Geospatial FM

Guest:  John Metzger ( LinkedIn ), Founder of Asset Assurance Monitoring ( Website ). "I don't know how, but I recognized it was one of my children. My friend rescued Nicolas, and I thought: Oh my God, at least I managed to catch one." These were the words of a father fleeing the 2015 Bento Rodrigues (Mariana) dam disaster in Brazil ( O Globo , 08/11/2015). Five days later, his daugh...

I am joined by Robert Cheatham of Japan Earth Observer (https://www.japanearthobserver.com/) for a GEO500 Weekly Wrap. Provisionally, also the PhysicalAI Weekly Wrap. I'll think about it. GEO500 weekly roundup sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AVbN5pQ9kiRmC0Iw2H8stoPJUngrqntA5DRU3Wll2aE/edit?usp=sharing TacticAI: Google's AI system that can help simulate field scenarios and predict op...

Today's guest is Robert Cheatham https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcheetham/ and we are talking about Japan Earth Observer , https://www.japanearthobserver.com/. This is a newsletter on the space, Earth observation, and geospatial industry in Japan. It is based on a fantastic effort by Robert to systematically collate every last company in the space and earth observation supply chain in that countr...

Mark Baumgartner is a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution . Back in 2011 he and Sarah Mussoline published a paper on how to use computer science to classify whales from sound recordings . This episode is about an evolution of that software by Atle Borsholm from NV5 Geospatial (https://www.nv5geospatialsoftware.com). At the beginning of the episode you will hear a sound recordi...

Karolina Sarna is founder of the wonderfully named Rebel Strategy Lab . She also writes and codes . On that basis alone I would want to record an episode. Even better though, she is an alumnus of the European Space Agency and Iceye, meaning she has a huge amount to contribute on the subject of earth observation. Iceye, by the way, have already come on the show. So, we covered: - How her background...

Abdulfatai Sanusi is a geospatial developer at Proforce Galaxies . He tells us the story of an MS Azure to Esri Enterprise migration at a power utility that covers several states in Nigeria. He then moves on to the next phase of his career at Proforce. They are an earth observation satellite design and data pipeline company. He described being a member of a talented team that also develops softwar...

Ryan Kmetz is back to talk with us about https://quantagri.substack.com/ . This initiative began in January 2026. It is about analyzing satellite data to predict the monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports. Ryan proposes a novel approach and shares some eye raising stats about lead times and profitability. This episode is inspiration for how we are all equipped to pr...

This was quite the episode! We return for Round 2 with Nelson Roque . He is Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He walked us through OpenClaw . Nelson is an incredibly useful guest because he is able to cover both podcasts I have run - The Behavioral Investor and this one, Geospatial FM . A significant message from The Behavioral Investor was the effect of de...

Geoharbor is a solution from SketchMyView . It is a way to avoid notebook hell. This is done through all data engineers on a team using a common framework. I recommend a watch to see Rakesh showing it in action.

We are privileged today to share an episode with a Pakistani geospatial firm, Seerab Technologies . Zulkifil is a co-founder and has been with the company nearly 10 years. They have their own platform for real estate developers to help customers understand the context of proposed property purchases. He gave a simple example, a property with a large hole in it is hard to spot if you don’t have a te...

This is episode 3/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena . In this episode, Alex steps through system characteristics of weather foundation models and how we can approach building them. Toward the end, the episode touches on an example of applying these approaches to a simulation of the Earth’s weather over a period...

This is episode 2/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena In this episode, Alex steps through ML weather models, their history and how they work. Links to items discussed: ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5): https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5 I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taugh...

This is episode 1/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena . In this episode, Alex steps through the background on doing weather prediction, from early efforts around a century ago to numerical and physics based models. This prepares us for later episodes on machine learning or AI based approaches. Links to items discu...

Mark Munsell is Distinguished Fellow of Artificial Intelligence at Lindenwood University and Executive Director at GeoSTL . He is also Former Chief AI Officer at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. As such, he has rich experience for us to mine. We used it to navigate the AI hype and transition from LLMs to world models. If you want to get an impression of him outside this episide, her...

