varies depending on location across the U.S. 
• The Hong Kong Lands Department received the Enterprise GIS award for their land management system which they started in the 1990's and is now in its second generation. 
• Tbe President's Award went to Direct Relief which distributes different types of equipment to people around the globe in need with 99% efficiency according to Forbes.

Themes

The theme of this UC was GIS transforming our world, not only changing the physical world as we know it, but also changing our perception of the world and how GIS has and will fundamentally help us collectively build a better future.  A classic example that has impacted everyone on the planet is GPS or more generally GNSS.   As a number of speakers including Dangermond said we are never lost any more and that is fundamental change to how we perceive the world.

Some of the major themes that emerged at this UC are common to many software and service providers in the IT sector, but some of these are new or unique to ESRI. 

Climate change

We are facing serious global challenges, in particular climate change, which both at the Geodesign Summit and at this UC conference appears to be a personal challenge for Dangermond who sees GIS as contributing in major way in creating a more sustainable future.  He sees GIS helping to change how we think and act and how we do basic things such as design. 

GIS across the organization

A theme that was pervasive throughout the conference including in the utility sessions was the need to make GIS pervasive across the organization because 90% of the data that organizations are collecting and managing has location.  This was also true in utility sessions I attended, where the thrust is to expand the use of GIS outside of the traditional area of records management into other departments.

Vertical industry "templates"

In the utility and telecommunications sectors there is a major effort underway to create preconfigured vertical "templates" for specific vertical industries.  In the utility sector one was announced yesterday for the electric power Industry, and others are underway for gas and telecommunications.  These templates are a collection of data and tools for vertical industries and are available as open source on Github.

Web

The web was pervasive, It was hard to find a session where the theme that desktop GIS is being transformed into web GIS did not come up.  It doesn't mean that the desktop is going to go away in the near future, but sharing data, applications, and apps is being recognized as a common goal and web GIS makes this very easy to do.  This includes web portals for accessing enterprise data over the web.

Cloud

A lot of the traditonal desktop GIS capabilities are now being made available in the cloud so that all you need is an iOS or Android device or a web browser.  This is also available to large enterprises who need to keep their data on their own servers for security reasons.  Cindy Salas from Centerpoint Energy demonstrated ESRI's cloud capability but running "on premise" completely wthin Centerpoint's fire wall. 

Integration

Being able to integrate location and the spatial dimension into enterprise applications such as ERP (SAP), business intelliegence (IBM Cognos), Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Excel spreadsheets is a new focus for ESRI.   They have already created plugins for several well-known applications.

Mobile devices

In the past when you talked about mobile in the context of utilities, you were normally dealing with Panasonic Toughbooks which could cost up to $6 000 each.  At this conference just about every application was able to run on a variety of low cost mobile devices including iOS and Android mobile devices.  One of the sessions I attended was about the National Broadband rollout in Australia where the 500 field folks who are doing 300 000 pit inspections were all equipped with iPads, which you might have thought were too fragile for pretty rough field work..  This project has been underway for something like 18 months and todate only two of the iPads have been damaged.

Big data

Spatial data volumes whether from sensors at utilities, from LIDAR scanning of transmission lines, or from earth obsevration satellited are now reckoned in terabytes.  There were sessions on spatially enabling Hadoop, SAP HANA and other big data management systems for managing these data volumes.

Real-time

In the utility track managing real-tme data from sensors on transformers, smart meters, phasors, and other devices and enabling near real-time decision making was a common theme.  A general event processing capability that can be triggered by rules has been added to the quiver to make this possible for any data stream. 

In the area of imagery, Digital Globe imagery can be accessed with 4-5 hours of acquisition.

Analytics

Big data and real-time means that we need to be able to understand what these huge volumes of data are telling us and then enable decision-making, automated or human mediated, as rapidly as possible.  If a transformer is running hot, we can't wait a week until the next service check to reconfigure the network because by then we may have reduced it projected lifetime by 10%.  There were "location analytics" sessions in most of the vertical industry sessions including utilities.

Content

Software companies like ESRI and Hexagon are now in the content busines.  And with the data beng made available in the cloud, you can access it through web GIS or desktop GIS. The data includes traditional topographic maps, digital terrain models, imagery from earth observation satellites from Digital Globe and others some of it near real-time (fr example, from Digital Globe within 4-5 hours of acqusition), demographics, and others.

Dangermond's term for this is the "living atlas" because this body of content is intended to be dynamic, real-rime and comprehensive.  The goal seems to be all the data you would need to manage the planet.

