Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest

What does it actually take to make AI useful on location data? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Ryan Urabe, co-founder and CTO of Dataplor, to unpack how AI, embeddings, and agents are changing the way we...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Troy Schmidt, a 20-year GIS developer and the creator of SPHERE, an open-source Python package that runs FEMA's HAZUS flood risk methodology on GeoParquet and...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Maggie Ma, tech content creator at @maggieindata and former geospatial data scientist. Maggie left her corporate data science role last year to become a...

What happens when you give an AI the ability to see and understand the physical world? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Yael Maguire, GM and VP of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth, to unpack the massive...

The future is spatial, but how do we actually make sense of the data? In this episode, we sit down with Emily Lisle from Dataplor to discuss the current state of location intelligence and how to overcome the biggest...

A viral LinkedIn post called "Something Big Is Happening" by Matt Schumer has been making the rounds and for good reason. In this episode, I break down why the pace of AI development should have every GIS professional...

If you are still trying to run your entire geospatial workflow on a local desktop, you are fighting a losing battle. The "Modern GIS Stack" looks chaotic at first glance with dozens of logos, cloud formats, and new...

Have you ever stopped to think about how GPS completely changed the world simply by becoming an invisible infrastructure running in the background of our everyday apps? According to Pierrick Poulenas, the CEO and...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Kyle Walker, Professor of Geography at TCU and the creator of popular R packages like tigris and tidycensus. Kyle dives into why he views US Census data as...

We have never had more data about our planet: petabytes of satellite imagery, aerial photos, and sensor readings collected daily. Yet, turning that massive volume of "noise" into a clear signal remains the fundamental...

There are trillions of dollars invested in the physical world every da: infrastructure, supply chains, and our planet. Yet many of these massive decisions are made without the data to back them up. For too long...

Large Language Models can write poetry and debug code, but they still don't understand the fundamental physics of the real world. Ask an AI to find the "nearest restaurant" to a specific coordinate, and it struggles...

In 1963, the US Postal Service introduced "Mr. Zip" to make mail delivery faster. They never intended for those five digits to determine your insurance premiums, your home value, or your health outcomes. In this short...

Maps have been around for thousands of years, but what they represent and how they work is changing faster than ever. In this episode, I’m joined by Cliff Allison, who has spent more than 30 years building...

We have an incredible amount of public geospatial data—high-resolution elevation, weather forecasts, floodplain maps, real-time sensors—yet most people still can’t easily answer a simple question: “What’s my flood risk...