Ujaval Gandhi
Ujaval is the founder of Spatial Thoughts - a learning platform for modern geospatial technologies. Ujaval got his Masters in Geospatial Information Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After joining Google Inc. in California, he moved to India in 2006. He was one of the early employees at Google India and part of the team that launched Google Maps for India. He worked on multiple Geo teams at Google and led the GIS team in India.
After 15 years of corporate experience, he left Google in 2020 to work on his startup - Spatial Thoughts - to create a learning platform to bridge the skill gap in the geospatial industry. His online academy has trained participants from over 150 countries. His learning materials on QGIS, Python, Earth Engine, and GDAL are cited as the top learning resources globally and are used by more than 1 million people every year.
Ujaval is a world-renowned training facilitator and is passionate about advancing the use of open-source technologies in teaching and research. He is an active QGIS community contributor and a QGIS.org certified training provider.
Sessions
Start your journey into QGIS development by building your first plugin. This beginner-friendly workshop will help you understand how plugins work and gain hands-on experience creating a plugin from scratch. The workshop will teach you how to build a simple plugin that allows you to easily load your favorite basemap in QGIS with just a click. We will start with a minimal plugin template and learn how to add features and user interface. Finally, you will be able to package your plugin and share with your friends and colleagues.
You will need QGIS and your favorite Text Editor installed on your computer. Knowledge of Python and PyQGIS is helpful, but is not required.
You may use any text editor for this workshop. If you do not have a favorite text editor, install one of the recommended beginner-friendly and free text editors from the list below.
- Windows: Notepad++ is a good free editor for windows.
- Mac: TextMate is an open-source editor for Mac that is simple yet powerful.
This talk will give a whirlwind tour of the QGIS Expressions with fun and creative use cases. Starting from the basics of expression syntax, you will learn how to construct complex expressions by combining the basic building blocks. Discover hidden gems and unexpected possibilities as we push the QGIS expression engine to its limits!
This workshop will introduce participants to the modern approach to working with large datasets in QGIS. Modern data formats - such as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COG), Cloud-Optimized Point Clouds (COPC), and FlatGeoBuf (FGB) allow datasets to be streamed from cloud storage without having to download entire files. Spatial Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) provides a standardized way to query cloud-hosted datasets. Combined with QGIS, these technologies allow users to visualize and analyze large datasets which was not possible before.
Participants of this workshop will learn how to perform analysis on large global datasets with built-in QGIS functionality that smartly streams only the required data and uses local computation avoiding expensive server costs. You will perform Zonal Statistics on a global population raster and compute the population in your chosen region in just a few seconds. Working with a STAC API Catalog, you will load a global landcover data and perform a landcover change analysis to find lost surface water without incurring any cloud computation cost.
Come and learn the modern computing paradigm that is set to transform how we work with geospatial data.