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Geospatial FM

Geospatial FM

By: Wilfred Waters
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 Obsessed with geospatial foundation models, broadcasting in geospatial and compounding via publicly listed geospatial equities.Wilfred Waters Science
Episodes
  • RomoGIS on AI

    RomoGIS on AI
    Aug 12 2025

    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, gathering data for geospatial projects, and as a study aid by creating a quiz to help pass the Part 107 drone pilot license.


    Frank is a joy to talk with. He is such a breath of fresh air because of the concerted efforts he makes to be approachable to all. He dresses the part. It is deliberately memorable and contrasts strongly with typical office dress. He wears a bandana in some of the photos with students. As such, he brings an atmosphere of fun, informality and through this it is easier to generate engagement with students and adults alike regarding what can often be a dry subject - drawing maps with databases.


    In the first episode I recorded with him, he publicly displayed for the first time a dashboard about gun violence in The Bronx, created during a RomoGIS community organising effort. First episode.


    Frank gives us a masterclass in community organising. He just so happens to have geospatial capability also. He provides several fantastic examples of geospatial outputs and acquisition of political power by communities that he has served.


    The Bronx gun violence dashboard is here. We are once again seeing, in this subsequent episode with him, the first public display of another dashboard from further community organising efforts. This is a dashboard about A Decade of NYC Shootings (2015 - 2024). In Frank's own words:


    "This project transforms ten years of NYPD shooting incident data into an interactive app that reveals where gun violence has occurred in New York City between the years of 2015 to 2024. The data was processed by RomoGIS with data sourced from the NYC Open Data Portal. This app is designed to inform community safety initiatives and policy interventions as part of RomoGIS' GIS For Good Initiative to end Gun Violence (www.gisforgood.com, https://gunviolence-romogis.hub.arcgis.com/)."


    Frank is a leader. We are privileged to have his time.
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    38 mins
  • Floodmapp

    Floodmapp
    Aug 5 2025
    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 flood forecasting. This is about using live data feeds such as from measures of precipitation, flood gauges, earth observation to provide a more accurate, real time estimate of where inundation will occur. Due to these factors, it will be better than, for example in the US, FEMA's 100 year flood polygons from here.As such, she was able to give examples from the State of Queensland in Australia where the system was used by emergency responders to decide where to send door knocking crews and also rescue personnel. Products from the likes of First Street and Fathom will not be able to offer these real time directives on where to send first responders. This is because they are large scale risk models developed with variables like topography, climate and historical rainfall without real time data on rainfall in the moment. They cannot offer advice on where to evacuate people from, where emergency services should send boats and helicopters.We are privileged to hear from her as they are involved now in the Texas flood clean up. She emphasised that they offer services in forecasting, 'nowcasting' and 'postcasting'. It is of course helpful to have assistance in characterising the inundation extent after a flood. This helps with helping where to look for damage and the deceased, along with verifying the risk modelling work of the likes of FEMA, Fathom and First Street. But one is forced to wonder how things would have gone if this or a similar service was involved in forecasting and early warning system activation for the area around Camp Mystic in Texas.Speaking of which, it was good to have an expert like Juliette give her take on this viral post of mine in the moment as the implications of Camp Mystic spread across the internet. She had a simple directive - ‘by law … $USD8.7 billion has been spent just on [residential building] smoke alarms for fires… but what is the … investment in flood early warning systems? The economic damages from fire vs flood… it actually suggests that flood… is really far and above the cost … of fire. So I’d really like to see the expenditure on flood early warning systems reflect the risk. …if we’re investing this much on fire then we really need an alert system in every community where people are at risk’. Emphasis mine. The analysis I proposed above is happening now. I face a very steep learning curve on cloud native geospatial tooling such as Wherobots but I am making progress with the help of Matt Forrest, Ryan Kmetz and Piergiorgio Roveda. The output will be a nationwide identification of the communities at risk. I look forward to Juliette’s assessment of that analysis.
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    46 mins
  • Azure Maps

    Azure Maps
    Aug 1 2025

    Clemens Schotte is Senior Program Manager at Azure Maps. It is pronounced "Claymens SuHotte". Microsoft has a few geospatial offerings:


    1. 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.

    2. Microsoft Azure Maps is a cloud-based geospatial platform designed for developers to integrate real-time mapping, routing, and spatial analytics into enterprise and IoT applications. Code samples.

    3. Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro was released 2 months ago. It provides global-scale environmental datasets and analytical tools, tailored for scientific research and sustainability use cases, with deep integration into cloud-native workflows.


    It's nice to see a big tech monopolist has devoted some attention to our industry and is keeping up with the cloud native geospatial trend. Speaking of trends, we have a nice continuation here of the episode with Nelson Roque that kicked off the name change to Geospatial FM.


    This is because of a recent blog post about model context protocol (MCP) by Clemens. Why has a brain researcher's comments about what cognition is made me excited about MCP servers? They enable tool use and extraction of up to date data from APIs. This enables the AI to operate on data beyond what it was trained on. As stated in the recording, this is sounding suspiciously like multimodal real time data feeds.


    This is an aspect of organic organism cognition as described by Nelson. Something else that got my attention here is that Clemens mentioned introducing both short and long term memory, check the diagram here.


    As such, we have a nice demonstration in front of us about the kind of progress a Big Tech company is making at the cutting edge of our species effort to duplicate our reasoning capacity.


    Thanks Clemens!
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    37 mins
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