Attending #ESRIUCCanada 2016 Toronto event was an amazing experience to know the new innovations in technology from Esri and the great research and industry accomplishments from organizations from all walks of life. The show was great and I must say that Esri is improving and evolving a lot with time. Each year you see added value and innovation rather than following on the old and aging products.  Here are a few of the ways that I found them doing fantastic job.

  1. Insights is a new product from Esri to help users add the power of business intelligence and data analytics in an all ArcGIS-integrated environment. It is a much awaited product that gives the Esri users power to explore and analyze data from diverse sources and sensors, perform predictive and real time analytics, and render the data in the form of interactive dashboards and reports. IMHO, it seemed to be the missing piece of puzzle in the existing suite of products and it is in its place now.
  2. Esri showcased an app for how smart communities are exchanging data and services through the concept of GeoHub. It was really a great way to facilitate the Open Data concept and exchange the geospatial information in a standardized way. The User interface of the web app is modern and sleek.
  3. Drone2Map is another nice and innovative product that takes the data right away from a drone flight, processes it within minutes and creates 3D, 2D and hillshade products with pre-configured interfaces to be consumed by ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online with a few clicks.
  4. Esri Space Time Cube is another innovative tool to render the data with a dazzling cartographic representation. It aggregates the timestamped points data into space-time bins.

The Esri Higher Education and Research concurrent sessions were really wonderful in the content and presentation. In particular, I liked the sessions related to water and wastewater assets replacement and rehabilitation risk modeling, using R-ArcGIS bridge to analyze hydrologic processes and visualizing geospatial Networks on the web but it was just my personal bias and their definitely were other great sessions.

Overall, the event was a great success and I had of plenty of opportunities to learn new things and share great experience with other professionals in the research and business. I can’t wait to apply what I learnt in this experience.