Tools like lidar, laser scanning, photogrammetry, remote sensing, reality capture, machine learning, and AI are
constantly evolving – and Geo Week’s conference program keeps you on the cutting-edge!
From using emerging technologies to solve problems, to taking on large scale, complex infrastructure projects, to embracing digitalization – geospatial, 3D and built world technologies are changing the game. That’s why conference content at Geo Week is designed to share new workflows, explore the latest tools, and provide insights on overcoming real-word challenges: everything you need to continue to drive the industry forward.
Discover the latest airborne sensors, workflows, and case studies to deliver faster, more accurate mapping projects.
Learn from colleagues and peers who are maintaining accuracy, safety and cost savings in critical infrastructure where it matters most.
Gain insights into cutting-edge hardware, software, and workflows that streamline data capture and delivery.
Explore tools and techniques for capturing precise 3D data that drives efficiency from construction to long-term asset management.
See how geospatial innovations help projects stay on schedule, on budget, and aligned with stakeholder expectations.
Learn how to make the right technology choices to grow your business, improve deliverables, and connect with peers facing the same challenges.
Sample sessions. Full schedule and speakers will be announced soon!
Land mobile mapping systems have become a powerful way to capture high-precision spatial data at scale, but getting reliable results depends on how well the underlying technologies work together. This panel session explores the practical realities of modern LMMS operations, focusing on the seamless integration of lidar, cameras, GNSS, and IMU into a single workflow. Panelists will walk through the full arc of a mapping project, from initial data capture to final map production, sharing best practices and hard-won lessons along the way.
Airborne lidar has become a foundational tool for mapping rivers, coastlines, and other aquatic environments, but complex water conditions and fragmented workflows often keep these datasets from reaching their full potential. This session explores how tighter integration across the mapping pipeline unlocks higher-value, higher-confidence results. Presenters will look at how pairing complementary sensors improves coverage across both topographic and submerged features, how smarter processing sharpens surface classification and bottom detection, and how independent truth data supports rigorous validation and calibration in demanding field conditions.
While the geospatial community has long discussed the challenges of workforce development, the time for high-level conversation has passed. This interactive session moves beyond identifying problems to providing concrete, actionable solutions for professionals at every level. Drawing on the latest data from a new industry report, we will examine current workforce scenarios and provide direct guidance tailored to your role.
Rivers and coastlines are where mapping technologies tend to run out of room. Water clarity, depth, turbidity, substrate and channel morphology all change what a sensor can see, and they change it from one reach to the next. Getting a seamless surface across the land and water interface usually means combining methods rather than trusting one.
This session covers four approaches to that problem. Speakers address topobathymetric lidar paired with sonar to recover deep channel geometry for river restoration design, an accuracy assessment of airborne bathymetric lidar flown over inland rivers where vertical performance varies with clarity and bottom reflectivity, an independent operational account of a new coastal mapping system across a growing project portfolio, and a multi-project look at how riverine topobathymetric lidar has matured and where it still struggles. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of which method to reach for, and what to expect from each when conditions are less than ideal.
Most drone programs stop at the deliverable. The orthomosaic gets produced, the point cloud gets handed off, and the flight is closed out. This session looks at four teams that carried drone data further than that, and at what it took to get there.
Speakers cover both sides of the question. On the platform side, how range, payload capacity and reliable BVLOS operations change what a single mission can cover. On the application side, immersive 360 inspection, subsurface sensing paired with aerial capture, and the use of drone-derived data to inform design decisions from the outset. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of how far drone data can travel downstream in their own workflows, and where the practical limits sit.
Utah is growing fast, drying out, and sitting on mineral resources the country suddenly wants. The agencies that manage the state’s land, water and wildlife are the ones expected to say what that means, and the answers depend entirely on the quality of the data underneath them.
This session brings together four Utah agencies doing that work. Speakers cover statewide water planning and conservation modeling, the first authoritative inventory of the state’s significant mine waste features, thermal UAV surveys that track subsurface coal seam fires before they ignite something above ground, and the rebuild of hundreds of siloed datasets into a standardized cloud ecosystem. Alongside the technical work, speakers address the realities of public sector geospatial practice, including limited budgets, legacy records, accuracy standards that public data has to meet, and keeping a small team functional under heavy demand.
