GIS Day

Main Events:

10:00 –11:00 am
Keynote: GIS for natural resources management at United Nation (STEW 206) Dr. Nicolas Picard, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

11:00am–12:20pm
Presentations (STEW 206) Spatial Humanities: What is and What Can it Be. Prof. Sorin Adam Matei, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education, College of Liberal Arts Race and Spatial Humanities Prof. Kim Gallon, Assistant Professor of History Forest structural diversity as a predictor of ecosystem function in North America Dr. Elizabeth LaRue, Forestry and Natural Resources My laptop takes forever, now what! Eric Adams, ITaP Research Computing

GIS day was a day to learn more about GIS and how it fits with UAS operations. Above is the main schedule that was posted (although there were more events afterwards). Although I could not make it due to illness, I was able to talk to classmates that did go to get some information about what happened. The main speaker was Dr. Picard, who was affiliated with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States. He talked about GIS data and how to analyze it to its full potential and also talked about mistakes other people made when trying to put out good data. The next presenter was Professor Sorin Matei, he had also talked about research projects that utilized drones. After this Professor Kim Gallon, who focused on the ethics of GIS. Professor Gallon said that people were simply looking at the numbers that we were obtaining from data capture and seeing them as just that, numbers. Similarly to comparing humans to numbers or figures on a screen or graph. Even though I could not attend, I still asked classmates for information about the talks since it did seem interesting for us in the UAS major.
In other classes I have taken, the ethical issues of treating people like a number or figure has been brought up, mainly in my remote sensing class. In my opinion it does dumb down what is actually occurring, regardless of it is serious or not. But, that does not solve much in my opinion, there isn't much people can do that will put a lasting effect on those statistics. 
For our class, we have less than 10 people but our outlooks for our career vary throughout us. Although this depended on what students want to do with this major, this major can branch out in many ways so students may want to use it for GIS applications and others may want to use it for design and manufacture. Personally, I am not interested in the data side of drones but the design and manufacturing of them. This still helps if I were to be interested in making a specialized drone for a mission that required sensors that need to be outfitted professionally. Having a team of well rounded individuals that have extensive knowledge on one area of topic can help team move forward easily. If an entire team only consisted of people with knowledge in data analytics, then they will encounter difficulty in the field where they might not know much about platform usability and troubleshooting. And similarly the other way around.
All together, GIS is a very vital market for drones. Drones are going to be used for these applications more and more. The technology is evolving at an ever increasing rate and will improve how these machines can do their job, making our job even easier.