Winners of the Lidar Leader Awards, Younger Geospatial Professional of the Year, and ASPRS Awards to be celebrated at Geo Week, February 12 in Denver, CO
Denver, Colorado – USA, January 17, 2024 – Geo Week has announced a full lineup of distinguished professionals and leading organizations that will be recognized for geospatial excellence at this year’s Geo Week Awards Celebration, in partnership with LIDAR Magazine, Lidar News and ASPRS. Geo Week Awards Celebration hosts many top honors, including the Younger Geospatial Professional Award, Lidar Leader Awards, and multiple ASPRS awards presented at Geo Week in Denver, CO, on February 12, 2024.
The Younger Geospatial Professional Award, in partnership with Lidar News, will be presented to Dimitrios Bolkas, Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Bolkas works with students to show how virtual reality can be used in the surveying and mapping field.
“I really want to expose our students to new technologies, for them to understand how it works, embrace it, don’t be afraid of it, and maybe find new ways to make a difference,” said Bolkas. Virtual reality is a game changer in the surveying field, and Bolkas is focused on teaching the next generation to utilize this technology and implement it as they enter the field.
The Lidar Leader Awards are presented in partnership with LIDAR Magazine. The award for Outstanding Personal Achievement in Lidar is awarded to individuals who have made a significant impact to their organization and community, either through technical excellence, professional development, or innovation within the realm of geospatial lidar technology. This year, the award is presented to Arttu Soininen at Terrasolid.
Soininen is known as the visionary head software developer at Terrasolid and epitomizes excellence in the geospatial industry. His contributions have streamlined workflows, saving time and resources across multiple sectors, from urban planning to cultural heritage preservation. With an impressive 30-year journey in survey data processing and over 22 years innovating lidar processing techniques, Soininen is the mastermind behind the world-renowned TerraScan, TerraMatch, TerraPhoto, and more.
Outstanding Team Achievement in Lidar awards are given to teams who have demonstrated a unique achievement in service, project management, or product development. This year, the winners of this award are the Singapore Housing & Development Board for their work in Intelligent Mapping and Querying of Singapore’s Residential Estates and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for their National Coastal Mapping Program.
The Housing & Development Board (HDB), which is the public housing authority in Singapore, has pioneered 3D Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) scanning within residential estates to support its effort to provide world-class public housing for the nation. In its digitalization journey towards producing sustainable yet feature-rich geospatial datasets, HDB has utilized point cloud data to its tremendous potential in supporting operational workflows, providing services, and enabling advanced analytics.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) National Coastal Mapping Program (NCMP) was established to support regional sediment management through the national dredging program. NCMP is the culmination of a decades-long program that developed and evolved the first U.S. lidar bathymeter into the first topo-bathy lidar for coastal mapping and charting. NCMP is the only federal program that maps the U.S. coast on a recurring schedule, providing high-resolution elevation and imagery data to measure and monitor the U.S. coastline accurately. This data and the products they inform are vital to navigation safety, floodplain management, coastal resilience, economic development, emergency response, ecosystem restoration, and sediment management.
The Outstanding Innovation in Lidar award is given to products, business models or technology on the market for less than one year, and this year is being awarded to the Global Mapper’s Custom Point Cloud Training Tool from Blue Marble Geographics.
Blue Marble Geographics was nominated for its outstanding innovation in creating a groundbreaking new functionality for training custom automatic point cloud classifications. The Custom Point Cloud Classification Training Tool results from years of work in lidar and point cloud processing within Global Mapper Pro. Blue Marble Geographics has been innovating methods for classifying and editing point clouds for almost a decade, making strides in generating photogrammetric point clouds and processing them along with aerial and terrestrial lidar while keeping these tools financially accessible.
Additionally, ASPRS and the ASPRS Foundation support several professional awards and scholarships each year that are given to active ASPRS members and contributors to the field of spatial and image sciences. This year ASPRS will be awarding winners from their 2023 professional awards and the 2024 William T. Pecora Award at Geo Week. The full list of ASPRS awards that will be presented are listed below.
The USGS / NASA Award:
2024 William T. Pecora Award
- Dr. Russell G. Congalton, University of New Hampshire
ASPRS Awards:
2023 Estes Memorial Teaching
- Dr. L. Monika Moskal, University of Washington
2023 Fellow
- Rebecca Morton, GeoWing Mapping, Inc.
- Dr. Joseph Messina, University of Alabama
- Gregory Stensaas, USGS (retired)
- Amar Nayegandhi, Dewberry
2023 Photogrammetric Fairchild
- Dr. Jason Stoker, USGS
2023 Lifetime Achievement
- Dr. Charles Toth, Ohio State University
2023 Outstanding Technical Achievement
- Dr. Gerald L. Mader, National Geodetic Survey (retired)
Learn more about these incredible achievements and meet all the winners at the Geo Week Award Celebration on Monday, February 12. Admission to the Geo Week Awards Celebration is included with registration for Geo Week, click here to register today.
About Geo Week
Geo Week, presented by Geo Weeks News was created in response to the changing needs of built world and geospatial professionals, and to acknowledge the increasing convergence of technology. Geo Week’s conference program and tradeshow floor feature commercial applications of 3D technologies, innovations, and case studies in the built environment, advanced airborne and terrestrial remote sensing solutions, smart products for a full project team, and much more. It occurs February 11-13, 2024, at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO. For more information, visit https://www.geo-week.com/. Geo Week is produced by Diversified Communications’ technology portfolio, which also includes Commercial UAV News; Geo Week, Geo Week Newsletter, 3D Technology Newsletter, AEC Innovations Newsletter, Geo Business (UK) and Digital Construction Week (UK).
