Rocket City GIS and I/ITSEC Conferences

Two Seemingly Unrelated Conferences Linked by GIS and GISP

By Art Kalinski, GISP

In November I attended the Rocket City GIS Conference and the seemingly unrelated Interservice / Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC).

Rocket City GIS

The Rocket City GIS Conference was organized by Joe Francica of Directions Media. As Conference Chairman, Joe picked an impressive venue, the U.S. Space and Rocket  Center, Huntsville, Alabama. The facilities are quite extensive, housing the Saturn and other boosters, the shuttle, and countless historic artifacts including space capsules, space suits, and all manner of test equipment, even a real SR-71. The Rocket Center holds Space Camp for youngsters as well as a team-building program for adults and corporations.

Huntsville is the home of the original rocket scientists led by Werner von Braun, and home to the NASA Marshall Space Center and Redstone Arsenal. The city has become an extensive technology center with the Rocket Center as a focal point. If you visit, plan on a full day to see it all.

Although not a large assembly, the Rocket City GIS Conference was very well organized and the meeting facility at the Rocket Center was superb. The keynote speaker for the conference was David DiBiase, the director of the John A. Dutton E-Education Institute for the online GIS program at Pennsylvania State University. In addition, David is a URISA board member and president of the GIS Certification Institute.

In his opening, David cited two interesting facts. First, according to Forbes magazine, Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI, is the 164th richest person in the United States. Donald Trump is 153rd. Second, according to the Bureau of Labor there are now 857,000 geo-spatial employees in the United States with expected growth of an additional 350,000 over the next eight years. No one guessed the number was that high.

In 2003 I was in the first group of GIS professionals to receive the GISP certification. Like many other GIS professionals, I participated in the planning and formulation of the GISP program. I felt that it would help hiring managers in the GIS community by identifying GIS professionals who had achieved a certain level of education and experience. I also felt that it would help URISA since the conferences and courses offered by URISA would take on greater importance as candidates looked to build their professional point totals. The program has proven itself over the past seven years, but some believe that it may need to evolve.

David caused a bit of a stir by presenting his desire and others to have an exam for future GISP candidates. He indicated that his opinion was not shared by all board members, but there was a growing interest in the prospect. In 2002 we considered an exam as part of the GISP process, but the general consensus was that it would be impossible to come up with an exam that was comprehensive, fair, and a good indicator of a candidate’s qualifications. I’m not sure that the situation is much different in 2010, but I’d like to hear the pros and cons. Time didn’t permit that, and without further discussion I don’t have an opinion yet.

The I/ITSEC conference was held in Orlando and is fairly large. As I reported last year, I/ITSEC continues to evolve from training and gaming technology to much more sophisticated modeling and mission-rehearsal technology. This is a large conference with participation by all the big players such as Lockheed, Boeing, BEA, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and many others.

The Keynote speaker, Air Force General Edward Rice, summed up the prospects for the training and simulation community. Even with feared budget cuts, funding expectations looked good since modeling and simulation are proving to be so cost effective.

Most of us think of flight simulators training pilots, and those are still key systems, but other skills are proving equally cost effective. The general cited fuel-boom operators as one example. There is a real art to operating an in-flight fueling boom, and it takes hours and hours to train operators. The new simulators are so realistic that 95% of training leading to qualification is done on simulators with only 5% actual in-flight time need to qualify operators.

ESRI had a good-size booth demonstrating work of partners such as Precision Light Works 3D models and systems such as Geoweb 3d. The growing evolution from training to actual mission planning and mission rehearsal is driving the need for accurate geospatial data and GIS environments. It’s no longer good enough to just “look good;” the systems also have to reflect reality in a way that wasn’t even attempted a few years ago.

As a retired naval officer and ship handler, I couldn’t resist testing the Navy bridge simulators by CSC. The navigation charts, GPS, radar, out-the-window graphics, physics, and response were dead-on accurate as I piloted a destroyer through Narragansett Bay. Even the small boat simulators by Kongsberg had hydraulic systems that simulated the motion of the small boat through moderate seas. The only thing missing was the salt spray in the face.

Regrettably, realism of medical simulators had also evolved. They want medical personnel to get over the shock factor of real injuries so they can react efficiently during real emergencies. Some were so realistic with spurting blood and missing limbs that the exhibits were not for the faint-hearted. Here is an example of one company that manufactures realistic bodies to train surgeons.

GIS is found in medial simulators as well. The spatial and topological tools of GIS are seeing their way into medical simulators that mimic the circulatory systems and other networks.

At large conferences I always like to visit the small perimeter booths for two reasons. The exhibitors in the outlying sections generally don’t have the budgets that the big companies have, so I try to give them their money’s worth by providing some traffic and visibility. But more importantly, this is where the new technologies are being introduced and some of the booth are quite interesting. One example is this paint booth simulator by VRSim, Inc. The trainee holds a spray gun and wears a helmet with a 3D video display. Using the gun, the trainee sees paint being applied, but even more important, the simulated surface is mapped to later show how heavy the paint was applied. Red = too heavy, Blue = too light, Green = just right.

Paint booth simulator by VRSim. The user holds a spray gun and wears a helmet with a 3D video display.

The simulated surface is mapped to later show how heavy the paint was applied.

Here again spatial data mapping is the basis for the system, and the cost to train an operator is a fraction of the real thing, not to mention wasted paint and fumes.

Orator Plus, Inc. had as robust multimedia data fusion software that permits the simultaneous display of GIS, PowerPoint, video, live web links, imagery, etc. in one elegant environment that also has a common “whiteboard” annotations and sharing capability. The company even developed a portable hardware display to optimize its system. The display is a rear projection multi-touch screen of light-weight Plexiglas. It’s difficult to explain how nice the system works.  You need to see it in operation.

Orator Plus’s multimedia data fusion software permits the simultaneous display of GIS, PowerPoint, video, live web links, and imagery.

The second keynote speaker was Dr. R. Bowen Loftin, president of Texas A&M University. His degrees are in physics and he worked extensively for NASA developing virtual environments. His keynote topic was a desire by many to create a certification system / institute for modeling and simulation professionals. This sounded a lot like our GISCI and the GISP program.

I spoke with Dr. Loftin briefly after his session to see if he was familiar with our GISP certification program.  He was and had used it as one example for discussions.  I later thought to myself that the one advantage we had with the GISP program was our starting point. Although the GISP qualification was not ESRI centric, the common ESRI environments that most of us were operating in created a sense of community and a good foundation for GISP.  There is no such common operating environment for the Modeling and Simulation people, not even close.  There are many competing companies with no over-arching system, which is a big hurdle.  Wait until someone suggests a qualification exam.