 The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Hello everybody and welcome to another directions magazine geospatial webinar. Today our sponsor is Penn State and this is our eighth webinar in our series with Penn State. Today's focus is on remote sensing. It's not just for the remote sensing specialist anymore. As you can see we have a very distinguished panel today and we'll introduce you to everyone in just a minute. You can check out our current offerings of webinars on our homepage under the webinars tab. Next week we have two webinars. The one with the OGC on the sensor web enablement standards. I definitely commend that one to you as it will cover some very interesting and important quality of life case studies. Two related to air quality. One in Saxony, Germany and another one in Durban, South Africa. And another one that addresses cholera in Uganda so it's a very interesting webinar that we have next Tuesday. We very much appreciate your time today and we're going to honor our commitment to you by finishing within the hour. So let's go ahead and get started. So today we have a global audience with more than 500 people registered for this topic. As you can see we've got people joining from every corner of the globe. We mapped people today based on the response to one of our registration questions. Are you seeing a greater need to know about remote sensing in your job or organization? And as you can see those blue dots, most many people indicated that they do need to have more information now or they will need to soon or even we have a few people signed up today to see if they can enhance their skill set for potentially looking for a new job. So you're definitely in the right place today and in speaking of enhanced skill sets I do want to let everyone know that participation in our webinar series does count towards the GISCI's EDU 3 points. So if you need a certificate of participation for today's webinar please email me. My email will be in the thank you note you receive and that's probably going to be going out tomorrow. So let's take a look at a few housekeeping tips. And I see somebody who says there's no pin for me in Puerto Rico. Sorry we must have missed you. There were a few people that couldn't be geocoded or actually I made the map yesterday so maybe you registered after that. My apologies to Puerto Rico. Anyway, so let's get to these first housekeeping details. During today's presentation we will be taking a few polls and we'll walk you through that process when we get to you. There's going to be three polls. We also encourage asking questions. In your control panel there is a section called Questions and click on that plus sign and you can type in your question. You can do this at any time during the webinar and we'll respond to as many of them during the Q&A at the end of the webinar as we possibly can. If you have any technical difficulties you can use that same interface you use to ask questions to send us a message and I'll try to help you out. You can also send us a tweet at Directions Mag and include the hashtag poundpenstate. And of course the number one question we get during webinars is whether the webinar is being recorded. Yes. Today's webinar is being recorded and all registrants will receive an email with instructions on how to view that on demand. And like I said before we should get that email out to you tomorrow morning. You can also access a PDF copy of our slides and you can take a look at the biographies, brief biographies of our speakers. And those two URLs are in your chat window now so you can check those out. Finally there will be a quick survey as you leave the webinar and we'd appreciate it if you take a minute to just let us know how we did today. So let me just tell you everything a little bit about Directions Magazine in case you don't know everything that we do. We're best known for our comprehensive online publication Directions Magazine and our newsletter and the many resources we offer to geospatial professionals. We also offer our content organized into channels. These are our online resources with news, articles, videos, podcasts, et cetera, et cetera for professionals in various industries and technology areas that are encompassed within geospatial. And they're a helpful way to navigate our copious content to drill into your specific area of interest to find them on our homepage. And I've put the URL for our remote sensing channel on the screen here so that might be of interest to some of you on today's webinar. And we have blogs and we also host webinars almost every week. So now I would like to introduce to you our series moderator, Wes Stroh. And this is Wes and my eighth webinar together so we are old pals now. Wes is a lead author and instructor for a new course at Penn State, Location Intelligence for Business. And he's an instructor and co-author of an introductory course called The Nature of Geographic Information. Prior to joining up this GIS world in geography, Wes worked in technical sales and marketing at AT&T and XO Communications. And he was also in product management and merchandising planning with the May department stores coach and Eddie Bauer. His research interests include marketing and business strategy applications of GIS. And he holds an MS in geography from Penn State and a graduate certificate in network design and analysis from the University of Denver. So, Wes, I'd love to ask you to join in now and take it away. Thanks, Nora. And I'm excited to be here as well for our eighth in the series inside geospatial education and research. And we're thrilled to be bringing you this remote sensing webinar as we've just recently expanded our remote sensing curriculum. We'll get to that in just a minute, but we'd like to start out with our first poll. And our first poll is going to ask the audience to think about this question. Which aspects of remote sensing do you regularly encounter in your workplace? You can choose more than one. So, Nora, let's go ahead and turn that poll on. So, in terms of what you encounter in your workplace in the context of remote sensing, do you encounter orthophotos, elevation and terrain data? Do you do image analysis? Something else we haven't listed? Or are you one of those folks who doesn't feel like they really encounter remotely sensing data yet? Go ahead and take a minute. Go ahead and let us know what you think. Nora, are you seeing those polls coming in? I sure am. Thanks for checking on that. We've got, gosh, quite a lot of people participating in this poll. And I apologize. It looks like I truncated a couple of words there on the question itself, but it looks like it's making sense to people. And it looks like the voting is leveling off. We have about 85% of the audience has voted. So I'm going to go ahead and close that and share the results. Thanks. Okay, so definitely orthophotos is up there. Two-thirds of the audience is dealing with that. But also almost 60% of you are dealing with elevation and terrain data. 50% of you are seeing image analysis coming up. Some other things are also showing up for you. And then there's just a few of you who aren't encountering remotely sense data regularly yet. But most of you are, so you're definitely in the right place. And I do see questions already coming in from the audience. So looks like we've got a good bunch of interest in this crowd, Wes. Let's go ahead and turn to our agenda today, Nora. I think that that poll question really does set us up for the kind of context of what we're going to try to cover today. What we really want to think about today, and if you think back to our title, it's not just for the