Attending the 2024 Esri User Conference and Education Summit
From July 13th to 19th, I had the tremendous honour and privilege to attend the 2024 Esri User Conference and Education Summit in San Diego, California, as Esri Canada’s Young Scholar Award recipient. In the depths of several research projects and with an upcoming teaching assistantship role lined up for the Fall term, the conference was a well-timed opportunity to gain new perspectives and to learn about new technologies. It was wonderful to connect with the 2024 Esri Young Scholars from around the world throughout the week. I greatly enjoyed discussing our diverse yet overlapping interests and learning about the academic work being conducted at other institutions. I also appreciated our conversations about what we had learned and how we could use new tools or concepts in our work following the conference presentations.
Esri Education Summit
During the Education Summit plenary, I learned more about the vision for modern GIS, which is web-enabled and less desktop-focused. It was eye-opening to see how ArcGIS Online is becoming a fully functional web-based GIS application. The plenary also featured various initiatives leveraging the free web-based National Geographic MapMaker tool. Throughout the weekend, educators from around the world showed numerous strategies they used to engage students through problem-based learning and solving real-world challenges. Additionally, I found out more about Esri’s Living Atlas, which I hope to explore further for both my research and teaching assistant roles. Another recurring topic was how other post-secondary instructors are incorporating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in course materials and how they strive to foster critical thinking regarding the outputs of these tools.
Esri UC Plenary and Map Gallery Reception
On Monday July 15th, the main Esri UC kicked off with a three-part plenary session packed with presentations showing a vast array of applications of Esri software. This was followed by the Map Gallery Reception, where the Young Scholars were provided a valuable opportunity to discuss our projects and posters with interested conference attendees. My poster summarized the details of my StoryMap submitted for Esri Canada’s Young Scholar Award application. My project described and demonstrated the Geographic Automata add-in tool I developed using the ArcGIS Pro .NET SDK to support spatiotemporal modelling in research, teaching, and decision-making settings. It was exciting to hear that so many people knew about the geographic automata modelling paradigm, and I learned about the work others are doing as well.
Week at the Esri UC
During the week, I attended presentations by the Spatial Statistics team, including the Spatial Statistics Summit event. Learning about existing and new technologies to support my research projects was a goal of mine, so I also prioritized attending technical and developer-oriented presentations to improve my workflows. One of the most interesting presentations I attended was on using the Suitability Modeler, which is available with the Spatial Analyst extension. I have used this tool and have even done short demonstrations on it in lab presentations as a teaching assistant. It is also significant to workflows involving the Geographic Automata add-in because the resulting suitability or susceptibility maps can be provided directly to the Basic and Advanced Cellular Automata tools for the purpose of guiding modelled behaviours of various geospatial phenomena. Up until now, I have never seen the non-sequential, interactive workflow of the Suitability Modeler shown so clearly before. The demonstrations gave me a lot to think about as I reapproach my demonstrations for a new cohort of undergraduate students in the Fall term.
Perhaps the ultimate highlight of my week was attending the Esri UC Expo. Here, I was able to discuss my work with Esri employees. I learned more about the underpinnings of geoprocessing tools I was curious about, best practices for building script tools and add-ins for ArcGIS Pro, and new perspectives on higher education topics. Hearing first-hand from ArcGIS Pro Product Developers and Engineers, it was reassuring to know that some of my questions about methodological implementation I am encountering in my own research remain open and important problems. It was also valuable to gain more information about creating script tools and add-ins from several Esri Product Engineers. With a paper about the Geographic Automata add-in being accepted for publication less than 24 hours before I left for the conference trip, I appreciated receiving assistance from the ArcGIS Pro .NET SDK Product Engineers regarding the various pathways available for disseminating .esriAddInX files. After discussing my technical questions with various Product Engineering teams at the Expo, I feel confident and better-informed about my implementation strategies for my upcoming ArcGIS Pro tool-building ventures.
Acknowledgements
Of course, I could not have gotten here without the help and support of many people. First, I am incredibly thankful to Dr. Suzana Dragićević, who forwarded me the 2024 Esri Young Scholar scholarship application callout saying that I should “absolutely apply.” I am thankful to both Drs. Suzana Dragićević and Shiv Balram, who manage the Esri Canada Centres of Excellence program at Simon Fraser University that connects undergraduate and graduate students with such opportunities. Thank you again to the Esri Canada Higher Education group and the judges who selected me for this prestigious award. I am thankful to Michael Gould from Esri Inc., who shepherded the Esri Young Scholars throughout the Esri Education Summit and UC events. I am also grateful to Madison Mackey from Esri Canada, who was my contact throughout the week and kindly included me in various events.
I am immensely grateful to have been awarded the opportunity to attend the 2024 Esri UC and Education Summit as Esri Canada’s Young Scholar Award recipient. I learned about new technologies I would not have otherwise been exposed to and learned more about the Esri software ecosystem and its future directions. The experience of connecting with other researchers, students, and industry professionals from around the world was invaluable as I approach the end of my graduate studies program.