We are privileged today to share an episode with a Pakistani geospatial firm, Seerab Technologies. Zulkifil is a co-founder and has been with the company nearly 10 years. They have their own platform for real estate developers to help customers understand the context of proposed property purchases. He gave a simple example, a property with a large hole in it is hard to spot if you don’t have a terrain map. Seerab provides that to users. He also stepped through a few prizes they have won, including from Uber. Nice to have some lessons learnt from a firm all the way over in Pakistan telling us how product development is done.

What was most interesting to hear is the timeless advice he shared applies everywhere. We’re so used to hearing it from Silicon Valley, but his is a story of applying it successfully a world away - Seerab has been in business for years.

Finally, Zulkifil talks about doing good. According to Gemini:

"The Hajj is one of the world's largest annual gatherings, with over 1.8 million to 2.5 million pilgrims converging on Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for five to six days of rituals. It is a mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime duty for all adult Muslims who are physically and financially capable."

One may imagine with so many people scrambling across a relatively small area on foot, in an unfamiliar place, there is a risk of getting lost. So Zulkifil showed us a solution based on listening to Pakistani pilgrims going to the Hajj.

Thanks Zulkifil for taking the time!

This is episode 3/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through system characteristics of weather foundation models and how we can approach building them. Toward the end, the episode touches on an example of applying these approaches to a simulation of the Earth’s weather over a period of 800 years. The approaches Alex has been talking about enable the use of a GPU to process this simulation in only one day. We conclude with the values that drive Alex’s work.

This is episode 2/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena In this episode, Alex steps through ML weather models, their history and how they work.

Links to items discussed:

1. ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5): https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5
2. I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me: https://www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-science-hypeheres

This is episode 1/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through the background on doing weather prediction, from early efforts around a century ago to numerical and physics based models. This prepares us for later episodes on machine learning or AI based approaches.

Links to items discussed:

1. Pangeo, a community for open, reproducible, scalable geoscience.
2. Alex's Google Scholar profile.
3. Episode with Sergei Nozdrenkov on a coral reef foundation model.
4. Global Climate Data Collaboration: The Intentional Dream by George Dyson.
5. Hurricane Melissa.
6. Arham Ansari on GeoRiskAI.
7. What can a technologist do about climate change.

Mark Munsell is Distinguished Fellow of Artificial Intelligence at Lindenwood University and Executive Director at GeoSTL. He is also Former Chief AI Officer at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. As such, he has rich experience for us to mine. We used it to navigate the AI hype and transition from LLMs to world models. If you want to get an impression of him outside this episide, here he is at SC25 talking about Pixels, Petabytes, Predictions (and Possibilities!):

He was also recently published in The Cypher Brief.

EPISODE TOPICS:

1. What Mark achieved as an inventor.

2. His reflections on hype cycles after a career in geospatial.

3. Using this experience to examine the meaning of world models.

4. Notable achievements by world model companies.

5. GEOINT use case: Venezuela and the US.

6. Mark's ambitions for St Louis: GeoSTL.

7. How the World Model 500 can help.

The Geospatial FM podcast topic profile:

1. Data engineering for geospatial

2. GEOSPATIAL FOR WORLD MODELS (foundation models are so last week)

3. GEOSPATIAL IN PREDICTION MARKETS (spatial finance is so 2022)

4. In this context, stocks, globally

5. Human rights outcomes of these stocks

Item 5 is always number 1. So we are finishing the year with that focus. Let's look at this BBC article about a murder of a tribal landowner to make way for the world's largest dictator vanity project, The Line in Saudi Arabia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52375343. Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti spoke in this video before he was murdered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Mp_CKbjdE. One thing he predicted was being framed by the government surrounding his dead body with weapons. They did report finding his body in such a state: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=35599. Another BBC article profiles Col Rabih Alenezi https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445. He said he was a security force leader who was asked by the government to, if necessary, kill villages who resisted eviction. He refused and escaped to the UK. Whoever replaced him obviously was not so upstanding, and Abdul Rahim al-Hwaiti was killed.