Some of the content explicitly mentioned includes

• basemaps
• community. content
• imagery
• 30 cm coverage of the US
• 60 cm coverage of Western Europe
• imagery for the middle east and asia in total covering 2/3 of the world
• health
• lifestyle
• economics
• demographics, at the zip code, county, state, and national levels
• scientific maps including environmental, energy, infrastructure, and terrain models
• landscape layers

This data is accessible to web and desktop applications and makes it very easy to do standard spatial analytical things like multi-criteria suitability or site selection mapping.  Users can also publish their own data to the cloud.

Education

This has always been a strong focus area for ESRI and from Dangermond's perspective with the challenges the world is facing, GIS professionals will be even more critical in the future.  There is focus on advancing spatial literacy to a broader audience than in the past.

LiDAR

Laser scanning is a major source of important data for the construction industry (right of way determination and construction progress monitoring), utilities (transmission vegetation management), and other industries.  ESRI has made this a focus area and there were a number of sessions devoted to managing and analyzing point cloud data.

3D

Dangermond specifically singled out 3D as a major capability area for ESRI.  There are specialized 3D products, but 3D is also being built into ESRI main stream GIS and spatial analytical products.

3D city models

At the plenary there was a demonstration of how to quickly build a 3D city model from 2D data, including extruding buildings from a 3D building footprint and height, adding textures depending on building types, and then tools for analysis such as zoning and shadow analysis and visualization including flythroughs.  These models are sharable on the cloud as web scenes requiring only a web browser (with no plugins) or iOS mobile devices.

Geodesign

At the UC ESRI is demonstrating a prototype of a product designed specifically for geodesign.

Open data

Dangermond specifically mentioned the newest national open data initiative in Peru. 

Crowdsourcing/volunteered data

There are sessions specifically on editing and manipulating OpenStreetMap data.

Sam Pitroda on harnessing technology to transform Indian society

India is projected to become the world's 5th largest economy by 2020.  The IEA estimates that India will require 600-1200 GW of new electric power generation capacity by 2050.  But 30% of India's power generation is lost to "aggregate technical and commercial" (AT&C) losses. To address this challenge, the Union Government created the India Smart Grid Task Force, chaired by Sam Pitroda, advisor to the Prime Minister.  Sam Pitroda has a reputation for making change happen.  As an advisor to a previous prime minister, Sam Pitroda spearheaded the telecom revolution in India which in 20 years transformed India from a country with 2 million phones to 900 million phones.  He is a strong believer in the power of  technology for enabling change for the benefit and betterment of society.  Today at the ESRI User Conference Pitroda reiterated this theme.

Pitroda ponted out that India is a complex country, both geographically and with respect to the diversity of its people.  Technology has been the key driver in India since 1947 when the British left.  Agriculture, telecommunications, higher education, energy, and space technologies were among the initial focus areas. India is now able to feed 1.3 billion people and send satellites into space.  20 years ago there were 2 million telephones for about 800 million people. Now there are about 900 million phones, mostly wiereless, in India as a result of the telecommunications revolution that Pitroda helped to initiate.

The challenge that India is facing is 400 million people below the poverty line. Every national policy has to take this economic pyramid into account. India is also a very young country with 550 million people under the age of 25.  These demographics means that the Indian development model has to be different from the Western model.  It is simply inconceivable that every household in India (and China) will have a a car, pay $30,000 per year for education, and $70 000 for a bypass operation as in the United States.

The primary challenges that India faces are social equity, lessening the disparity between the affluent and the poor, urban and rural, educated and uneducated, reinforcing Indian democracy, and demography - creating economic opportunities for the young. 

In Pitroda's view the key to meeting these challenges is information.  People are poor because of a lack of information.  Access to information is essential for making democracy work. Information is also a great leveler which helps reduce disparity.  It is also going to help provide the 15 to 20 million new jobs that India needs to create every year.

Already most Indians have access to voice communications.  The next challenge is data communications.  India and tthe US jointly developed an open platform for sharing government data that is being made available to other countries.  At a cost of about $2 billion, India has developed a Knowledge Network linking Indian universities and technical institutes.  The next step is to create a fiber optic network linking Indian cities, towns, and villages, at an estmated cost of $7 billion over the next 18 to 24 months.  The long term objective is to empower over a billion people.

