Clemens Schotte is Senior Program Manager at Azure Maps. It is pronounced "Claymens SuHotte". Microsoft has a few geospatial offerings:
Microsoft Bing Maps is the most well known amongst the public. It is a web-based mapping service offering street maps, aerial imagery, and route planning for public and consumer-facing applications.
Microsoft Azure Maps is a cloud-based geospatial platform designed for developers to integrate real-time mapping, routing, and spatial analytics into enterprise and IoT applications. Code samples.
Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro was released 2 months ago. It provides global-scale environmental datasets and analytical tools, tailored for scientific research and sustainability use cases, with deep integration into cloud-native workflows.
It's nice to see a big tech monopolist has devoted some attention to our industry and is keeping up with the cloud native geospatial trend. Speaking of trends, we have a nice continuation here of the episode with Nelson Roque that kicked off the name change to Geospatial FM.
This is because of a recent blog post about model context protocol (MCP) by Clemens. Why has a brain researcher's comments about what cognition is made me excited about MCP servers? They enable tool use and extraction of up to date data from APIs. This enables the AI to operate on data beyond what it was trained on. As stated in the recording, this is sounding suspiciously like multimodal real time data feeds.
This is an aspect of organic organism cognition as described by Nelson. Something else that got my attention here is that Clemens mentioned introducing both short and long term memory, check the diagram here.
As such, we have a nice demonstration in front of us about the kind of progress a Big Tech company is making at the cutting edge of our species effort to duplicate our reasoning capacity.
Thanks Clemens!