So we have a suitably arresting human rights issue to examine for the podcast. I then used The UN's Communication Report and Search tool (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/Tmsearch/TMDocuments) to find out about the western companies involved, an issue flagged by the BBC. I found a UN Letter of Urgent Appeal to AECOM: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=28030. The communication search tool shows the CEO, Mr Rudd, does not appear to have responded to the letter. It is significant that AECOM was a recipient, because they're the best international design firm according to Engineering News Record (https://www.enr.com/toplists/2025-top-500-design-firms-preview). Last year it was Jacbos, also a delivery partner on The Line, but they have not received a letter of urgent appeal.

In the letter, reference is made to an earlier one about the killing of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=25483). The UN accompanied that letter a week later with a summary for the public: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136322.

In tying up loose ends, I observed that another recipient of such a letter was Solar Water. They announced in 2019 what they were doing for NEOM: https://www.solarwaterplc.com/company-news/green-technology-in-the-neom-project-and-others-how-will-it-change-the-rules-of-the-game-in-the-gulf/. Five years later, however, after receiving the letter (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=28049), they gave up $100 million by cancelling the project: https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-aw-canceled-100m-neom-contract-human-rights-abuse-saudi-2024-5.

AECOM has done no such thing. They could not even bear to respond to the letter. Despite being a signatory to the UN Global Compact (https://unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/participants/17780-AECOM-Technology-Corporation).

AECOM is in the Consultancy vertical of the World Model 500. The podcast remains faithful to its 5 topics. Topic 5, human rights, is always number 1. Please accept, dear Mr. Rudd, the assurances of my highest consideration.

Ryan Kmetz is Research Director at IQSpatial. We are privileged to have his time in this episode. He talked with us about economic conditions faced by geospatial workers in the US. We reflected on the emergence of a protest movement, the No Kings march a couple of weekends ago. We observed how this has emerged in the context of very high cost of living, lack of wage growth, high costs of housing and education. Ryan is a useful guest here because he has in his family history a great great great grandfather who was involved in similar protest movement against a Russian czar and was sent to Siberia as punishment. In a hero's journey like so many who have come to America over the centuries, this man escaped prison to New York City where he sold newspapers on a street corner. A few generations later we have Ryan to tell this story and remind us that things happen in cycles.

By using a translation service you can read more about this family member here.

Ryan also told us about another family member who adds to the picture of unrest like we see now occurring in cycles, and how cynical political figures can exploit underprivileged groups in society to distract the population from the real causes of their issues. I recommend listening to find out more about that family figure.

Ryan then turned the mic toward me for a summary of what I have observed in my career from the perspective of exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It was a chance to step through what I covered earlier in the year in 8 episodes starting here. We then used this material about cycles of exploitation of the vulnerable in society across the centuries, examples of how to deal with that from his family history and evidence of this pattern continuing in my career across the world to make the case for a new way of worker participation in the economy.

That new way is expanding democratic participation via owning shares. When you own shares you can vote on how a company is run. Through community organising (and we can use a prior guest Frank Romo for inspiration here) Ryan and I perceive there is an opportunity to assert ourselves in the industry to direct our work to favour the poor and marginalised.

I look forward to your own reflections on this matter and working with you to build up a force for justice here.

0:00 - Motivation for Microsoft to compete with Esri

1:20 - Who is Rakesh and data engineering services of SketchMyView

6:40 - Deploying a land and planning GIS for the UK government with Microsoft Synapse

22:25 - Is there a similarity between Synapse and Fabric?

26:26 - ACID compliance, delta files, lakehouses, bronze, silver, gold layers

35:18 - Apache Sedona in Fabric tutorial

57:20 - Why is it worth it to use Apache Sedona in Fabric?

1:00:44 - SedonaDB

Apache Sedona is a way for a regular Apache Spark using data analyst to acquire geospatial capabilities. With Sedona, if you know SQL, you know GIS. Rakesh Gupta is Principal Consultant at SketchMyView in London. He tells us about how to set up Apache Sedona in Microsoft Fabric in 2 lines of code. It was a privilege to have his time for this tutorial as he showed how easy it is to get up and running with a powerful, free spatial analysis system that leverages Apache Spark for scalable compute. He also touched in the new SedonaDB, released last month. This is a significant development for the geospatial economy because it is a database created with geospatial data as a first class citizen. This means we have our own database library that is only a pip install away:

pip install "apache-sedona[db]"

Something to consider as a replacement for DuckDB. More here and here.