remote sensing specialist anymore, is that probably a lot of folks on the call today have a real kind of traditional sense of what remote sensing is. And what we want to bring to bear today are some of the new technologies and new uses. So one of the first folks I'm going to bring on is my colleague Karen Shuckman, who's going to talk a little bit about trends in the remote sensing industry. Then we're going to turn to colleagues of both Karen's and mine, Mike Renslow and Dr. Jay Parish, who are going to discuss how we're addressing some of these new technologies and new trends with three really innovative courses amongst our five innovative curriculum responses to the directions of remote sensing. We're going to look at advanced applications of LiDAR, unmanned aerial systems, and then some emerging trends in remote sensing in a seminar format. Karen's going to come back following that and really kind of contextualize the entire Penn State curriculum. And then we're going to talk a little bit about how this is coming to bear in the professions and how we're seeing it change certification in remote sensing, again with Mike Renslow. And we've also set aside plenty of time today for questions and answers for you, so we'll get to as many of those as we can. Let's go ahead and turn now to my colleague Karen Shuckman, who's a senior lecturer in the online geospatial education program here at Penn State. Karen was formerly a consultant to the URS Corporation in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and when she was geospatial technology leader there in 2005 and 2006, she supported response recovery and mitigation projects with FEMA following Hurricane Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. She's been past president, or she is past president of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, former vice chair of NOAA's advisory committee on commercial remote sensing, and is a member of the National Research Council committees on floodplain mapping technologies and FEMA flood map accuracy. Karen's a real expert in the field, and I look forward to what she has to say today. Welcome, Karen. Thanks, Wes, and I just want to thank everyone who's participating. It's amazing to see such global participation. And thank Nora and Wes for helping us through the preparation for this, all their guidance was really helpful. So when we're talking about remote sensing in the geospatial profession, most people immediately think of imagery that would be either collected from a satellite or some form of an aircraft. Another type of important remote sensing data is elevation or terrain. Historically, elevation data was created using overlapping or stereo imagery using photogrammetry. And this is still being done today using digital aerial cameras and high resolution satellite imagery. Many of you have heard of LIDAR, which is a laser scanning system, which effectively paints the ground with 100,000 or more individual elevation measurements every second. LIDAR is currently the preferred method for collecting high resolution and high accuracy elevation data. Radar, or more precisely, interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or IFSAR, can be used effectively in cloudy or remote areas of the world where aerial photography and LIDAR are difficult to collect. And some of you may have heard of the shuttle radar topography mission SRTM. SRTM mapped most of the land surface of the Earth at a medium resolution and accuracy. Remote sensing also includes extraction of higher level information from imagery and elevation data. The examples shown here are land cover maps. The one on the upper left was produced for the United States from Landsat data and is given to many users in environmental disciplines. The one on the lower right was produced with a combination of hyperspectral and LIDAR data to identify potential wetlands for environmental permitting of a planned transportation corridor. Here on the upper left you can see watersheds and streams that have been delineated from elevation data using GIS. This type of product is used in hydrologic studies from water quality to floodplain mapping. On the lower right you can see radar elevation data creating a textured backdrop for a detailed topographic map. Why is remote sensing important? Many GIS layers originate with remotely sensed data. This is an example of a prototype web-based infrastructure management tool for the Port of Tampa. Remote sensing data you can see on the left was used to derive highly detailed, accurately placed 3D buildings, tanks, and other port facilities. The 3D buildings were then tied to a database which can be updated in real time with information about what is stored in each building, who owns it, where it has come from, and where it is going. All of this remote sensing GIS and database information is accessible through a web interface for port management and security. Remote sensing is often the fastest way to gain situational awareness as an event unfolds. LiDAR and thermal imagery were flown daily over the World Trade Center site after 9-11 to provide emergency responders with critical information, including the location and volume of debris, and to make temperature measurements across the surface of the disaster site. On the right, this image of tornado damage is worth a thousand map symbols in terms of understanding the conditions on the ground and the extent of devastation. Web applications like Google Earth, MapQuest, and Bing have brought the most basic capabilities of remote sensing into the public consciousness. Because of these tools, many of us can easily merge imagery with terrain, zooming, panning, and even rotating to street-level views. But notice in this example from Google Earth that the stadium structure is not accurately represented in a street-level view. At this point, one should be asking some simple questions about this imagery and data. Where did it come from? How current is it? How accurate is it? What information does it actually contain, and how can we appropriately use that information? The answers to these questions are not immediately obvious to the man on the street who can access Google Earth, but every geospatial professional should be able to respond to these questions correctly. For example, what if you were planning security for the London Olympics? In addition to the views provided by Google Earth, you might also want to see the sides of the buildings, the doors and the windows, and so on. You might want to measure the height and width of these openings and calculate line of sight from key locations in the facility. So here we can see oblique aerial photography accurately georeferenced and brought in over the web to ArcGIS using a third-party extension from pictometry. Or what if you were trying to predict global commodity prices and wanted to know what crop yields are expected this year in Russia? You would want to see large extensive land at medium resolution, perhaps using specific spectral bands, to enhance the interpretability of crop status and health. These are views created from Landsat data displayed with different band combinations in ArcGIS. Or if you were interested in the impacts of a new highway, you might need a time series of imagery that has sufficient spatial resolution to see detailed features of both the roadway and the surrounding communities. And as a final example, high-resolution imagery, elevation data, and engineering flood studies are brought together to produce digital flood insurance rate maps. D-farms are the planning tool used by FEMA and local floodplain managers to guide community development, determine flood