Transportation agencies have more corridor data than ever, much of it collected for a single as-built deliverable and then left in storage. The four projects in this session all start from that data and push it into engineering use.
Speakers cover clearance and clash detection built from rail point clouds, a century-old SEPTA transit line surveyed while third-rail service continued, a survey-grade digital twin of FDOT SunTrax autonomous vehicle testing facility assembled from multiple sensor platforms, and AI-assisted defect detection on an Ohio DOT bridge. Across all four, the technical work sits alongside the practical constraints of live operations, restricted access and the accuracy standards that engineering decisions require. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of what existing capture data can support well beyond its original scope.
Scanning a building is the easy part. Turning that data into a model that coordinates disciplines, survives handover and stays current is where AEC projects lose time and money.
This session follows four points along that path. It opens with the standards themselves, and what is missing from the way existing conditions documentation gets specified, since deliverables that technically meet spec still miss expectations and leave contractors with models they cannot trust. From there, practitioners weigh how to choose among handheld, 360, UAS, mobile and terrestrial capture for a given project, and what it costs when the choice is wrong. AI point cloud segmentation then takes on the manual modeling bottleneck, feeding scan to BIM, quantity takeoff and facility management from a single dataset. The hour closes with a million square foot project delivered across 18 working models and more than 1,500 sheets, and the point at which BIM as a primary deliverable started working against the team. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of which steps can be automated, which cannot, and where the workflow tends to fail.
Geospatial professionals routinely produce data that supports engineering decisions, regulatory actions, construction claims, environmental analysis, asset management, accident investigations, and litigation. From the combined perspective of a general counsel and practicing hydrographic and mapping discipline lead, this session will examine what makes a point cloud, orthomosaic, surface model, or digital twin defensible when its accuracy, completeness, methodology, or intended use is questioned. A visually compelling product is not necessarily reliable, complete, or supportable. Its defensibility depends on whether the project team can explain what was measured, how it was measured, how the data were processed, where professional judgment was applied, and what the final deliverable does and does not represent.
This session will show how geospatial professionals can build that defensibility into their workflows from acquisition through final delivery. Inland hydrographic surveying will serve as a demanding case study. Rivers and reservoirs often require the integration of sonar, topographic and topobathymetric lidar, orthoimagery, terrestrial scanning, SLAM, conventional survey observations, water-level records, field photographs, and other sources collected under changing environmental conditions. These projects illustrate the challenges that arise when datasets differ in timing, accuracy, density, coverage, observability, and intended use. The presentation will address the records and practices that make geospatial data understandable, traceable, and supportable when challenged.
Topics will include control and datum documentation, calibration and system checks, accuracy testing, acquisition and environmental conditions, preservation of raw data, processing lineage, software versions, manual edits, classification decisions, exclusions, interpolation, file naming, version control, and identification of the authoritative deliverable. Particular attention will be given to distinguishing directly measured information from data that are inferred, interpolated, classified, or unobserved. The session will also examine the growing role of artificial intelligence and automated processing in geospatial production. Machine learning can classify point clouds, extract features, identify objects, detect change, generate surfaces, flag anomalies, and assist with quality control. These tools can improve efficiency, but they also raise questions about training data, validation, human review, reproducibility, confidence, bias, and responsibility for automated conclusions. Practitioners should be prepared to explain not only what an AI-assisted workflow produced, but also how the result was reviewed, validated, and determined to be reliable for its intended use.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for creating geospatial data that is defensible by design. The objective is not to prepare every project for the witness stand, but to produce data that clients, engineers, regulators, owners, and future users can understand, evaluate, reproduce, and trust.
