Lightning Talks
ISPRS 2026
Lightning Talks
Get your tech update fix at the Showcase Theatre in the Exhibit Hall, where Lightning Talks will deliver fast-paced 10- and 20-minute demos and technology updates during networking breaks. It’s the perfect way to catch the latest innovations—especially if you’re not registered for Congress sessions.
Don’t have your Exhibit Hall Visitor Pass yet?
TUESDAY, 7 JULY 2026
10:05 - 10:15
Presenter:
Jonathan Murphy,
CEO,
GoGeomatics Canada
From Imagery to Impact: Why Canada’s Geospatial Community Matters
Session: LiT1
10 mins
Canada has world-class expertise in remote sensing, photogrammetry, GIS, surveying, Earth observation, and spatial data science. The challenge is not a lack of talent. The challenge is making that talent more visible, connected, and useful across sectors. This 10-minute lightning talk will offer a national community perspective from GoGeomatics Canada. Drawing on our work in publishing, events, meetups, contributor development, GeoIgnite, and the GoGeomatics Expo, the talk will explore how community infrastructure helps connect students, researchers, government, industry, associations, and the public. As ISPRS returns to Canada, this is a timely moment to think not only about imagery and technology, but also about the networks that turn geospatial knowledge into collaboration, decision-making, and impact.
10:15 - 10:25
Presenter:
Jason Frye,
Strategic Account Manager, Government Solutions USA, ICEYE
From Orbit to Action: How ICEYE SAR-derived Solutions are Transforming Disaster Monitoring
10 mins
As the frequency and severity of natural disasters continue to escalate worldwide, the demand for timely, accurate, and actionable geospatial intelligence has never been greater. This lightning talk introduces ICEYE and its constellation of small Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites — and explores how SAR-derived insights are transforming how governments at every level respond to natural hazards. Unlike optical sensors, SAR systems emit their own microwave signals and can penetrate cloud cover and darkness to deliver consistent imagery regardless of weather or time of day. This capability is particularly critical during the acute phases of disasters, when clouds and smoke routinely obscure the ground from conventional sensors. ICEYE operates one of the world's largest commercial SAR constellations, enabling rapid, repeat-pass imaging over areas of interest within hours of tasking. Building on this foundation, ICEYE has developed a suite of hazard-specific intelligence products. Flood Insights and Flood Rapid Impact deliver near-real-time flood extent mapping and impact assessments — quantifying affected structures, roads, and critical infrastructure within hours of an event. Wildfire Insights leverages SAR's unique sensitivity to surface change to detail building damage even through the heavy smoke that blinds optical systems during active events. Hurricane Rapid Impact provides rapid post-landfall damage assessments across affected regions, enabling prioritization of emergency response before ground teams can safely deploy. Finally, ICEYE's Deforestation monitoring solution offers persistent, high-cadence change detection across forested landscapes, supporting both conservation and regulatory enforcement. These solutions carry significant implications for government stakeholders. At the local and state level, rapid impact products reduce the time between disaster onset and actionable situational awareness — enabling faster evacuation decisions, resource deployment, and damage reporting. Across all tiers of government, ICEYE's analytics bridge the gap between raw satellite data and the decision-ready intelligence that emergency managers, planners, and policymakers actually need. This session will provide geospatial professionals with a concise overview of how operational SAR, combined with automated analytics, is moving the needle from imagery collection to real-world impact.
12:10 - 12:25
Session: LiT2
Summer School Design Competition Winners
15 min
The ISPRS Student Consortium Summer School 2026, held prior to the Congress at York University in Toronto, focuses on Geospatial Innovations for Climate Action. This five-day program blends expert learning, hands-on training, and teamwork to tackle real-world climate challenges. The program culminates in a team innovation challenge, with the winning solution presented in this session. Don’t miss the chance to see tomorrow’s leaders in action!
WEDNESDAY, 8 JULY 2026
Session: LiT4
10:05 - 10:25
AI in MDPI
20 mins
Presenter:
Stefan Tochev,
CEO, MDPI
As a pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing, MDPI is committed to integrating artificial intelligence to enhance research transparency, accelerate knowledge dissemination, and uphold the highest standards of scientific integrity. In this section, we will introduce our AI tools and the AI-Enhanced Publishing Workflow. At MDPI, AI serves as a supportive tool that amplifies human research—not a substitute for scholarly rigor. We remain dedicated to fostering a fair, efficient, and ethically grounded publishing ecosystem for the global research community.