A key part of the the IT platfom is developing geospatial infrastructure including data and technology.  The XI Five-Year Plan mandated the use of geospatial technology in new mission-critical projects. The objective is to provide a seamless, nationwide, geospatially-enabled database, which will serve as a platform for data sharing amongst various national government departments and state governments. 

Several years ago it was realized that just about every department has its own base map.  The Water Department, the Revenue Department, the Gas Authority all had different base maps with different boundaries.  Information is power and no one wants to share.  It was recognized that it was essential to get everyone working together to agree on one common standard base map.  It took a year and half to achieve this.  It is not easy to get 30 different states some of which have populations of 200 million to agree on common standards and this requires changing people's mindset.  From Pitroda's perspective the problem is a 19th Century mindset, 20th Century policies, and 21st Century technology.  The solution is to get the younger generation to think differently.

Pitroda's vision is that a national information infrastructure based on a common geospatial platform will help make government more transparent and accountable, reduce corruption, reduce the waste of resources, empower citizens and provide a foundation for a uniquely Indian approach to innovation and economic development that will reduce disparity and create jobs for the young Indian workforce over the next decade or two.  Based on the Indian experience with revolutionizing communications, Sam Pitroda is optimistic that access to information incorporating geospatial techology will transform Indian society.  This is an incredible vision for transforming the lives of 1.3 billion people.

UN geospatial initiative focuses on sustainable development

At the Geospatial World Forum (GWF) in Amsterdam last year, Paul Cheung of the United Nations Initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) voiced the concern about their role that many national mapping agencies and other government organizations with responsibility for geospatial information have had since the advent of Google Map/Earth, private data companies like Digital Globe, Geoeye, TeleAtlas and Navteq, crowd-sourced geospatial data like OpenStreetMap, and open data policies adopted by many governments around the world.

The objective of the UN GGIM initiative is to help government fit into the new world of Google Map/Earth and the rest of the private geospatial industry.  Based on the assumption that neither the private sector nor government can do it all, the GGIM has a process in place to define the role of government in managing national geospatial information.  It has asked geospatial practitioners around the world to provide guidance on where they see the geospatial industry headed and their views on the roles of government and the private sector.

The Second High Level Forum on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) was convened in Doha, Qatar in February, 2013 by the Secretariat of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM), together with the Government of Qatar.

The Forum bought together 350 participants from 60 Member States, international organizations, the private sector, and UN entities.  The discussions centered on building national geospatial information systems, an examination of the technological trends impacting the future of geospatial information management, the challenges experienced and the solutions used to develop geospatial reference data sets, the need to use geospatial information to address sustainable development issues, and UN-GGIM's leadership role in ensuring global geodetic frameworks.

The final declaration of the Forum, the Doha Declaration Advancing Global Geospatial Information Management listed important focus areas for GGIM activities.

• a sustained operational global geodetic reference frame and infrastructure to support the increasing demand for positioning and monitoring applications
• the greater use of geospatial information in sustainable development by supporting the the Global Map for Sustainable Development (GM4SD) with an initial focus on managing risks of natural disasters to urban populations
• an agreed set of authoritative core global reference datasets to support global sustainable development activities
• a stable, credible, and reliable national geospatial information infrastructure in each country built on internationally recognized standards
• more training programs related to geospatial information management at all levels
• regional collaboration in the promotion and development of geospatial information management

Massive open on-line courses potentially transforming education

I have blogged frequently on the workforce challenges facing the utility industry resulting from accelerating retirement among engineers and skilled workers and by the technology transformation  associated with the smart grid.  Community colleges in partnership with utiltiies have been the quickest to respond to this challenge.  But universities, encouraged by program like the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus program, are responding as well, though they are also facing an aging workforce problem.  Now something has appeared on the horizon in education that may provide a way of ramping up more rapidly to the challenge of training the next generation of engineers and skilled workers.

From October 10th to December 18th 2011 Stanford offered a free, on-line course, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence", open to anyone, that  attracted 160'000 students.   The course was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig based on Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course.  Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car.  Norvig worked at NASA and is the co-author of a widely used college textbook on artifical intelligence.  The term applied to this type of on-line education is massive open on-line courses (MOOCs).

There were a number of precursors.  The one explicitly referenced by the Stanford instructors is the Khan Academy that offers videos to instruct anyone in a wide range of topics including arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, probability and statistics, differential equations, Cosmology and astronomy, organic chemistry, finance and capital markets, microeconomics, macroeconomics, computer science, healthcare and medicine, drawing, programming Basics, animation, history,  american Civics, and art history.