Every surveying and reality capture firm eventually reaches the point where demand exceeds internal production capacity. The question is no longer whether more work is coming, but how to deliver it without compromising quality, increasing overhead, or creating operational bottlenecks.Outsourcing is often presented as the obvious answer, yet many firms have a disappointing first experience. In most cases, the problem is not outsourcing itself but poor timing, unrealistic expectations, and the absence of well-defined workflows. This presentation explores the four key reasons why outsourcing can help surveying firms grow, improve efficiency, and create additional production capacity. It also examines the one situation where outsourcing is likely to fail and why firms should avoid it until the right conditions are in place. Using real-world examples and practical lessons learned from supporting surveying companies across Europe and North America, attendees will gain a clear framework for deciding when outsourcing makes sense, what work should remain in-house, and how to build successful long-term production partnerships. This is not a session about selling outsourcing. It is about helping firms make better business decisions based on their own operational needs.
Utilities are maintaining aging networks under wildfire risk, extreme weather and regulatory pressure, usually with fragmented or outdated data and less field time than the problem deserves. This hour looks at what three organizations actually built to close that gap. Speakers cover high-altitude lidar flown to see risk across an entire network rather than sampled sections of it, an end to end geospatial workflow at a utility managing 70,000 square miles and 2.5 million distribution poles under a $73B investment program, and real-time visualization used to bring multidisciplinary teams to consensus on energy infrastructure design. Owner, service provider and technology perspectives on the same problem, each with its own constraints.
The GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) awards the GISP, the leading professional certification for GIS practitioners in the United States. Achieving the credential requires passing a rigorous exam, documenting at least four years of relevant experience, and signing a code of ethics. To support emerging professionals, GISCI—together with the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS)—has developed the PreGISP exam. This standardized assessment provides GIS students with an early credentialing opportunity that bridges academic study and professional certification, leading to the new GISP-E (Emerging GIS Professional) credential. For academic institutions, the PreGISP serves as a nationally recognized external assessment tool. For students, it offers early professional recognition and a clear pathway toward full GISP certification.
This session will present the PreGISP exam blueprint, based on an industry-aligned body of knowledge, and discuss how the exam integrates into diverse academic programs. The PreGISP program / GISP-E certification officially launched in Spring 2025. The GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) administers the GISP, the leading professional certification for GIS practitioners in the United States. To support students and emerging professionals, GISCI—along with the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS)—has developed the PreGISP exam. The PreGISP provides a standardized, early credentialing opportunity for GIS students that bridges academic study and professional certification, leading to the new GISP-E (Emerging GIS Professional) credential. For academic programs, it serves as a nationally recognized external assessment tool; for students, it offers early professional recognition and a clear pathway toward full GISP certification. This session will outline the development of the PreGISP exam blueprint, built around an industry-aligned body of knowledge, and highlight how educators can integrate the content into their curricula. The PreGISP and GISP-E program officially launch in Spring 2025.
The infrastructure demands of 2026—from AI-driven data centers to highway modernization—are outstripping the manual capacity of the existing surveying workforce. Mobile mapping and laser scanning are no longer an “innovative option”; they are a standard operating requirement. Leaving us with the question: How do we prepare the next generation of geospatial professionals to operate in this high-velocity, automated environment?
In this collaborative session, Trimble and Halff discuss the future of reality capture through the examples of two contrasting high-stake mobile mapping projects: a complex, multi-ramp TxDOT highway as-built in El Paso, and a massive 99-site municipal project in Arkansas. And while outlining how datasets transition into rapid digital deliveries, we’ll show that an entire project is far more accurate than most would think – proving that data density and smart processing outweigh raw per-shot conventional methods in overall project Route Mean Square Error (RMSE) accuracy. Additionally, we’ll explore the shift from focusing on “products” to focusing on “outcomes,” illustrating how visually-immersive environments, complex technical workflows and machine learning are changing the daily roles of the modern-lidar-surveyor. And yes, the role of the licensed professional remains secure! Why? Because automated data will always require human expertise to verify, validate, and prove accuracy to clients and courts. However, point clouds can be highly intimidating to younger and established professionals alike.
Let us share our story—developing a passion with Lidar technologies and finding deep career satisfaction in solving complex spatial problems that standard automation cannot easily replace.
Geo Week is proud to partner with professional development associations, including GISCI, to offer certificates of attendance to professionals seeking to keep up with their accreditation requirements. Attendees may request a certificate of attendance to submit to their associations. Geo Week does not guarantee credits but can provide proof of attendance to support obtaining credits. Please consult directly with your accreditation provider for information on qualifying credits.
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