Tina Cary of Cary and Associates is on location at the annual American society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing conference in Washington D.C. She sends us some updates on the latest happenings from the event.

Thursday, 25 May, included more educational sessions, a forum on Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing, and tours of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the US Army Topographic Engineering Center.

Your reporter’s impression is that any sessions involving lidar draw a lot of attendees. In the exhibit hall, 3D is a big theme. A number of booths have stereo viewing, and a fascinating image in the Cymbolic Sciences/Gretag Imaging booth shows 3D without any special glasses.

The Awards Luncheon provided recognition to people who wrote papers in these categories:

• Best Scientific Paper in GIS (sponsored by ESRI),
• Best Scientific Paper in Spatial Data Standards (sponsored by Intergraph),
• Best Scientific Paper in Remote Sensing (sponsored by ERDAS),
• Best Paper in Photogrammetric Interpretation (sponsored by Autometric), and
• Practical Papers (in honor of past president John I. Davidson).
• The luncheon program also included the installation of officers.

At the Memorial Address and Awards Ceremony, five awards to students were presented, and Gomer T. .McNeill and Heinz E.R. Gruner were honored in Memorial Lectures. James B. Cummins, presenting the life of Gomer McNeill, included a new variation of an old quote: “one decision is worth a thousand pictures.”

The social event at the National Air and Space Museum was a great success. In addition to food, drink and conversation, there were presentations in the planetarium and the IMAX theater. A new award, the George E. Brown, Jr. Congressional Honor Award, was initiated, and Congressman Brown was the first honoree. Mrs. Brown’s acceptance speech was so moving, a number of people were reaching for handkerchiefs.

One of the buses from the museum back to the hotel detoured through Georgetown. The higher powers must have a sense of humor, that a bus driver would get lost driving around a bunch of folks in the mapping sciences!

Cary and Associates was founded in early 1998 by Dr. Tina Cary to provide marketing services in the geospatial technologies -- remote sensing, photogrammetry, geographic information systems (GIS), surveying, and global positioning systems (GPS). Available services include market research, training, planning and implementation.