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GERINGER Distinguished Lecture in GIS PolicyOrganized by School of Computing Friday, April 4th, 2025 University of Wyoming Campus Coe Library Room 506 This event is open to the public. Add this event to your calendar, or check for updates.
"From Digital Twins to the Metaverse"Speaker: Barbara Ryan, an Earth Observation Advocate
Barbara will share insights from her career in environmental governance, science and technology, and international collaboration. She is a strong advocate for open data policies, the integration of Earth observations, and hyper-partnering to ensure that existing and planned resources can be more effectively used to address the major environmental and social issues facing the world today. Once the domain of the manufacturing environment, digital twins are increasingly being designed, developed, and used to model our physical world. Examples include digital twins of our brains, bodies, homes, towns and cities, counties, states, countries, continents, oceans, and even the Earth, with Europe’s Destination Earth Program (DestinE) (https://destination-earth.eu). Yet, like most of our organizational structures, these digital twins are almost always siloed, not integrated or integratable, and therefore, suboptimized for a truly systematic, system of systems view of the entire Earth. Simultaneously, most view the Metaverse as only a gaming environment, and while, games are important, and generate significant revenue both nationally and globally, we instead, should view the Metaverse, as a virtual representation of the Universe. Like metadata – structured data that describes and explains other data – the metaverse is (or should be) structured data that describes and explains the universe. In order to deliver on such a vision, then all digital twins that are created for, and/or about, our physical environment need to be linked. During this presentation, both challenges and opportunities will be explored based on the author’s 50-year career working in the national and international public and not-for-profit sectors. |
Check out the WyGISC YouTube channel for all of our past Geospatial Forums:
A new set of maps that document the movements of ungulates is now published in the fourth volume of the “Ungulate Migrations of the Western United States.” The maps in this report series reveal the migration routes and critical ranges used by ungulates, or hooved mammals, in the western U.S., furthering scientists’ understanding of the geography.
University of Wyoming School of Computing Assistant Professor Di Yang has been awarded a NASA Early Career Investigator Program grant to study how land-use decisions on Western U.S. forests have affected fire activity.
This past summer, the WyomingView program crossed a major milestone. The program, which trains the next generation of remote-sensing scientists and experts, passed 100 student interns.
"Since the first cohort of WyomingView interns was trained in 2004-05, the program has seen 103 student interns, most of whom have been University of Wyoming undergraduate students", says Ramesh Sivanpillai, a senior research scientist from UW’s Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC).
The UW Data Hub, a component of the Wyoming Innovation Partnership (WIP), seeks proposals to support innovative data-sharing and data-integration projects at the University of Wyoming.
With this call, the grant program will provide funds to UW units or individuals to either enhance or expand established data sharing deployment activities or develop new data-sharing or data-integration capacity, with the goal of demonstrating the value of an integrated, cross-disciplinary research information infrastructure supporting the WIP’s broad programmatic goals.
Ramesh Sivanpillai, with UW’s Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC), is part of the AmericaView consortium that was recognized for advancing Earth observation education through remote-sensing science, applied research, workforce development, technology transfer and community outreach.
Laboratory Inventory Management Systems (LIMS) is an end-to-end solution of software and hardware designed to contextualize samples first drawn from the field, as they get processed in the lab, and long after work has concluded. LIMS offers a safe, reliable and compliant way to collect, track, maintain and report data throughout a project’s lifetime. Team members are Shannon Albeke, a senior research scientist in UW’s Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center; and Nicholas Case, a UW graduate student from Laramie, who is majoring in geospatial information science and technology.
Congratulations to WyGISC faculty member Dr. Paddington Hodza (PhD, West Virginia University, 2007) for his recent promotion to Senior Research Scientist. Dr. Hodza joined the University of Wyoming in 2013 as an Assistant Research Scientist and WyGISC Assistant Director. He was promoted to Associate Research Scientist and WyGISC Associate Director in 2016, a position he held until 2021. Dr. Hodza is a certified GIS Professional, licensed FAA Drone Pilot, past recipient of a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and a Leadership Wyoming alumnus (Class of 2017). Dr. Hodza currently serves on the Board of Directors of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. His current research interests include unmanned aerial systems, multimodal GIS education, positivity GIS, immersive geovisualization, and spatial data science. Once again, congratulations to Dr. Hodza on this significant achievement!
The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees recently approved WyGISC Senior Lecturer and former Geospatial Information and Technology (GIST&T) Program Director Dr. Ken Driese as Emeritus Senior Lecturer.
The title of Emeritus Senior Lecturer is awarded to faculty members who retire after long and meritorious service to the University.
Driese joined WyGISC in 2001 as a remote sensing scientist, where he established a remote sensing lab and began teaching the core of the remote sensing curriculum at UW. Following subsequent appointments in the Botany Department and Life Sciences Program, Driese returned to WyGISC in 2019 to help design, launch, and direct the Center’s new interdisciplinary GIST Program before retiring earlier this year.
“This is a well-deserved appointment, recognizing Ken’s many contributions to WyGISC and the UW community,” notes WyGISC Director Jeff Hamerlinck.
Congratulations, Ken!
Research led by a University of Wyoming graduate student involving about 50 scientists from across the globe has provided new insights into the behavior of ungulates (hoofed animals) as it relates to forage conditions and water availability.
The goal of NASA EPSCoR is to provide seed funding that will enable jurisdictions to develop an academic research enterprise directed toward long-term, self-sustaining, nationally-competitive capabilities in aerospace and aerospace-related research.
Yang will be using the grant to host a series of activities (hackathons) across Wyoming to explore and develop deep learning tools to segment, characterize, classify, and label components of land cover photographs from the GLOBE Observer (GO) land cover and mosquito habitat app.
Using observations from crowdsourced science and weather location data, researchers concluded that wildfires caused a mass die-off of birds in the western and central United States in 2020.
The use of unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, by industry may be in its infancy, but there are many businesses already using the technology.
Ramesh Sivanpillai, a remote-sensing scientist with the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) at the University of Wyoming, has been named a fellow of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).
The Business Ethics Program at the University of Wyoming, supported by the Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative (DFEI), recently named 15 UW employees as 2021 Daniels Fund Faculty Fellows.
The University of Wyoming will offer new degree and certificate programs to meet changing student demands and workforce needs, following action by the UW Board of Trustees.
Years ago, Ramesh Sivanpillai had a feeling that satellite images taken from afar could help bring some closer perspective to lessons being taught to Laramie students in elementary and middle school.
It turns out he was on to something. Sivanpillai, a senior research scientist from the University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC), has been visiting classrooms with his images -- depicting everything from crop fields to forests to lakes to cities to water diversion in the Aral Sea -- for a decade now.
Responding to Wyoming workforce needs, the University of Wyoming will offer three new bachelor’s degree programs starting this fall.
The Wyoming Geospatial Hub (GeoHub) website was updated. The site leverages ESRI's Open Data platform in ArcGIS Hub.
WyGISCUniversity of Wyoming Phone: (307) 766-2532 |
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