Boxian Dong (Esri)

Indoor positioning from a GIS industry’s perspective: scale and resolution

Summary:
A Geographic Information System (GIS) is the tool that connects information with space and time. It helps users understand where, when, how and why things are happening, and to predict what things will happen in the future. GIS has proven to help businesses to increase their revenue, scientists to protect the environment, communities to strengthen safety and societies to combat inequality. Compared to the outdoor counterparts, indoor GIS is still in its infancy. However, this is neither caused by the lack of applications nor by the lack of demand. After all, we spend 90% of our time indoors and require at least the same amount of safety, support and convenience as we do outdoors.
The Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides outdoor positions up to submeter resolution at a global scale, is a major contribution to the success of the outdoor GIS. It makes data processing, not data acquisition the bottleneck of the GIS applications. Data acquisition in an indoor environment, on the other hand, is still limited by the availability of indoor positioning and/or the lack of positioning resolution (accuracy). This contributes not only to the poor adoption of indoor GIS usages, but also to the lack of data availability for indoor applications at local and global scales.
In this talk, we will discuss the outdoor and indoor GIS applications with respect to scale and resolution, which drive the requirements for different coverages and levels of positioning accuracy. We will also discuss different technologies that will provide solutions for an indoor positioning system and Esri's implementation of such a system.

Bio: Boxian Dong is the lead scientist and the product owner of ArcGIS IPS (Indoor Positioning System) core component from Esri R&D center at Vienna, Austria. He is currently leading the indoor positioning technologies research and the development of the indoor positioning SDK API to support indoor application development. He has worked and pioneering indoor positioning algorithm for indoo.rs GmbH since 2013 and continues his work after indoo.rs GmbH has been acquired by Esri. Prior to joining indoo.rs GmbH and Esri, Boxian Dong worked in the fields of signal processing, ubiquitous computing, as well as general Machine Learning.