Purdue GIS Day 2024 Keynote Speakers
This year’s conference featured two distinguished keynote speakers, both experts in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). They shared their extensive knowledge with the Purdue community through engaging talks and networking opportunities throughout the day.
Gregory Brunner
Brunner is an experienced scientist, award-winning professor, and principal data scientist at Esri, the global market leader in GIS software, location intelligence, and mapping. He spoke about the rapid growth of the AI model ecosystem and the potential impact it has and will have on GIS in his talk titled, “The Burgeoning AI Model Ecosystem and Its Potential Impact on GIS.”
Through his vision and guidance, he has helped organizations across the world understand how to manage, disseminate, and analyze vast quantities of imagery in support of a wide range of missions and problems. Brunner’s current focus is on developing custom AI and computer vision-driven spatial analysis tools in support of extracting features from imagery and attributing those features. He also explores extended reality applications and the incorporation of 3D GIS data into extended-reality environments.
As a dedicated and enthusiastic teacher, Brunner served as an adjunct professor at Saint Louis University from 2017 through 2022, where he was the recipient of the 2019 award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching. Brunner has written multiple lesson paths for Esri’s ArcGIS Learn website that teaches ArcGIS users how to use the ArcGIS API for Python for data science. Brunner’s unique ability to solve abstract quantitative geographic problems and explain those solutions has enabled him to give presentations around the world on topics such as advanced image processing, augmented reality, and GeoAI.
Michael Johns
Johns joined Databricks in 2017 as the first solutions architect for Public Sector, before taking on a field engineering manager role for a few years, and then turned his full attention to Geospatial in 2022. Prior to Databricks, he performed engineering functions in an identity management product and a commercial semantic network analysis product, and researched the application of graph analysis techniques over motion imagery processing systems. He discussed how to use Databricks to perform scaled spatial analysis while retaining full visibility and control over all of the underlying processes, code, models, and data lineage in his talk titled, “Any-Scale Spatial Analysis on Databricks.”
He is one of the founding members of the Geospatial SME group at Databricks where he has worked with a variety of spatial data and frameworks, offered thought leadership for current geospatial direction, authored content, and spoken at numerous Databricks-sponsored events. As a Geospatial Specialist, he represents field interests with product management, marketing, and engineering to deliver high-quality geospatial features and field-delivered assets to our customers and partners.