12:10 - 12:30
Presenter:
Darrick Wagg,
Vice President, Customer Success,
GeoCue
Advances in LiDAR and Imagery Processing: Scientific Workflows and Standards Compliance in LP360
Session: LiT5
20 mins
Recent advances in LiDAR and photogrammetric data acquisition have increased both data volumes and expectations for accuracy, repeatability, and processing efficiency. This Lightning Talk will examine how research-driven methods can be translated into practical, scalable workflows within LP360 for point cloud and imagery processing. The presentation will focus on scientifically grounded workflow design, including classification, feature extraction, accuracy assessment, metadata handling, and standards compliance. It will highlight how LP360 supports repeatable processing chains, quantitative validation, and evolving geospatial standards through capabilities such as ASPRS-compliant accuracy reporting, LAS v1.5 support, coordinate reference system management, strip alignment, surface modeling with breaklines, and integrated LiDAR and photogrammetric processing. Examples from corridor mapping, area mapping, and mixed-sensor datasets will be used to illustrate how these methods are applied in operational environments. The talk will also briefly address newer developments in AI-assisted classification, cloud processing, and 3D visualization. The objective is to provide attendees with practical insight into how scientific principles can be implemented in robust, transparent, and repeatable production workflows using LP360.
12:30 - 12:50
Topo bathymetric LiDAR - Compact sensor evolution and the implications to platform compatibility and application expansion
20 mins
Presenter:
Michael Sitar,
Managing Director, RIEGL Canada
RIEGL
This session provides an overview of RIEGL's portfolio evolution of compact topo-bathymeters and the much smaller platform options that have typically been unavailable to users until recently. This minitiarization effort has significantly reduced the barriers to market entry, decreased collection costs and enabled data acquisition access to general surveyors, research groups and smaller firms alike. Application examples will be provided that demostrate performance capabilities that until recently were reserved for much larger sensor designs, as well as environments that were previously inaccessible with typical aircraft.
12:50 - 13:10
Gulo Gulo: Where World Models Meet Physical AI
20 mins
Presenter:
Prof. Dr. Mohamed Elhabiby,
CEO & Co-founder, Micro Engineering Tech Inc.
Prof. Dr. Kai-Wei Chiang,
Professor, Department of Geomatics, National Cheng Kung University
Everyone is racing to build AI that operates in the physical world. Most are betting on one giant black-box model that swallows sensor data and spits out decisions. It demos beautifully. But when it fails, nobody can say why, and you can't fix it, trust it, or reuse it. For companies deploying real robots in real environments, that's a non-starter. Gulo Gulo was built differently and built to ship. It starts with the AIO box: a single all-in-one unit that fuses GNSS, INS, camera, LiDAR, and RADAR into one factory-calibrated, time-synced package. No clock drift, no calibration headaches, no months of sensor-integration engineering. It's plug-and-play across the robots you already own, mount it on an inspection dog in the morning and a survey drone in the afternoon, and get identical spatial intelligence from both. You don't replace your fleet. You upgrade it. On that foundation sits our Path-wise locator, which keeps the agent precisely located even when GPS drops out, in tunnels, indoors, underground, or where signals are jammed. It treats positioning as the whole journey rather than a single guess, so one sensor failing never breaks the system. That's military-grade resilience built from low-cost commercial sensors. Then the world model goes to work. As the robot moves, it doesn't just navigate, it understands. It sees what's there, detects what's changed, and turns every trajectory into a live, semantically rich 5D map. And here's where it pays off: that understanding lands directly in the tools your teams already use. HD maps in Lanelet2 and OpenDRIVE for autonomy. CAD and GIS exports for Autodesk, ESRI, and AVEVA. One capture materialized into whatever the job needs, no re-surveys, no conversion projects, no waiting. Maps that heal themselves and stay current at fleet scale. The same system powers smart cities tracking road damage, automotive teams building safer autonomy, energy operators predicting failures before they happen, mining companies mapping where no signal reaches, and defense teams that need eyes in contested space. One architecture deployed everywhere it matters. We're also clear about what's next. Today Gulo Gulo is exceptional at understanding the world as it is right now. The next frontier is helping it imagine what happens next, the predictive power that turns a system that sees into a system that plans. We get there by fine-tuning compact world models on our own captured data, sharper and cheaper than any general-purpose model because we model only the environments our customers actually operate in. If you're tired of AI that demos well and deploys badly, this is your talk. Come see how Gulo Gulo turns sensing into understanding, and understanding into results, and find out where the wolverine goes next.
