Purdue GIS Day 2019

The annual Purdue University GIS Day Conference was held on November 7th, 2019. Each research team in the UAS major was able to showcase their work and the research they have done this semester. I am very proud of the work done by my research team and I as well as the work done by my classmates, each project showcases innovative and effective ways to use Unmanned Aerial Systems in different industries. Our class had a fairly large presence at the conference and I hope it brought positive attention to our major, work and research!

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the morning keynote speaker presentations due to morning classes. I was able to attend the lunch and listen to each of the guests talk about their history and current work with GIS. It was very interesting and inspiring to hear how they have gotten into the GIS industry and are using it in many different applications. From the lunch we transitioned into the poster presentations where my classmates and I were able to present our research posters and compete in a poster competition. One of my personal favorite posters not from my class is pictured below. What I liked about this poster was the descriptions and figures that described the work-flow of using UAS in agricultural imaging pictured in the bottom left corner. I also really enjoy the layout of the orthomosiacs on the right side with the zoomed in insert to show the crops. 

 

As posts in the past have described, our group was presenting on our research into UAS implementation in search and rescue. More specifically, we are using a computer-aided object identification tool called Loc8 to try and determine if it is the best method for this task. Since the last update on our poster, we decided that it didn't quite show off the work we were hoping it did. We were a bit disappointed with what we created, so we completely overhauled the poster. Multiple days of intensive work resulted in the poster shown below.

Figure 1: GIS Day Poster

Overall, we were incredibly happy with our decision to overhaul our poster. Before, we were too text based, and the poster didn't flow incredibly well. We think the story this poster tells is much easier to read, flows a lot better, and really draws your eyes to the most important parts; our maps, the process of using Loc8, and the results Loc8 has given us. 

Figure 2: The Loc8 Group at GIS Day 2019

Figure 3: AT 409 Capstone Class at GIS Day 2019

I am very happy with the efforts of my team and my classmates, our UAS capstone class was able to take first and second place in the poster competition with my team and I coming in first and Alan Pecor coming in second (check out his blog here! https://alanpecor.blogspot.com/). It was a successful day and semester, now we will be diving deeper into the research and continuing experiments into next semester!