insurance premiums, and plan response to future storms. Imagery and terrain provide a view of the world that is so intuitively simple that it's easy to take for granted. This looks like a simple photograph, but it is actually created from a detailed elevation model overlaid with satellite imagery. Imagery and elevation data like these are fundamental components of most GIS projects today. And there are many ways to manipulate and analyze these data to meet a specific purpose. But what knowledge and technical skillset do you, as a GIS professional, need in order to be able to create the right view for your application? In addition, today's geospatial professional needs a lot more than just a basic level of competency in remote sensing to maintain future job security and plan a meaningful career path. Remote sensing technologies and applications are evolving at a lightning pace, and the emerging trends include accessing and analyzing remote sense data from the cloud, interactively manipulating 3D LiDAR points, as Mike Brinslow will discuss in a moment. Dr. Jay Parish will talk about the use of spectral content outside the visible bands to discover things that can't be seen by the human eye. In addition, many sensors are now being miniaturized and deployed on remotely piloted platforms internationally and domestically. And finally, as with many other forms of GIS data, crowdsourcing of remote sensing will likely become an important form of geospatial intelligence in the future. So with that, I'll pass back to Wes. Thanks, Karen. And with that useful and yet kind of a hefty load of information there, we kind of want to ask the audience to take a deep breath, and we're going to turn to poll number two and ask, how comfortable do you feel with these emerging trends? And we'd like you to kind of put yourself somewhere on the scale. So Nora, if you'll turn on poll number two. You bet. Folks, do you feel like you're already an expert? You have some exposure, but maybe need more. You know, enough to be dangerous. Or we like to throw a funny one in there. Dude, these trends are freaking me out. Perhaps something else we haven't listed there. So I'll let Nora go ahead and observe the poll and let us know when folks are signing in. Yeah. And you guys are voting quickly. And I think that you guys are going to be kind of surprised at the results here. Maybe you'll be surprised or maybe you won't be surprised. I'll be interested to see what people think. But it looks like the voting is starting to level off again. So I'm just going to give this maybe another five seconds. But we have almost all of you have voted. So if you haven't voted yet, please do go ahead and register your vote. And I guess I'll go ahead and close it and share the results. Okay. So 60% of you have exposure, but need more. And I love that 22% of you know enough to be dangerous. And 11% of you are in the dude, these trends are freaking me out category. We've got 5% of you who are experts and 4% of you have some other category that applies to you. Wes? It sounds like we've got the right audience here today, Nora. That's for sure. This is definitely good for, you know, you've dabbled but you need to know more. So I'm going to go ahead and hide that one, Wes, and we can go ahead and keep going. Okay. Well, I'm going to introduce Mike Renslow next. And this begins the portion of the presentation today where we're going to look a little deeper into three of the kind of technological themes and how we at Penn State have addressed those themes with particular courses and particular curriculum. So Mike is a senior lecturer here and worked with Karen actually on developing the course specifically on LiDAR. Mike is also a past president of ASPRS, a member of the ISPRS Council, and he happens to be the editor in chief for the upcoming ASPRS LiDAR manual to be published in November. So Mike, I look forward to hearing about emerging trends in LiDAR and a little bit about how you take a look at those in your LiDAR course. You know, thanks a lot, Wes, and welcome to everyone that's participating in our webinar today. I'd like to introduce three emerging technologies that, in my view, are having an impact on remote sensing and the geospatial sciences in general. The first one of those that I'd like to talk about this morning is full wave form LiDAR. Basically, I think everyone knows that LiDAR pulses are columns of electromagnetic energy. And there's a wave form of that energy that occurs. And as the diagram on the right-hand side of the figures show, the wave forms easily can be observed as it travels through the vegetation. It's been easy to capture the data. It's been difficult to process the data. So for that reason, the manufacturers of LiDAR system have provided filters to separate discrete returns, which all of us are pretty familiar with as you see in the diagram on the left-hand side. Well, in the last couple of years, the software has developed, and the processing of these very, very large data sets is now available. And there are some really interesting applications. The first application that I'd like to introduce to you is being able to use the wave form LiDAR to create very, very, very dense point clouds. In this case, it's of a forest. And visually, you can see the shape of the trees. You can see the understory if there's a riparian component and also the bare earth. So the wave form LiDAR has allowed you to observe all of these. Well, with that now, you can do complete mapping and measurement of forest land cover and understory. What does that mean? Well, if you're a forester, it means you can measure height very accurately, and you can compute volume analysis and other kinds of measurements in forest land. If you're a biologist, you can also measure and you can map habitat. And if you're a fuels expert, it gives you the data that you need to measure, for example, the live crown and model fire behavior. Another really useful example of full wave form LiDAR is to use this technology in identifying airport obstruction surveys. But we have in the figure here is a simulated approach into an airport. As you can see in the lower part of the diagram, there is vegetation penetrating into the flight path. Well, with full wave form LiDAR, you can identify those obstructions and also identify very subtle features, features like communication towers and antennas. So full wave form LiDAR is offering a surreal opportunity to do some very accurate and complete mapping. Another new technology I'd like to introduce you to is called flash LiDAR. I think everyone is familiar with what a CCD array looks like on a camera. This is basically an array of LiDAR sensors. The figure on the right hand side shows an array of 127 by 127 LiDAR sensors. Well, what that means, every time this system flashes, you get over 16,000 LiDAR pulses. It can, using one nanosecond pulses, fire at 30 times per second. The simple math will give you nearly half a million pulses per second from a flash LiDAR system. The result is you get a very dense point cloud with LiDAR intensity data. Keep in mind that there are no moving parts. This is quite portable. As the image on the bottom of the diagram shows, they're about as big as a shoebox. And because of the nature of this technology, it can be processed in near real time for development of products for both two-dimensional and three-dimensional spatial data. This application shows that in a real-time 3D mapping combination of flash LiDAR with a video cam, taking, flying in a UAS, capturing 3D stereo imagery with flash LiDAR data, merging it into a three-dimensional visualization. Well, for examples like reconnaissance, change