Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about Mapping

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Saturday 10th March 2012

• The Building Blocks for Indoor Navigation

  by Ants Maran, Josh Marti, Ankit Agarwal, Nick Such and Chris Broadfoot

  The prevalence of location-based services has been rising over the past few years, but they have yet to venture into the place where people spend 80% of their lives: inside buildings. Startups and large corporations alike are racing to build the infrastructure to make indoor LBS possible. Hear from a few of the players in indoor mapping and indoor positioning technologies as they discuss the future of indoor navigation.

  • Buildings
  • Location
  • Mapping
  • Services

  At 11:00am to 12:00pm, Saturday 10th March

  In Salon J, Hilton Austin Downtown

  Coverage audio clip write-up

Sunday 11th March 2012

• Public Lab: Mapping, DIY Activism & Civic Science

  by Jennifer Hudon, Mathew Lippincott, Gregory Foster and Shannon Dosemagen

  Are you embroiled in an cartographic dispute? Do you disagree with the official version of your geography? Do you need a up-to-date map of your area of interest?From the BP Oil Spill to the Gowanus Canal Super Fund site, Grassroots Mapping and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science work to empower citizens around the world. Communities engage in citizen cartography and create aerial images with low-cost, DIY, open sourced technologies. This method of mapping creates on-demand imagery that’s 30 to 50 times higher resolution than what’s available via Google Maps. It allows people to document, to lobby and to enact change in their neighborhoods. The Public Laboratory community has expanded to organize projects around the world. Recently recognized with the award of $500,000 Knight Foundation grant, that work continues to expand. We’ll discuss the unique challenges and obstacles of scaling citizen science, IRL community development work, and online technology engagement.

  • Activism
  • Cartography
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Mapping

  At 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Sunday 11th March

  In Salon A, AT&T Conference Center

  Coverage audio clip

• Adapting New Technologies for Humanitarian Aid

  by Kate De Rivero, Ivan Gayton and Pablo Mayrgundter

  Responding to medical humanitarian crises is filled with a variety of obstacles. Constraints like limited time for aid workers, uneven staff education, lousy internet and mobile phone access, as well as the frantic pace of emergency response have made aid organizations reluctant to introduce technological innovations into their practice. This panel will explore how two international aid organizations collaborated with technology companies to adapt new technologies to field conditions. In on instance, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teamed up with Google on a spatial mapping project to better understand the cholera epidemic in Haiti in 2010. In another program, Women and Health Alliance (WAHA) are teaming up with the mobile phone carrier Expresso and Microsoft’s HealthVault in Senegal to adapt electronic medical record system to SMS. The discussion will address how the programs were implemented, how cultural differences were bridged, and what lessons were learned.

  • Crisis Response
  • Mapping

  At 3:30pm to 4:30pm, Sunday 11th March

  In Room 6AB, Austin Convention Center

  Coverage audio clip