April 2019 Summaries

The European Location Intelligence Summit, Discovery 2019, will be held in Madrid on June 6th, 2019, featuring keynote sessions by renowned experts from fields like GIS management and data analytics. The conference will take place at Teatros Luchana, an avant-garde venue, and promises to provide valuable insights for attendees from leading enterprises such as JLL, Vodafone, TINSA, and Posterscope. Early Bird pricing is available for RSVPs, with the event website offering more information on speakers and what else to expect. CARTO experts will also be sharing their expertise on powering Location Intelligence operations across industries.

The text discusses building a recommendation system for site planning, which involves combining data from different sources to derive insights at specific locations and comparing geographic locations to find similar characteristics. The authors developed a method to compute a similarity score with respect to an existing site for target locations, taking into account various data points measured at that location, including traditional sources like the census and modern sources like mobile financial transactions and point of interest (POI) data. The similarity score is calculated by computing the distance between each variable of interest at these locations, resulting in a lower-dimensional representation of the data. To address issues with missing data, the authors used a probabilistic approach to principal component analysis (PPCA), which iteratively updates the expected complete data log-likelihood and maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters. The PPCA method is faster than traditional PCA because it does not require computation of the eigen-decomposition of the data covariance matrix. The similarity score is then used to select target locations with the smallest distances as the best candidates for opening or relocating offices, taking into account uncertainty in the computation of the distance for each target location.

The text highlights various conferences and events focused on location intelligence, spatial data science, and geospatial technologies. The CARTO team will be attending several of these events, including Data Council San Francisco, ODSC East Boston, 2019 CGA Conference: The Geography Of Redistricting, DataX San Francisco, GEOBusiness 2019, and GEOPython 2019, where they will showcase their tools and technologies. Some notable speakers include Andy Eschbacher from CARTO, who will be presenting on "Spatial Data Science Methods for Improving Models" at both the Data Council and ODSC East events. The events offer a range of content, including keynotes, workshops, training sessions, and networking opportunities, and cater to professionals working in geospatial across various industries.

The new version of Airship, a front-end library for Location Intelligence applications, introduces several features and improvements, including a new Time Series widget, enhanced style customization options, and the release of the VL Bridge, a library that simplifies connecting CARTO VL with Airship widgets. The VL Bridge allows users to connect Airship widgets with CARTO VL in a more streamlined process, reducing the need for manual coding. Additionally, the histogram widget has been updated with new features such as categorical data support, range and background data options, and customizable axis settings, enabling users to fine-tune their visualizations. Overall, this release aims to enhance the user experience and provide more flexibility in building Location Intelligence applications.