detection, and disaster response, this is incredibly useful. Another application is using flash LiDAR to map power line corridors. Power line corridors are a very valuable asset to providing power throughout North America and around the world. It's possible with a flash LiDAR system to capture about 1,000 miles in a day. That's normal production and be able to very quickly visualize and model and measure terrain, power line height, power line sag, vegetation hazards. Another technology I'd like to introduce you to is mobile mapping systems. During the last two to three years, mobile mapping systems have become very commonplace. Basically, it's capturing geospatial data from a moving vehicle, combining the technologies of LiDAR, imaging systems, frame grabbers and videos, GPS and inertial data, and being able to generate survey quality data quickly and safely. The image on the top of the figure shows the links to sophisticated system incorporating LiDAR GPS in the video. The image on the bottom is the Google car with a high-performance rotary camera that basically these systems are designed to provide corridor mapping capability. Well, one application that has become extremely useful for mobile mapping systems is complex areas, complex corridors. In this case, you're looking at a light rail system. It's quite easy to visualize and measure the tracks, physical conditions, all of the infrastructure, vegetation, signage. It can be done any time of the day, and in this case it was done at night. The result is a very complete, much more accurate data set than traditional mapping methods. The last technology I'd like to continue on with is mobile mapping systems is being able to extract engineering measurements. Now, what this figure is, it's a pedestrian bridge over a freeway that was recently built in the Portland, Oregon area. What you can see that was done is the roadway was driven with a mobile mapping system and from it exact measurements were derived actually to within a hundredth of a foot of the clearance between the road surface and the pedestrian bridge. This is required for safety purposes. I also want to point out that in this case, you're not looking at any imagery. What you're looking at is a synthetically colorized point cloud that was made totally from LiDAR. There was no imagery involved with this. While you're looking at that though and seeing these applications and these new technologies, I'd like to say a few comments about the Penn State curriculum and I'll focus on the LiDAR course, and Karen alluded to this a little bit also. In the first part of our LiDAR course, we introduced the students to LiDAR. What's important is in the context of LiDAR, we talk about mapping processes and standards, provides state-of-the-art software, student licenses for all the students so they can get a good basic understanding of how LiDAR fits into the mapping and the geospatial sciences. The last half of the course though focuses on real world applications and we've developed a series of lab exercises in addition to reading materials that really focus on practical applications that people will use in their work. So the first one, for example, is the digital elevation module. We basically introduced the basic techniques of LiDAR data and generation of digital elevation models, but also introduced break lines and hydro flattening for floodplain management. We then also offer a segment on forestry mapping where you can actually measure trees and do an estimation in biomass. We offer another module on mobile mapping systems so that the students can actually visualize and work with mobile mapping data. These are good examples in these application sections as to what the practitioners are really doing in the real world with LiDAR data. With that, we'll turn it back to Wes. Thanks a lot, Mike. I appreciate hearing about the LiDAR course and we're going to hear about a couple more courses as well. I'd like to welcome Dr. Jay Parish to the webinar. He's a professor of practice here in the online geospatial education program. Prior to coming to Penn State, Jay was the state geologist for Pennsylvania and director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Pop Graphic and Geological Survey for over nine years. He's a national geospatial advisory committee member, currently a member of the National Digital Elevation Program, has his PhD in geophysics actually from Penn State as well, and has a particular interest in geobotanical remote sensing. Welcome. Well, thank you very much, Wes. It's a pleasure to be here. Let me tell you about two courses that we are offering. The first is the GEO UAS course, which involves unmanned aerial systems. You may have referred to them as UASs, UADs, or drones. It's obviously going to be a very large industry in the near future in the billions of dollars. The FAA is ruling on what the usage will be and what kind of policies will be in place for the usage in the next few years. And these things can range in size from something in their hands to something really large and from something hundreds of dollars to tens of millions of dollars. The types can be face-to-face blimps, nanocopters, octocopters, any variety of those things. And the applications are that they can go where humans can't. They can go into small spaces where there's natural disasters, toxic environments. Places are just not possible to fly. And they're also good for small areas. It wouldn't be cost-effective to fly with a fixed plane, perhaps. We'll be looking at some of the ethics and legal issues involved with this. Airspace access, privacy, data sharing. Exactly who has access to the data and who has the right to fly around and look around with these very small systems. Or even if they're large ones. One of the class activities we'll be doing is a flight simulator of the UAS. We'll be able to take off, fly a mission, come back, and look at the imagery we've collected, all done digitally in the virtual sense. And we'll be working on a class model for proposed rules for usage, since these rules have not yet been published. It might be interesting for us to say what would be the feedback option. One of the other things we'll be looking at is the emerging trends in remote sensing. There's two books we'll be using that because it's a slightly different course. We learned how to think about image interpretation and processing, not just out of doing it. And the two books are one is the Slice of Mind, which is on neuroscience of magic. The other is La Bella Principessa, which is about a Leonardo da Vinci talk drawing. So we applied some of the things we learned in that into remote sensing and image processing. But we'll do traditional things as well. For instance, we'll do thermal imagery, looking at astrodata and depth value, we'll be doing geologic mapping using ratio and bands, multi-polarization with VR, the land cover mapping, which allows you to look at orientation of trees and moisture and texture and a lot of other kinds of information you wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain. Now, looking at some of the issues of ethics, the satellite sentinel project, using data to predict where violence may occur, and then we're talking about responsibility to warm versus just to inform and what kind of ethical considerations are there with that. We'll also be looking at the Jingu River in Brazil with an environmental problem there. Turning to the art part, let's take an example of a Rembrandt self-portrait in Washington, D.C. As you can see, he put a lot of effort and time into the face where we'd actually look and look at people and look in their eyes. And