Good morning. That's better. Makes me feel a little more comfortable. I guess I should say, I'm Jack Dangermond. It's my great pleasure on behalf of all of my colleagues at Esri to welcome you here to our 46th annual user meeting. It's amazing. Well, welcome. This is an amazing event. The purpose of it is fundamentally all about helping you and helping your work and advancing this community that we live in.
And at the beginning of this meeting, I always like to spend a little bit of time talking about who you are. You are an amazing group of people. Look around, there's 15,000, 16,000, something like that here in the room. You're from almost every background of human activities. You come from over 117 countries. And that's a description of who you are. There's also, by the way, an equivalent amount of people watching online. So welcome all of you around the world. There's big watch parties in Australia. What are they doing? Staying awake all night? I just can't get over it. And also in Allentown, Pennsylvania, well, it's interesting.
I always start this meeting out by having you meet somebody else next to you, a stranger. Don't meet somebody that you already know. Stand up and tell them who you are. Tell them a little bit about your story so we can get on with this purpose of sharing and learning together. Can you do that for me now? Turn the lights on.
Thank you very much. Great. As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of this meeting is to learn, to create a new understanding, to meet some new people, to share and learn. And we do that as human beings through conversations. It's our language. And that's what I want to have happen, what you just did all week long at break times because while there's lots to learn in the technology space, it's dwarfed by the learning that happens when you share real experiences, not BS experiences, non-experienced experiences, as I call them. But your collective experiences in this room are just amazing.
And I know this about you because I know many of you personally, and I've had the opportunity and pleasure to work with you. This is a unique group of people. You are purposeful. You are dedicated to your work. Many of you in public service. It just touches me emotionally to be in the same room with you, and some in the private sector and some in education. It's almost overwhelming to me. The NGO representation that's here, people that, well, they just work hard. All of you are unique in that respect. I won't go on and on about it, but you'll come to know what I mean during the week, and perhaps you already do.
The other thing I like to do at the beginning of this meeting is share your work so that you get to know just the amazing contributions that you are making. The last couple of weeks I've spent going through thousands of maps that you sent me, and I'll share just a few of them that I picked to talk about. These examples of your work are in environmental monitoring and conservation. And I'll call your attention here to tracking environmental recovery of degraded areas in the Amazon basin and directly below it, the mapping of wetlands and forests in Florida. But the map on the left is Sylvia Earle's map of Hope Spots, marine protected areas around the world. And how about the one on the lower right, which is done by Chris Tompkins and her organization, which we'll hear a lot about later this afternoon about creating a whole new national park.
I like these maps on this display because they show your work in natural resource mapping and also management. And they span from simply geologic mapping and mineral claims in Southern British Columbia to this beautiful visualization in Southern Europe of subsurface geophysics. In the center, some applications in agriculture where it's measuring crop health with remote sensing in Australia for the management of wine grape growing areas in Northern California. And then there's this interesting one on the right in the Cameroon, which is mapping sustainable cocoa production. It's just remarkable, actually.
Many of you are actually creating information systems about the land, a foundation for the civic society, Washington, DC in the lower left, modernizing their land information systems. But here I'd like to point out, in Sweden, they've taken the entire country and implemented all the land records there as a foundation inside of the parcel fabric with hundreds of people who update this across the web. And right below it in Istanbul, they're moving cadastral to 3D with this interesting display.
Some of you are planning for and creating the future, creating comprehensive plans or urban designs, like in Los Angeles. The one that caught my attention, however, is on the far right, which is low carbon village planning in rural Indonesia. Interesting, isn't it? Interesting. At the very other end of the scale are these efforts being done in here focused on Japan, but for the entire world, creating a global land use plan, considering carbon. On the left, we see a breakdown of carbon emissions and sequestration coefficients associated with each land use or human activity.
In the center in Tokyo, working with the Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transportation, my old professor, Carl Steinitz, has a team of academics who are building this methodology of developing local plans and then evaluating them with respect to emissions, in this case, 2050, but also understanding the cost of being able to flat line carbon activities of humans on the planet. Again, extraordinary work. Just even envisioning this, which, of course, we must do.
At the other end of the scale, we see many of you working now using GIS for indoors or buildings, managing complete university campuses like the University of Denver or in the center the buildings and management of the campus in the famous University ETH in Zurich. And then there's bringing 3D BIM models of this water plant right into a GIS and managing it more effectively.
I like these examples in transportation because they show real time. Look at Los Angeles by Caltrans there. Makes me realize I don't want to go there at rush time. No, that's it. And then in the lower right, a very practical application of pavement management. And above it, car crash hotspots, that data analytics to be able to deal with how do we reduce car crashes on our networks.
Increasingly, GIS is being applied in engineering disciplines and in public works organizations. On the far right here, we see network infrastructure mapping and asset management for all of the Netherlands. And right next to it, optimizing waste collection in Denmark, optimizing these garbage trucks moving around. And then in the upper left, the monitoring of construction of a new town in Egypt.
Water and wastewater in almost every modern organization that manages water today is now using GIS for asset management like this interesting one here in North Dakota, where they're mapping the infrastructure and the customers in association with them, or the digital twin next to it in Riverside, California, a water plant. And in the far left, the lead service line risk assessments. This is a very difficult situation that we're faced in many American cities, particularly in the Northeast.
