All posts by Marc Delgado, PhD
The Next Big Thing
A string of high-profile bridge failures in recent years has underscored the importance of innovating the way we inspect and assess the condition of our vital civil infrastructure. Can the use of AI help prevent bridge collapses in the future? This award-winning engineer thinks so. The period spanning 1992 to 2014 could just be the...
Low-Code/No-Code Mapping
Location-aware apps can now be created with almost no coding expertise. Is this the next frontier in mobile GIS? When authorities at the Ara Hīkoi Aotearoa, New Zealand’s Walking Access Commission, needed to revamp the country’s web-based maps, they knew that they had to build a handy and more user-friendly alternative for their hiking patrons. ...
Out of Sight; Not Out of Mind
Cities are now creating their own subsurface utility maps to manage their underground assets. But the lack of an open-based geospatial model means that data are often not interoperable. A new mapping standard aims to fix that. In the years since 2004 when a leaking gas pipeline exploded in Ghislenghien, an industrial town in Belgium,...
How Green Is Your City?
As tree-planting efforts take root in cities around the world, urban managers turn to geospatial tools to map and monitor their community’s canopy cover. New Yorkers are fast walkers. But there are those who prefer to take it slow, like the group of well-trained volunteers who purposely roamed around the streets of the Big Apple,...
Watching Rotterdam (and More)
What are drones doing Inside Europe’s biggest ports? Doing what they do best, of course, which is to fly. After years of test flights, authorities at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands have given the go-signal to integrate UAVs in its operations, making it the first in Europe “to organize its own airspace...
Bridge Watchers
Smart sensors and satellites are being used to actively monitor bridges and large infrastructures. With eyes in the sky and ears on the ground, can this new technology improve public safety? Despite what the lyrics of the popular English nursery rhyme may have our young ones believe, the London Bridge has actually never fallen down. ...