if you look down at his hands, he really just sort of swapped them on there. That's because we use high-resolution pixels in centerbar vision and a purple vision uses low-resolution pixels. So just as we do when we look at an image, we interpret things and chill in the detail around that, assuming that the low-resolution imagery is the same as the high-resolution imagery. It's kind of like what a pickpocket does with you. They distract you and let you interpret and fill in the detail where there isn't really actual detail there. That all holds true when we look at imagery and when we look at any kind of processing that we're doing. So it's a drawing that was bought for about $20,000 and is now valued at about $100 million because it's a DaVinci. And you would say, well, how did we know that? There's a number of the book details, the process they went through to try to authenticate it. One of the roots they took was multi-spectral examination of it. And you can get the spectra of all the pixels that make up each part of the drawing and see whether it's chalk or charcoal or ink or what part of it went into it. And that's really analogous to looking at hyper-spectral imagery. So you can look at the hyper-spectral imagery of the ground or you can look at the hyper-spectral imagery of a painting. It's the same idea, the same process. And the idea is that you want to learn how to do it and not be focused on the geography so much that you lose track of what exactly you're doing to the data. And so if you learn the techniques on data that isn't something that's well known to you, then perhaps you can focus more on the technique you're using than on the geography. Going on to the other geographic application we have is looking at the La Fonte map of Washington, D.C. And that is a map that is famous because it was created by, you know, the guy who laid out D.C. and Washington and Jefferson got to write on it and put annotations on it and pencil. And so what we do with it is analyze it as best we can with all the intuition we can pull out of it. So one of the things we do is look at the filtering out things in it. If you look at the grain of the paper you can filter out regular noise by transforming it into the wave number domain and then inverse transforming back into the spatial domain. And while you're in the wave number domain you can filter out regular noise and you can bring out things like water marks. Or you may notice that there's kind of two tones of orange here. One is the clouds. An example could be like a cloud. What I'm saying is that the glue that was painted on the map actually obscures part of the map. And it's a analogous to a cloud. And likewise you can look at enhancing pencil marks or you can look at a texture as I said before. All these things can be applied both to the map and to imagery in the real world. So with that I'm going to return it to Wes. Thanks Jay, and that's a really interesting spin on how we might use some aspacial techniques to better improve our spatial skills. I want to return to Karen who got us started. We've looked at three specific courses but Karen is going to come back and give us really an overview of the entire curriculum and how these courses fit together. So Karen, welcome back. Thanks Wes. Here can state we saw the need to develop a core curriculum in remote sensing to supplement our existing GIS offerings. So we based this remote sensing curriculum on two important documents. The first is the geospatial technology competency model developed by the Department of Labor to address workforce needs in the geospatial profession. The second is the geospatial analyst competency plan authored by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. We try to address the basic industry-wide technical competencies at the introductory level, analysis and modeling at the intermediate level, and emerging trends in our two graduate seminar courses. My personal mission and the reason I left industry to teach is to make sure that all geospatial professionals have some basic competency in the use of imagery and elevation data. My experience is that a lot of people know almost enough to be dangerous, but they often run into trouble with some fairly simple problems, often involving either geo-referencing, the size of the data sets themselves, understanding error and accuracy, and so on. So at the introductory level, we focus on imagery and elevation data base maps with hands-on exploration of display and analysis capabilities that are available in ArcGIS. At the intermediate level, we have two in-depth courses. The first covers image analysis, focusing on multispectral imagery in applications such as land cover and vegetation mapping. The second covers lidar in detail. Mike has talked about that, including sensor and platform design, processing lidar data, and using it in applications. In these two courses, students get a lot of hands-on experience with a number of commercial software packages, including PCI Geomatica, Pictometry, NV, LP360, QuickTerrain Modeler, and Mars. So our approach to teaching is to combine the theoretical knowledge with the hands-on experience that's critical for students when they're seeking employment. These software packages that we use are part of the art and industry, and we have worked in industry ourselves, have trained people in the workforce, understand what the needs are, and so we've designed the courses specifically to make sure that our students get that kind of valuable experience. Finally, Dr. Parish offers two graduate-level seminars covering more advanced image analysis and, as you heard, unmanned aerial systems, and he's talked about the seminar content in his presentation. You can find more information about our courses on the World Campus Remote Sensing webpage. We'll be showing you that URL in a few moments. Okay, Karen, thanks a lot. Well, we've given you a lot of information, and we always try to do that in these webinars. We hope it's the opening of a conversation with folks that are interested in curricular offerings we have here at Penn State. I'd like to turn, though, now to poll number three and just ask the audience. So based on what you've learned today, what do you think you need to do next? And please just choose one here. We'll have Nora go ahead and open the poll up. So is the next step for you to complete some kind of certificate or track in remote sensing? Maybe just take a course in remote sensing, perhaps introductory and immediate, depending upon your level. Dabble a bit on your own, do some research. Or EGAD, I don't even know what to do, or something else. Let's go ahead and take a minute, and Nora, keep me abreast of how those are coming. We're actually getting extremely strong activity on the poll and on all of the polls that we've had today. So definitely asking the right questions. And I do have questions coming in as well on the question interface. So please do feel free to keep those coming in. We will try to get to as many of those as we can. And oh my gosh, just again, almost everybody in the audience is voting on these. So I'll just give another two or three seconds. So if you haven't voted and would like to vote, please go ahead and do so. And okay, I'm going to go ahead and close it, and I'll share the results. And you know, a lot of people who want to date, a quarter of you want to take a certificate, 30% of you would like to take a course, a quarter of you are willing to strike out on your own, and we have that 6% who's in the eGADS mode. And 16% describe themselves in some other, being in some other mode. But what do you think, Wes? Well, I'd like to turn to one