Most modern electricity and gas companies use GIS today to manage their utility networks. And now we can see in the upper right these interesting dashboards which show more or less real time power outage. And right below that one is a 3D utility planning engineering visualization that PG&E is owning for their foundation, both underground utilities and above ground in 3D.
Similarly, in telecommunication, we see the work in the UK with fiber network engineering, and in the center, look at the work by Swiss Rail, where they have the rail lines, and they have 5G coverage as an attempt to improve the service for their riders. And then in the upper right in South Dakota, optimizing wireless networks. It's a geography thing. They think of it as an engineering thing, but we think of it in this room as part of geography.
Well, I would assert that our cities, that our nations, that our world is more secure because of the work that you are doing like crime analysis in Oakland, California. Or look at the medical evacuation work across Europe in response to the Ukraine war. Heroic work in many ways. Underneath it, fire incident response planning in a town called City, but this is not Sydney, Australia, just a small community. I won't call your attention to the snake call hotspots in Scottsdale. I'm not going there anymore after looking at that.
But anyway, many of you are dealing with the issues of planning for and responding to disasters, floods, fire, earthquakes. This afternoon, we'll hear about the good work in Jamaica of responding to the tragic Melissa hurricane that went through there. But here, I like two maps on the right. One of them on the bottom is this ice storm tracking from Barren Weather. And then right above it, on the same day in January, we see power outage. This is a coincidence that these two maps were submitted, but it's interesting to me.
In the world of statistics, population demographics, human health, these examples show your work. And here, the story behind the map in the upper right is quite extraordinary. It's done by the US Census Bureau who are now using imagery and AI to be able to estimate housing unit change, saving them hundreds of millions of dollars and collapsing the time to carry out certain census and also disseminating their census data with demographics and economic reporting for Americans about what's going on. But I'm attracted to the one on the far left about food access and poverty, the overlay of this information. And then there's a whole collection of other interesting maps and stories.
GIS is becoming increasingly interesting in the private sector. FedEx looking at travel times from their field service stations in the upper right and in the city of Detroit doing economic development. And then some of you are probably looking at this map of venture capital investments in the San Francisco Bay area, and you see it peaking in downtown San Francisco and also peaking in the South in the Silicon Valley, where the headquarters for some of the big tech giants actually exists.
I know many of you are interested in your communities. You're connecting and using GIS as a language for connection. And here in Topeka, Kansas, we see open data and open GIS services so that people can take advantage of them in their community. But you probably all notice this Montgomery County and the center of organizing volunteers to get them to become part of the workforce in the county, cleaning up. And then my favorite and this one is the lower right, little crowdsourcing going on in Queensland. I can say more about this, but I won't. It's quite a cute map.
Sensing using crowd sourced information. There's hundreds of examples of this, of course, engaging the community to do a better job. And talking about sensing, imagery has always been part of GIS, but it's increasingly valuable because we're learning how to extract information from the images. Remote sensing, like the one in the upper left of pulling off wildfire risk at looking at LiDAR, and then right below it, doing damage assessment automatically. Or in the far right here, monitoring irrigation not exactly in real time, but near real time on these fields in New Zealand.
Well, this map shows your work in cartography. And look, I feel like shell shocked after looking at all the maps. I pulled just a few that I liked personally. One of them is the geology map of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Beautiful work. And then the roadless area, cartographic design. I just found an exquisite design, and others like this visualizing agriculture in 3D in Northern Central California in the Valley.
And then there's this very interesting map in the upper left. And this is done by USGS. In the United States, we have the USGS quadrangles, and they're amazing. They provided the base maps for our nation. This map is a picture of the database behind it. And the extraordinary thing that USGS did is they put this on the web in such a way that you no longer have to make a map about the quad, you can actually put in your own coordinates and it'll generate a quad map for you except not their grid. Isn't that cool? You guys, you're supposed to say, yes, that's really neat. They've made millions of maps off this website, and it's really transforming how we think of base maps in various ways.
So look, these are all interesting stories. And if you're like me, and I suspect you are, you're interested in maps and interested in the stories behind them. Behind every one of these maps is a story, and it's a story of your work, actually. Tonight, we're going to see all of the authors and their maps, all of these, and thousands of other ones upstairs. Let's see, I guess it's this way. No, it's this way. Upstairs. You'll have a chance to meet these people and see their extraordinary stories and the work that they do.
Each year, we acknowledge our users with something called the Special Achievement in GIS Awards. And this is representing about 1/20th of 1% of the millions of users that we acknowledge that are using these tools. These are the award winners here in the United States this year, and these are the award winners from around the world this year. And I think almost all of the award winners are here. What I'd like to do is take a moment and turn on the lights and have the award winners stand up so that we can acknowledge you in the proper way.
It's good. For me, these people are heroes because the definition of a hero, they're just like a normal person, except that they actually do something in a crisis. Well, I don't know. It's something like that. They're extraordinary. And I like to give these awards because it makes me feel good, them feel good, everybody feel good. But it's also very important because I want you to notice those people if they're sitting next to you, they've done something extraordinary and you can learn from them. Back to the very purpose of this meeting is learning from each other. We're going to have a special ceremony on Wednesday afternoon, and you're all invited to this. We're going to do the awards in a more personal way. But it's nice to be acknowledged by your peers. You people recognize what it takes, the work and endeavors that it took to do this.
