Penrose Conference Days 1 and 2

So I meant to blog about the conference as I went along but I've found myself busy meeting up with lots of contacts and writing/editing my talk so I haven't found the time.

Day 1 Personal Highlights:

Declan De Paor and John Bailey welcomed us all, they and the rest of the organising team have put a ton of work into organising the event - John reckons he's written an average of 3 emails a day over the last year just about the conference.

Mano Marks talked about lots of new Geo things, the bit that most interested me was fusion tables and maps, I confess I've never understood what they're about but the key points to me about them are:

1. Cloud based and free
2. Built to handle lots of data
3. Limited spatial functionality now but more being built in the future
4. Can import shape files and export KML
5. You can build a web based interface with them so you could build a custom web page to query a given data set and visualize results on a map

Thanks to Christiaan Adams for helping explain them to me too.

Tina Ornduff described Google's approach to education. I think they are getting much more serious about it which is a welcome development.

Barb Tewksbury described using geological outcrops in arid countries to teach geological 3D interpretation, very smart. Paul Karabinos outlined using sketchup to teach 3D geology too.

Day 2 Personal Highlights:

I did the keynote on 'User First all else follows'. I've put slides and links on prezi but they won't make much sense if you weren't there as I haven't posted the videos and its designed for people who saw the talk. People have been very kind about what I was saying after the talk.

John Bailey and Sean Askey talked about creating tours, I was persuaded that tours generated from lines can be worth trying out.

Unfortunately I missed out on a number of talks and posters on day 2 as I was talking to colleagues about current/future projects.