Geospatial technology is used in everything from intelligence gathering, to climate study, to self-driving cars -- even video games. The new head of the Taylor Geospatial Institute in St. Louis wants to see it used to benefit humanity in other ways.
Dr. Nadine Alameh says all of those things happening at one time in the same place is what brought her to St. Louis. "I think what's happening today, is that we finally have the technology and the tools to be able to leverage that location piece of every piece of information out there," she explained Monday on Total Information AM. The Taylor Geospatial Institute is a consortium of 8 research institutions led by St. Louis University.
Alameh comes to St. Louis from her most recent post as CEO and president of the Open Geospatial Consortium. She's also an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Interior’s National Geospatial Advisory Committee and a board member of the United Nations Geospatial Global Information Management Private Sector Network. She was the chief architect for innovation in Northrop Grumman’s Civil Solutions Unit and also senior technical advisor to NASA’s Applied Science Program.
Alameh tells KMOX, she wants to use her new position to accelerate geospatial technology. One example -- instead of just using geospatial information to allocate resources after a disaster, it could be used to predict a potential catastrophic event before it even happens. "I think that's one of my dreams. We have enough data where you can detect a mudslide before it even happens because you've collected satellite imagery for how long now? You see it happening, these are the geospatial patterns, and you raise the red flag."
She adds that St. Louis has the talent and institutions, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), to get geospatial technology to the next level.
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