13:10 - 13:20
Beyond the Point Cloud: Fused LiDAR and Visible Light Reconstruction with the DJI L3
10 mins
Presenter:
Grant Hosticka,
Head of Enterprise Solution Engineering, North America,
DJI Enterprise
In this 10-minute lightning talk, we cover what becomes possible when you combine LiDAR and visible light imagery as inputs to a single reconstruction workflow. Using the DJI Zenmuse L3 as the data source and DJI Terra for processing, we walk through how fused sensor data produces not just a point cloud, but also a 2D orthomosaic, a 3D mesh model, and a Gaussian splat, all from one flight. One practical benefit we highlight is the ability to collect with less image overlap than a traditional photogrammetry workflow requires, while still achieving high quality reconstruction outputs. For large area surveys, that reduction in overlap can translate directly to fewer flight lines and faster collection times. This talk is useful for anyone evaluating LiDAR payloads, planning mixed-sensor acquisition workflows, or looking to get more out of a single dataset in post-processing.
15:05 - 15:15
Airborne InSAR for Large Scale Mapping and Smart Applications
Session: LiT6
Presenter:
Li Chen
Director, CSGPC, Beijing, P.R. China; Executive Director, CAGIS, Beijing, P.R. China; Registered Surveyor, MRICS, London, UK
TIRAIN Technologies
10 mins
This presentation introduces the definition, main characteristics and typical application scenarios of InSAR in eospatial information production. It outlines the overall workflow for generating DSM, DTM, DOM and DLG deliverables, and analyzes key technical challenges in practical production — including coherence loss, phase unwrapping, geometric distortions, and multi-source data fusion. On this basis, it summarizes relevant technological innovations and application outcomes, and provides an outlook on the future development trends of InSAR in geospatial information production.
15:15 - 15:25
Presenter:
Prof. Dr. Naser El-Sheimy
RoboGarden Inc.
Educating the Next Generation Digital Geospatial Workforce: A Stackable Learning Architecture for GIS, Geomatics, and GeoAI
10 mins
The geospatial profession is being transformed by the rapid convergence of Earth observation, remote sensing, LiDAR, photogrammetry, real-time positioning, digital twins, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. As technologies evolve and disciplinary boundaries disappear, employers increasingly seek professionals who can work across the entire geospatial value chain—from data acquisition and reality capture to spatial analytics, automation, and deployment. Yet traditional academic programs often struggle to adapt at the pace required by industry, creating a growing gap between workforce demand and workforce readiness. This session presents RoboGarden's vision for addressing this challenge through a comprehensive stackable learning architecture designed to develop the next generation of highly skilled geospatial professionals. The model combines micro-credentials, intensive bootcamps, hands-on projects, and work-integrated learning into a flexible framework that enables learners to continuously build competencies while responding to evolving industry needs. The architecture begins with a Common Foundation Track consisting of five core micro-credentials covering spatial thinking, coordinate systems and geodesy, GIS data models and cartography, Python for geospatial automation, and spatial databases, governance, and quality assurance. These foundational competencies establish a common language and technical framework for all learners regardless of their specialization. From this foundation, learners advance into one of two specialized 600-hour certificate pathways. The Geospatial (GIS) pathway focuses on spatial analytics, geoprocessing, data engineering, cloud-native GIS, web-GIS development, and digital twin applications. The Geomatics pathway emphasizes reality capture and data acquisition through remote sensing, photogrammetry, UAV mapping, LiDAR technologies, and advanced image analytics. Together, these pathways comprise forty specialized micro-credentials that balance depth within a discipline while preserving cross-disciplinary interoperability. A distinguishing feature of the framework is its advanced elective ecosystem, which enables learners to specialize in emerging areas shaping the future of the spatial industry. These include Positioning and Computer Vision (GNSS, inertial navigation, visual-inertial odometry, LiDAR SLAM, and HD mapping), Digital Twins and Smart Infrastructure (BIM-GIS integration, scan-to-BIM workflows, 3D city modeling, and IoT-enabled digital twins), and GeoAI (machine learning, deep learning, autonomous systems, predictive analytics, and spatial intelligence). Combined with the foundation courses, the architecture offers forty-five stackable micro-credentials that can be assembled into personalized learning journeys aligned with career goals and industry requirements. Central to the model is an experiential learning philosophy. Every pathway culminates in a capstone project or work-integrated learning experience requiring learners to solve real-world problems, develop end-to-end geospatial workflows, implement quality assurance procedures, and produce a professional portfolio demonstrating measurable competencies. Graduates therefore leave with both recognized credentials and tangible evidence of their capabilities. This lightning talk will present the design principles behind RoboGarden's workforce-development framework and discuss how stackable credentials can create flexible entry and exit points for students, professionals, employers, and educational institutions. The session offers a practical and scalable model for skills-first education that aligns with the rapidly evolving needs of the geospatial sector and provides a blueprint for preparing the workforce required to support the emerging spatial economy.