more topic before we get to folks' questions. And I think we'll have some thoughts on what folks should do next as well as I know some of the questions we've been getting as I've been watching the question groups are on the trends themselves. So we'll get to those in just a minute. Before we do, though, I want to turn to Mike Renslow one more time. One of the things that we really want to cover, we always want to make these webinars really kind of practically focused. And so we know folks are concerned about their place in the workforce, and are they prepared and are they competitive. And so Mike's going to speak to us for just a minute about certification in remote sensing and how that can be advantageous to your career. So welcome back, Mike. Hey, Wes, thanks a lot. I'm going to share with you a few comments about professional development and certification in the geospatial sciences. One question you may have right at the beginning is why do I need to become certified? Well, basically, certification and being certified is an opportunity to stand out from the rest of the folks in our field. The geospatial workforce is growing all around the world. And anything that you can do with your education or your training or your experience is important towards your career and your professional development. So I'd like to share with you a few comments about some of the existing certification programs that exist. The first one I'd like to mention is the certification program available from the American Society of Photogram and Remote Sensing. I'm pretty close to this program because I chair the committee for the society. But frankly, it's an older program. It's been around over 35 years. It initially began to certify folks that practiced in photogrammetry but has matured to the point now where it also provides a certification for both folks that specialize in remote sensing and are GIS practitioners. The certification program is developed for folks at both the professional level and the technologist level. And it's a time proven process that includes peer review, personal references and an examination. And one thing I wanted to spend a few extra moments about was talking about a special program that the society has developed for graduating students. It's possible that you've completed your education and you want to become certified but you need the required job experience. It's possible through the provisional certification program to go through the complete process without yet having the experience and becoming provisionally certified. And when your experience is completed then you become fully certified. And of course, if you participate in the curriculum and the course work at Penn State, you certainly can qualify with this program. There are a few other programs I'd like to share some comments with you. Many of you are familiar perhaps with the GIS certification institute who developed professional certification that was implemented in 2004 and there's approximately 5,000 professionally certified certified by GSCI. It's based on peer review and it's examination of your education, your experience and your contributions to the profession. Another one that is becoming quite an interesting certification process is the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. This basically is a review of the college course of Geointelligence Curriculum and Program and Providing and Accreditation. Penn State is one of a small group of universities that has the accreditation and possesses the certificate from USGIF. So when students graduate from the program, they receive a certificate from Penn State and also a certificate from USGIS. And this program is expanding the staff at Penn State and the faculty are very aware of this and we are very much involved with the process. And finally the University Consortium on USGIS has developing a program to assist higher learning institutions to develop a certification based on degree and non-degree training programs. With that, I'll turn it back to Wes. Thanks, Mike. I'll take just a minute to put some additional resources up. If anything, you might copy down that URL at the top of the page www.worldcampus.psu.edu slash rs and that'll get you directly to a landing page with the remote sensing curriculum and some of the specific issues we've covered today. We've also got the emails for our three faculty that have presented today. Promise you that in the follow-up email that Nora will send tomorrow, we'll have all this contact information along with the links to the website to the archive of the webinar today. But what we'd really like to do now is turn to your questions and I know they've been coming in. I'm going to go ahead and field the first question while we get some of the others queued up. One person asks, do you have an online undergrad program for GIS? I am sorry to say we currently do not offer an online undergrad program for GIS. The courses that we talk about today and in many of our webinar series offerings are primarily targeted towards folks that are post-baccalaureate after a bachelor's degree. I will say this though many of our courses have been developed and certainly some of the remote sensing courses fall into this category. We like to think of them as professional development and professional development really means different things to different people. Some folks just want to go out and learn the content and some folks want to advance in a particular vein of the industry. If you have an interest in one of the courses we've talked about today or really most of the courses in Penn State's online geospatial education program, please don't hesitate to contact us and we'll see if we can't find the right match for you. I know that we had a question early on and I'm going to try to pull that one up here. This one I'm going to turn to Karen first and perhaps Jay wants to comment as well. The first question is, is hyperspectral imaging and expanding science or declining and what they mean by that is, is it being replaced by other less expensive technologies that are just as good? Karen, do you want to take that first? Yeah, I would say it's definitely on the upswing. Hyperspectral remote sensing has been around for some time but the sensors were there were a few in number rather expensive the data is quite complex in its content and difficult to process. We've got much more capability to do that data processing on the desktop now with many software packages and so I would expect to see more use of hyperspectral data going forward as more people begin to understand how to make use of that again very complex data. Jay, anything you'd like to add to that comment? Did we lose Jay? I don't know, it looks like he might have lost audio temporarily I'll see if we can get him back Wes. Let's go ahead and move on to another question. Mike, I think I'm going to turn to you first on this one and perhaps Karen wants to comment as well. This one has to do with LiDAR and the question asks, has any mobile LiDAR mapping been used or developed for riparian areas and coastal communities? Well, as far as the riparian component there has been a couple of studies and they're documented in the literature where mobile mapping systems and also static LiDAR systems have been used in the forestry environment to create profiles and so the answer to that is yes although not very much. Now on the other issue though of the coastal areas, mobile mapping systems are used quite extensively at least in my experience on both coasts of the United States they are extremely useful for doing like sand dune mapping for example and on the east coast especially where they