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The Multidimensional Magic of Modern Maps · THE DAILY BRIEF

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: I'm a digital cartographer by trade, and honestly, the last
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  Speaker 1: two three four presentations have been incredible. Maps. Historically they
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  Speaker 1: do really two things, and we've really seen an amazing
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  Speaker 1: amount of the first understanding our world. But historically maps
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  Speaker 1: weren't just about understanding. They were also about creating, about building,
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  Speaker 1: about shaping the built environment around us. They help us
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  Speaker 1: plan cities, do trade, fight wars, and maintain peace. And
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  Speaker 1: as we've digitized these maps, you've seen them fit into
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  Speaker 1: our pocket. Things that used to take entire libraries reams
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  Speaker 1: of paper are now in our pocket or in our eyes.
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  Speaker 1: But as we move from the information age into the
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  Speaker 1: cybernetic age, an era dominated by the application of robotics
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  Speaker 1: and artificial intelligence to the physical world, cartography needs to change.
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  Speaker 1: It's not enough to collaborate in a digital world. The
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  Speaker 1: challenge in front of us is really to take these
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  Speaker 1: technologies and to use them to build physically. And for
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  Speaker 1: the first time in history, we have the remote sensing
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  Speaker 1: capacity on orbit and the technology to process all of
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  Speaker 1: the data into a dynamic, living replica of the physical
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  Speaker 1: earth inside of computer, what we call the living globe.
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  Speaker 1: You can think of this as a sandbox, a place
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  Speaker 1: where you can take the digital representation of our earth
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  Speaker 1: and combine it with a physical representation on the ground
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  Speaker 1: and go back and forest so that sensors can show
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  Speaker 1: you what's actually happening in real time. Let's make that real.
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  Speaker 1: Earlier this year, the Los Angeles wildfires devastated southern California.
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  Speaker 1: Many of us were personally impacted or know someone who was.
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  Speaker 1: Satellite imagery and mapping played a critical role in understanding
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  Speaker 1: the impact of that devastation, guiding first responders, and shining
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  Speaker 1: a spotlight on the destruction that happened. But it's not
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  Speaker 1: enough just to look, to observe, to react. What's been
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  Speaker 1: nagging me since then, is that what LA needed. It
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  Speaker 1: wasn't satellite imagery. It was water, large scale infrastructure projects,
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  Speaker 1: mega projects, rapid response systems with firefighting robots that would
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  Speaker 1: be able to take out the fire before it started.
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  Speaker 1: This used to be how we thought two hundred years ago.
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  Speaker 1: We were a civilization of builders with a culture of action.
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  Speaker 1: We built the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Hoover Dam,
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  Speaker 1: mega projects that fundamentally reshaped our earth, our physical world.
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  Speaker 1: But these projects had devastating ramifications, unable to predict their
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  Speaker 1: impact and know what the results would be. We were
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  Speaker 1: treated into the virtual world, a world of iPhones and
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  Speaker 1: personal computers dominated by individualism. The problem is the problems
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  Speaker 1: of the twenty first century. They're fundamentally physical. They're problems
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  Speaker 1: of moving atoms. When you think about climate change, energy abundance,
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  Speaker 1: housing affordability, global security. These are problems that require regaining
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  Speaker 1: a builder's spirit and starting to act upon the physical
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  Speaker 1: world once again. What we've done is we've taken dozens
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  Speaker 1: and dozens of different data sets. We fuse them together
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  Speaker 1: into a dynamic and living representation of the Earth. By
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  Speaker 1: pulling these into an ontology so that computers and people
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  Speaker 1: can interact with them together, we can programmatically start identifying
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  Speaker 1: patterns so that we can delegate the monitoring of those
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  Speaker 1: patterns to a computer. What we see here is Vancouver,
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  Speaker 1: a combination of tree height data, landsap vegetation data, and
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  Speaker 1: information from the affordable housing district showing the blue dots
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  Speaker 1: right now, what we can start to identify is patterns
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  Speaker 1: things that we can see about the city that affect
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  Speaker 1: the way that people live in it. You can tell
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  Speaker 1: that the areas that have a lot of trees protect
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  Speaker 1: us against heat. This is heat data showing the density
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  Speaker 1: of trees, and when we can over to really forested
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  Speaker 1: parts of the city, we can tell that the trees
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  Speaker 1: are actually protecting us from that heat. So what we've
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  Speaker 1: identified is really two patterns here. One that trees are
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  Speaker 1: great for economic development people really desire living in places
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  Speaker 1: with trees, and two that trees are critical for building
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  Speaker 1: a lovely, wonderful city. But it's not enough to have
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  Speaker 1: a static map looking the past. Our goal is to
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  Speaker 1: have a really dynamic map that's updating in real time
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  Speaker 1: and in the background, dozens of satellites are orbiting the
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  Speaker 1: Earth taking images of Vancouver, so that we can start
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  Speaker 1: to move from mapping to monitoring to building an instrument
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  Speaker 1: panel and a dashboard where we can really understand what's
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  Speaker 1: happening in our city in real time. This lets us
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  Speaker 1: move away from thinking about individual projects towards thinking about
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  Speaker 1: the city as a cohesive whole, right an integrated system
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  Speaker 1: where all of the projects play together to achieve multi
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  Speaker 1: dimensional goals. So here we have all of the building
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  Speaker 1: permits in Vancouver right now, but that doesn't really tell
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  Speaker 1: us what's actually happening on the ground. If we use
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  Speaker 1: satellite imagery, we can run change detection algorithms and actually
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  Speaker 1: see the places where change is really happening, where ground
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  Speaker 1: is being broken zooming into one of them. We can
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  Speaker 1: see the actual development that's occurring in Vancouver. We can
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  Speaker 1: see a satellite image of a construction site moving back
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  Speaker 1: in time and turning the trees red. With infrared sensors,
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  Speaker 1: we can really see trees blossoming and growing, the vegetation
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  Speaker 1: changing over time, and we can see that this particular
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  Speaker 1: one small development in Vancouver cut down a bunch of trees,
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  Speaker 1: which is very natural. But in order to have our
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  Speaker 1: goal of having a more forested city, we're going to
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  Speaker 1: have to plant these trees somewhere else, probably north in
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  Speaker 1: that affordable housing district that we saw earlier. This is
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  Speaker 1: what I mean by using maps to build. We get
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  Speaker 1: a dashboard and an instrument panel for understanding the change
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  Speaker 1: in the globe over time, not just in terms of
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  Speaker 1: the spatial information, but in terms of a time series,
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  Speaker 1: in terms of metrics and measures that we can use
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  Speaker 1: to guide development. For the last fifty years, we've really
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  Speaker 1: framed the question we have as a society very narrowly
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  Speaker 1: to build or not to build but the important thing
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  Speaker 1: about technology is that it eliminates trade off. It lets
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  Speaker 1: you do more with less. This living globe, it's not
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  Speaker 1: just a mirror for the world. It's also a canvas
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  Speaker 1: to build a better future, to visualize it, and then
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  Speaker 1: to summon the collective will to make it happen. I'm
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  Speaker 1: really excited to be here and share this with you,
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  Speaker 1: and thank you so much for having me