The open online course that I have watched over and over again is Open Yale's Roman Architecture given by Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner of Yale University and available for free on iTunes.

In August 2012, the online education company Coursera began offering free college courses.  According to the New York Times, by January 2013, it had attracted a million users, growing at a rate outpacing even Facebook and Twitter.  There are at least three other startups (Udemy, Udacity, edX) attempting to do the same thing.

The MOOC approach is getting some acceptance among traditional universites and colleges.  The American Council on Education, which represents the presidents of 1800 U.S. accredited, degree-granting institutions, which include two- and four-year colleges, private and public universities, and nonprofit and for-profit entities. has recommended that colleges could grant credit for some of the free classes from Coursera.

Help build electrical grid 2.0

In the next decade, the U.S. electricity grid will change more then it has in the last 100 years.  Aging infrastructure, distributed generation integrating renewable energy sources, smart grid and net zero energy buildings will dramatically change the way power is generated, transmitted, distributed and used.  To many in the industry there is real concern about the availability of highly-skilled, quality engineers to design, build and operate grid 2.0.  The IEEE PES has estimated that between 2011 and 2015, the power and energy industry will experience as much as a 50% turnover in engineers.

To help encourage more young engineers to enter electric power engineering, the IEEE PES created the PES Scholarship Plus Initiative™.  Potential engineers are encourage to apply for a PES Scholarship as early as the first year of college.  To be eligible you must:

• be considering a career in electric power and energy engineering
• working toward an electrical engineering bachelor's degree.
• be a full-time student in the coming academic year at a U.S. university or college
• willing to take at least three power engineering courses for a total of nine or more credits
• be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident
• be enrolled full-time at a university/college or community college with an ABET-accredited, 4-year electrical engineering program.

The scholarship provides up to three years of financial support, US$2,000 the first year, US$2,000 the second year, and US$3,000 the third year.  Even more importantly, the program provides career experience through internships and co-op work, so that when you graduate you will have the tremendous advantage of already having hands-on experience.

National science teaching standards includes for the first time the science of human-driven climate change

The first major update to national science teaching standards in 15 years includes for the first time the science of human-driven climate change.  The standards are based on a National Academy of Sciences report and supported by Achieve, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Teachers Association and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Manufacturing jobs of the future

I blogged previously about an interesting analysis of job creation by the "App Economy" has been conducted for TechNet by Dr.Michael Mandel of South Mountain Economics LLC.  The Technet analysis suggests that there were 155,000 tech jobs in the App Economy as of December 2011 including developer and tech support jobs at both dedicated app developers and at large companies who create apps for them or for others.  This implies that there are roughly 311,000 jobs in App Economy firms, including tech jobs, which require app-related skills, and the corresponding non-tech jobs.  With spillover included, the total number of jobs created in the App Economy is estimated at 466,000 jobs since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post that makes the case that this kind of transformation is going to happen to many manufacturing jobs.  In the future the types of jobs that need to be filled will be different from the jobs that are being filled by workers in the emerging economies of the world. These new jobs in industries that we have not yet even conceived of will require fewer workers with very different skills.  The one thing that is certain  is that we will require a workforce with much different skills and education than what was required for the manufacturing jobs of the last 50 years.  Malaysia is an example of a country that understands this better than most.

New materials, processes and integration

Carl Bass of Autodesk sees three key developments that will define these new manufacturing jobs: new materials, new processes, and complex integration of automated systems.

New types of materials such as carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers are being used to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy efficient and more durable. These materials require new manufacuring processes and more highly skilled employees to manage the more complex manufacturing processes.

In conventional manufacturing, artifacts are produced by "subtractive" manufacturing processes using equipment such as lathes, drills, and milling machines that cut shapes from solid blocks of materials such as steel or wood.  These processes result in a lot of waste material.  In a new method called “additive manufacturing,” parts are produced like you would make a snow ball, building the object up by adding layers of material.  The best example is 3D printing. The process doesn’t produce waste material in the way that "subtractive" manufacturing processes do.  This new manufacturing environment will need 3D designers and operators who can operate and maintain sophisticated computer-based equipment.

Factories will have to become smarter in much the same way that the electric grid is becoming smarter and this means that we will need people will different skills. As in the electric power industry, there will be  greater use of simulation to analyze how manufacturing systems respond to changes such as introducing a new material or changing a feature of a product. Manufacturing engineers will need to become more adept at dealing with virtual control systems, simulation and other such technologies.