have major weather events for mapping change detection. On the west coast where I am the erosion factors on the west coast are really infringing upon a lot of urban development and so there's a very active program maybe through the state mapping department or the state geology department on being able to use mobile mapping systems for mapping the structure and the erosion factor and change detection and also taking the media of action. So yeah, the answer is yes to that. If I recall one of the first publicly disseminated studies or examples was the state of North Carolina did a whole lot of coastal mapping with LiDAR I seem to find that whenever I do a search on LiDAR but Karen anything you'd like to add to that? Yeah, I'll go back to the North Carolina example it was one of the first big applications of airborne LiDAR but they have gone ahead and used mobile mapping vehicle-based mobile mapping quite extensively to map all the coastal roadways to help more accurately predict inundation due to storm surge in the events of a hurricane and to planning evacuation so it's not really an environmental application but more of a transportation emergency response application but as with what as always true with remote sensing once that data is collected you can be sure that many people are going to find other applications for it than what was originally intended for the collection. I think you're definitely right there and just to kind of from my own experience you know I think most of the folks on the call know that I kind of focus more on the business and marketing and demographic aspects of GIS and one thing that I see now more and more is to joke in commercial real estate about going out and kicking the dirt and we kind of have this joke about scanning the dirt now because there's really so much you can do in terms of looking at site selection and site pads and that kind of thing you know in terms of remotely since data I always argue that there's nothing quite like walking a parking lot to get a sense of a store site but you see this again and again and again so I think you're right I think what happens is there's an application and then we multitask the data back again and the actual applications are really taking off. Let's see this one asks and I'm not sure who to point this to maybe start with Mike are there solutions for mobile mapping for the interior of buildings such as Street View to tour interior office properties? The answer is yes there's actually you know there are several documented applications now of using static light our systems to inventory the insides of buildings and there's actually a firm that called Urban Robotics that I'm familiar with that has developed an emerging technology with a sensor that actually can develop a as we would call it a flight path it can develop kind of a transportation path through a building and it can develop a 3D model of the building and the vehicle can travel through the building and go into the individual I don't think it can open the doors yet but it can go through the individual rooms and actually create a three-dimensional model of everything that is in that room using imagery and a LiDAR system so yeah having that that total GIS for the insides of structures you know is historically been a pretty difficult process and of course to do it manually is almost cost prohibitive that technology is coming yeah the answer is yes we can almost even imagine in this era of moving into big data and real time sensing you can imagine LiDAR you know flashlight are being used inside of a warehouse for instance track the positioning of certain inventories or whatever so almost you know the converse of what Karen was showing us early on I would like to turn because we've got some real specific questions about courses and I'd like to take a few moments to hit a couple of those if we can so one of the questions and I touched on this already but I'll turn to Karen with this one is it possible to take individual courses such as LiDAR online without taking the entire certificate the answer to that is definitely yes in fact the LiDAR course was one of the first courses that we developed with the intention of people being able to take it as a single educational experience I do encourage students to look at the course website which is PennStateLiDAR.com and look you can see a lot of the course content there it's publicly available we have a little self assessment quiz that we ask people to take because there is the assumption if you take this course you're fairly familiar with a lot of basic geospatial concepts and you have some capabilities particularly with ArcGIS so I would tell people look at that website and look also at the website for the intro course to see kind of where your level of expertise and preparation is thank you Karen I'm going to take this next question this is a more advanced education question so one person asks I have a bachelor's in geography but often think of returning for a masters in GIS or remote sensing which would be more beneficial and I'm actually not sure if there's a masters of remote sensing out there but Karen maybe you and Mike and I don't know if we've got Jay back if you guys want to take a moment and kind of characterize advanced education in remote sensing as it relates to GIS let's start with Karen I think the answer to the question really has a lot to do with what this person's personal goals are I would say incorporating remote sensing having courses in remote sensing in conjunction with a larger geospatial program like a masters of GIS would be advantageous I think that it's important to see remote sensing in a greater geospatial context and so that having other kinds of courses that relate to project management different kinds of spatial analysis complemented by a strong curriculum in remote sensing would really be beneficial I think some of the typical historically the more typical masters in remote sensing is very focused on a very higher level but more specific application more scientific applications of image analysis for example we got Jay back Jay do you want to pick up on that notion of a masters in remote sensing well actually I'm biased but I've always enjoyed remote sensing and I think it's the basis for GIS most of the data that you use in GIS starts out as some kind of imagery data but it's a fascinating field and so it really depends upon what you want to do and what excites you I'm personally thrilled by imagery and so for me it's in the brain to say oh I'd rather people went into masters of remote sensing but it has the potential to grow and technology change and it's a very large field that's just constantly coming up with new things and so I think from that point of view it's an exciting area to go thanks thanks a lot and I think we've got a couple of kind of corollary but slightly different positions there and that's interesting so I guess what I would add to that is talk to some programs and find out what they say you know contact faculty in given masters programs and have a conversation many faculty are actually quite happy to have a conversation with prospective students this one's a little different question go ahead I would also encourage people to look at the ASPRS remote sensing industry forecast that you can find on the ASPRS website because this is an extensive study that's been going on for quite a number of years now and outlining what the potential growth areas are and what the workforce development needs are related to remote sensing so that's a very good resource for people to check out and we did include that in the invite but I'll ask Nora to go ahead and include