Tuesday, September 13, 2011

HEEP 2011 Day Two

Busy day today at HEEP full slate of presentations on 3 separate tracks.  Started the morning learning about Wisconsin DOT Move to model based design and ended it with my 2nd presentation of the day titled "Engineering Technology of the future - Today (or why isn't anyone selling this stuff?).  In between I gave a presentation on social Media and DOTs, attended several sessions on using LIDAR and point clouds, along with cloud computing and aerial surveying.

I think the two best ones (other than mine) were the Wisconsin presentation and the Caltrans presentation on their use of LIDAR.  Say what you want about Caltrans but I they seem to know how to use technology.  Off to a Bentley forum in a few minutes so check back in later in the week for more info.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Day One HEEP 2011

The first day of the the 51st annual HEEP meeting is done at least the official meeting part.  The vendor reception starts in about a half hour followed by the hospitality room where the real exchange of information takes place.

While attendance is down a bit this year,  partly due to state budget and travel restriction, along with the need to have a passport to travel to Canada we still have 16 states and provinces represented, along with 6 countries. Not to bad for a down year.  As usual the real technical sessions start on Tuesday.  Today was devoted to organization business, student presentations and meeting with vendors.

 I will say that this years crop of students gave the best presentations that I have seen in my past 23 years of attending HEEP.  Congratulation to them all on their presentation skills and topics.  While we won't know the winner until Thursday they should all be proud of the their efforts.  The results of the competition and more information about the presentations will be posted on the HEEP website next week ( www.heep.org). If you weren't able to attend this year you can follow some of the action with twitter at the #heep hastag.  That's it for now (off to the vendor hall).