Nowhere: A podcast about the unexpected ways geospatial tech affects our lives Jonathan Neufeld

On this episode of Nowhere Podcast we’re joined by Masoud Kalantari, CEO of The Rubic, and Luke Buckberrough, Chief Growth Officer at The Rubic. The Rubic is a development company that specializes in creating autonomous robotics and industrial automation solutions.

Supply chain is not something most people have great knowledge about, yet it represents one of the largest industrial ecosystems in the world. When you break it down, there are several points to consider: product storage, inventory management, order fulfillment, packaging and labeling, and receiving. It’s an expansive process.

This can also be a very intensive process, especially when it comes to the demands on human time and energy, as well as operational budget. However, humans are flexible and adaptable, which is something automation has lacked previously. The Rubic aims to offer this flexibility using robotic design.


The robots created at The Rubic are designed to map a warehouse using a combination of lidar technology and a camera vision system. They use AI learning technologies to remember what can be found where, gaining the ability to efficiently fulfill their duties over time—no barcodes required.

Anything that can be automated likely will be automated in the future, and that includes the supply chain industry, but spans across industries too. Using AI technology and robotics inside a warehouse setting allows a business to maximize their spaces in ways they couldn’t before. It helps reinforce the workforce, and it can save a business money too.

Today we’re welcoming Jason Winn, Founder and Director at Narrative Infrastructure. He’s also an architect and urban planner with a focus on long-term design. The term narrative infrastructure refers to the basic structure that underlies the rest of the infrastructures that we all live around, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this episode.
Narrative infrastructure sees the world around us as a setting for our stories. All the environments that we live in are a mixing of each other’s stories. By being able to demonstrate that graphically and show how stories might be interfering with one another will tell us what the combined story is for that location.
When visual cues have been erased, narrative techniques can be used to build them back with the correct references to the past. Stories that have been passed on can always be used to rebuild, whereas images in a person’s memory cannot. Jason gives an example of when recreating infrastructure becomes meaningless if stories are not used.
For people who want to map the stories of their own community, it’s important to take the time to tell their own story. As long as it’s been recorded, it has the potential to be incorporated and mapped. Google Earth allows you to record voice and a flythrough on a map, which are fundamental building blocks of a narrative infrastructure.
There are technological challenges with recording narratives, mainly that the stories must not be tampered with. The stories need to be ethically of the individuals who has the experiences.

Our guest in this episode is John Norman, Director of Strategic Research and Development at Teren, in Lakewood, Colorado. Today, we’ll be talking about wildfire reclamation and the role of geospatial technology in this work.
The 2022 Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico was the biggest in the state’s history, and 60% of its coverage was on private land. Private land owners in this area vary greatly, from those who live off the land by cutting firewood, to those who have a secondary home there. These socioeconomic conditions make this fire one of the most unusual that John has worked on.
Because of the history and private ownership of the affected areas in Hermits Peak, there were thousands of individuals that needed to be contacted so the federal government could start the reclamation process. This was especially difficult because many people in the area do not use technology or are very skeptical of the government.
 

 
While also using publicly available terrain and satellite imagery, John and his team were rapidly flying LiDAR and 4-band imagery over the burned area. This process impressively only took about a week, despite covering around 600,000 acres. They were even able to analyze individual trees with the data they acquired.
These fires are occurring more often, so John believes that task forces will be established to immediately come in with technology to quantify exactly what areas are the most at risk. He also hopes to see geospatial technology used to mitigate risks in areas that are prone to fires before they even happen.

Emily Craven, Founder and CEO of Story City, joins us for this episode. Today’s discussion revolves around locative content and the power of location to connect people to places via stories, as well as how Story City ties it all together.
Locative content is content in the form of stories, media, film, and audio which can only be experienced in a specific physical location. This kind of content is important because it’s the roots that make people feel as though they belong.
Story City was inspired by the idea of wanting to create stories, but also allowing others to be a part of those stories. People can interact with the characters in particular adventures by allowing them to be in the same exact setting.
 

 
Users are then prompted to choose how their story goes. They are given maps to allow them to dictate where they go and how their story continues, giving each user a different experience based on where exactly they are.
This also serves as an educational tool by giving information on things such as the history of the location. It allows for a unique social and recreational experience that brings people together.

We’ve got three guests in today’s episode: Dr. Caleb Brown, Curator of Dinosaur Systematics & Evolution at the Royal Tyrrell Museum; Dr. Derek Peddle, Professor of Geography at The University of Lethbridge; and Sean Herridge-Berry, a master’s student at the University of Lethbridge, join us to discuss how modern technology is being used to explore ancient fossil beds.
Alberta is known for being a hotbed for fossils, but why? Alberta’s rocks are the right age to preserve fossils, but these rocks have eroded at a quick rate in the badlands of Alberta. These abundant fossils are being uncovered at a high rate, which means this landscape provides a lot of information about fossils.
The standard method of prospecting to find new fossils is pretty low tech: put your boots on, get outside, and keep your eyes on the ground. Generally, fossils look like any other bone. The hardest part is figuring out which fossils are most important.
 

 
An interesting fact about fossils is that they are a breeding ground for lichen, a composite organism. There is a bright orange lichen which grows on the fossils, and this orange glow can be used to identify fossils. Furthermore, fossilized material and lichen reflect the sunlight in a certain way, and Sean is currently studying how to use that to identify them in a remotely sensed image.
This technology opens the door to discovering new, yet to be discovered bone beds (layers of rock with concentrated fossils). Watching million-year-old fossils collide with new technology is really interesting and will lead to even more exciting dinosaur bone finds down the road.

Travis Riedlhuber is joining us for this episode. He is the managing director of RainBarrel, an Edmonton-based company that uses geospatial data to help advertisers deliver their message to the right people.

Digital advertising is going through a lot of changes. Focus is shifting to privacy, and new technology is setting in to emphasize regulatory action. New businesses are forming to find solutions to work within this new era of digital advertising.

Advertisers who have been reliant on using cookies need to pivot, as this kind of tracking is slowly being phased out. New identifiers like loyalty programs and apps are emerging in its place. What makes RainBarrel unique is that they utilize location data to group people with similar attributes, and they only use data given with explicit consent.


The cohorts they put together are a minimum of one thousand unique devices, but the typical audience is within tens of thousands or even millions of devices. This not only goes a long way for protecting privacy, but it also helps advertisers reach a larger group of people to generate the return they expect.

In the past, there haven’t been a lot of regulations in this area of the digital advertising space, and a lot of work was being done in the shadows. Now, this is headed in a more transparent direction, which RainBarrel fully embraces and supports.