The Geospatial FM podcast topic profile: 1. Data engineering for geospatial 2. GEOSPATIAL FOR WORLD MODELS (foundation models are so last week) 3. GEOSPATIAL IN PREDICTION MARKETS (spatial finance is so 2022) 4. In this context, stocks, globally 5. Human rights outcomes of these stocks Item 5 is always number 1. So we are finishing the year with that focus. Let's look at this BBC article about a m...

Ryan Kmetz is Research Director at IQSpatial . We are privileged to have his time in this episode. He talked with us about economic conditions faced by geospatial workers in the US. We reflected on the emergence of a protest movement, the No Kings march a couple of weekends ago. We observed how this has emerged in the context of very high cost of living, lack of wage growth, high costs of housing...

0:00 - Motivation for Microsoft to compete with Esri 1:20 - Who is Rakesh and data engineering services of SketchMyView 6:40 - Deploying a land and planning GIS for the UK government with Microsoft Synapse 22:25 - Is there a similarity between Synapse and Fabric? 26:26 - ACID compliance, delta files, lakehouses, bronze, silver, gold layers 35:18 - Apache Sedona in Fabric tutorial 57:20 - Why is it...

Having started his career at USGS in 1980, Joe Francica is a veteran of the geospatial industry. He has a lot of experience in publishing, for example as Editor In Chief of (the now shuttered) Directions Mazagine…and he has been host of On Point with Korem. Joe’s latest venture is www. LocationIntelligence.us . In my endless search for the world’s geospatial companies, I came across his Guide to t...

Arham Ansari confronts some challenges that most of us in the liberal democratic Western world do not. For example, in a small town near Delhi in northern India he only has 8-10hrs of power per day. There had also been a blackout the whole 3 days prior to the first day of recording the episode. India is not a wealthy country and he cannot afford to pay for expensive cloud computing/storage service...

Frank Romo is an inspiring leader in geospatial. He runs several educational programs with school students across the country such as in The Bronx and recently St Louis . The focus of episode was therefore on how AI is being used to facilitate better outcomes for students. Frank gave examples from his community organising work such as urban planning and urban design renderings in The Bronx, gather...

Juliette Murphy , CEO and co-founder of Floodmapp joins us to continue the coverage of how the geospatial industry is responding to the flood season. This is after an episode with Shelly Klose about True Flood Risk a couple of weeks ago. I should also highlight the episode on flood models with Fathom last year . Juliette describes the capacity of her company to perform operational impact based flo...

Clemens Schotte is Senior Program Manager at Azure Maps . It is pronounced "Claymens SuHotte". Microsoft has a few geospatial offerings: Microsoft Bing Maps is the most well known amongst the public. It is a web-based mapping service offering street maps, aerial imagery, and route planning for public and consumer-facing applications. Microsoft Azure Maps is a cloud-based geospatial platform design...

Tue (Matt) Le-Quang is a Data Reporter at VnExpress.net . He spent time with us today analysing and mapping the upgrade of Vietnam's administrative boundaries. Quoting from his publication VnExpress (Google Translate) : "After the reorganization of 34 provinces and cities, the number of commune-level administrative units in Vietnam decreased by 67%, from 10,035 to 3,321 units. Of which, Hanoi merg...

The podcast is picking up the pace in terms of meeting my heroes. UN Mappers is an open spatial data volunteering programme run by the UN . Michael Montani stepped through the part of the UN he works for and some conflicts or disasters his team is currently helping on. We were also given a look at the UN's operational web map and some commentary on the unique cartographic style that they have...

At the beginning of the year I conducted an exhaustive review of all the #LAfires geospatial responses. This turned into a series of podcast episodes culminating in a discussion with Jamon van den Hoek. A theme was synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to detect building damage. There were some side quests related to near real time earth monitoring for commodities trading, key company profiled was Ursa S...