GIS-Pro 2024

This week flew by! Hopefully you learned a lot and will leave Portland with a boatload of solutions and ideas and a professional network that will be your support system throughout your career.

URISA and AI: A Look at This Latest Round of Information Technology-Driven Change
URISA has always been an organization focused on harnessing emerging information technologies to improve urban and regional planning. Over the decades, the URISA community has responded to multiple waves of technology-driven change -from computerizing census records in the 1960s all the way to distributed computing and location-based services in recent years. In many ways, AI, and especially large language models and generative AI, are just another wave of new tech. In many ways, the impact of AI on the URISA community looks familiar, but there are some differences worth noting. The talk will compare what is happening now with the impacts of previous technologies in order to draw some conclusions about where we are, what to expect, and what to prioritize.

We are honored to feature Joe Ferreira (Professor at MIT and URISA Past President) and Katie Picchione (Response Coordination Lead at NASA) to discuss this important and ever-evolving topic.

Annual Business Meeting
Then stick around for some closing comments from the conference leadership and attend URISA's Annual Business Meeting. We talked about the NSDI on Tuesday and will bookend that discussion with an updated from URISA's Policy Advisory Committee. Learn about URISA accomplishments over the past year, Board actions taken, and exciting plans for the future. Meet the new members elected to the URISA Board.