“Inside GIS” with Alumnus Jack Dangermond
Wednesday April 2, 2008
Informal Conversation with students from 1:30 – 2:30
Coffman Union Room 303
Public Lecture (free) from 4:30 – 5:40
Followed by a reception
McNamara Alumni Center
Jack Dangermond, founder of one of the world's largest geographic information systems companies and College of Design alumnus from 1968 who studied landscape architecture and city design, will be on campus Wednesday April 2.
Jack's company, ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute), is focused on developing and using computerized mapping to make better land-use decisions.
The tools developed by ESRI are important to the design community, enabling synthesis and overlays of information to reveal relationships and patterns. In a commencement speech at the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in 1993, Dangermond said that his ideas about combining mapping and graphics together came to him first as a student at the U of M, where Roger Martin and John Borchert were mentors. Studying landscape architecture, Jack says, gave him the understanding that "the study of the landscape and land processes and systems and the interpretation of those could be used to guide decision-making."
Today, his company employs 4,000 staff and has users in more than 200 countries. The pioneering research and technology developed by ESRI has been used in such diverse areas as marketing, surveying, vehicle routing, economic development, cancer risk analysis, timberland management, and hurricane response management.