that in the thank you note that we follow up with I want to get to at least one more question and then I think folks will start to drop off here because we're at the top of the hour and I'll let Nora let us know if we can continue with a couple more questions since we've got so many one person asked how can I refresh my education in GIS and remote sensing without taking full courses anybody have an answer to that I guess I would remind people about that let's get Mike sorry Mike go ahead there are a lot of opportunities I mean you're attending a webinar right now which gives you kind of an overview of some of the things going on in the field of remote sensing and geospatial sciences but professional associations offer some excellent meetings and workshops some of those are actually offered in a web format also so admittedly a lot of folks just can't make the time to take a course so they have to be constantly doing something but you can time your schedule in such a way that you can attend a lot of these workshops or take webinars and you know I'm very familiar with the ASPRS Webinar program and it offers state-of-the-art education for geospatial sciences so I would recommend that they take a look at those opportunities Nora did I get to go ahead from you that we could go for another couple minutes definitely go for it I feel like we've got about 170 people still hanging on with us a lot of questions so for those of you that need to hop off I want to say thank you on behalf of Penn State and on behalf of Nora and Directions Media and then for those of you that didn't get your question answered we'll try to get to a couple more here before we close out the webinar today there's one that I'm dying to get to and I think we'll start with Jay on this one and that is can any of the speakers comment on the public's concerns with privacy and how we might allay their fears as we use this technology for the public's benefit and Jay I know you're kind of engaging with that notion in one of your courses what's your thinking there well it's a great question we definitely have a tremendous increase in the capability to invade your privacy and how we make use of that data is really something that comes to back to both the policy issue and the technical issue but you as a person who's involved in this as a student or a professional are involved in that whole mix and there's several ways to look at it I think one of the more interesting solutions I saw was that if you have a lot of UAS is flying around your neighborhood and you're concerned about people invading your privacy what if the rule were that all data collected from a UAS for a public so essentially everybody knew who was looking and what they were looking at and there was nobody who had the information that wasn't secret that was secret anyway but it was always completely free and out there that's an intriguing possibility to me because I think the total transparency might alleviate some of that concern that people have about privacy there are many things that we didn't pass that said oh that would be an invasion of privacy but over time technology has made it such that we readily accept it for one thing we have here photos of our back yard now and nobody thinks anything that's not too long ago people are outraged that they were here photos Thanks Jay, Mike do you want to say anything in that regard? I guess I can only agree with what Jay said it's true 10 years ago having one fourth of a foot image resolution of the city you live in would have caused a lot of concern among people about privacy issues but today it's normal even though most of the world doesn't realize that they're using remote sensing they are I mean they have all sorts of devices that allow them to observe and in some cases even manage the data to extract different kinds of information and they use it all the time you know so I do think though in the larger picture even though the data is available it's how the data gets used is where it starts to become an issue with privacy so I think in general the public has accepted the fact that we live in a world where there's a lot of information available Yeah Karen I'd like to turn to you for a different question and maybe we'll do this one and one more and I think we don't want to take up too much of folks time but I thought this was a good one and it kind of touches back on the software that you discussed that some of the courses engage the students with so this question reads do you know of any educational institutions or software companies example and I'm not going to get this right, Excelistis or NV on the job training I want to continue my learning my employer is willing to support for the remote sensing exploration should they take a course with us or should they go for the on the job training or how does this work Again I think it's it kind of depends on the person's personal situation a lot of the software manufacturers offer training webinars and so on and I for one also make use to keep myself current with software such as NV and so on I think the difference between taking the vendor training and taking a course like the ones we offer we tend to give quite a bit more theoretical background in sort of you know how does this work how do the sensors work what is the software actually doing where the software training from the vendor is usually more about some people call it learning the buttonology like which buttons do I press and where are the tools but I think they don't always have time to go into the background about what is actually happening so in our courses we try to use the software as a means of demonstrating principles and concepts not just giving software training I think that's a fair answer and I can speak from other courses in the program I think that's students who graduate from the Penn State program or take courses with us certainly feel that way maybe this we can make our last question unless anybody has anything else they want to say Mike I think I'll give this one to you I think it's a pretty easy one we'll see folks want to know would certification be recognized throughout the world or only for the US I think we're talking about the ASPRS the ASPRS program is an international program we actually have I just looked at the statistics recently and we have about 80 individuals that are certified outside the United States and Canada and a membership in ASPRS is not required to be certified so the answer is yes an international program well thanks and I don't want to take up too much of folks time I appreciate those of you we still got 133 in the audience hanging on with us really really robust discussion today and a lot of great questions answered do any of our panelists have any last things they want to say before I say thank you and hand it back to Nora I think that's a no on behalf of Penn State in this wonderful 8th episode in the inside geospatial education and research series I'm really glad you joined us today Nora thanks from Penn State to Directions Media and please take us out thanks to the speakers thanks for everybody who joined up I wanted to mention to the audience you know we did have a lot of questions we didn't even scratch the surface but our panelists did put their emails up there and they put them up there I double-checked with them they really do want you to interact with them and so please do follow up on questions that didn't get answered and anyway so yeah let's go ahead and wrap up Wes since we did take a little bit of extra time so thanks again everybody for coming and be sure to tell a friend about Directions Magazine and we'll see you the next time thanks everybody