Location Matters
A podcast by NGIS. Valuable insights into the geospatial industry with expert discussions and opinions.
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The AI Powering Smarter Cities: What’s Ahead for ITS
Episode Description: In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai is joined by Oliver Looker, Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS, to talk about what it actually takes to measure road congestion across an entire city. The average person living in a major Australian city loses around 80 hours a year to traffic, and building more roads is rarely the affordable answer. Oliver explains how TraceMark Flow turns Google’s Road Management Insights data into something transport agencies can work with, refreshed every two minutes and covering a whole city or a whole country without putting a single new camera or sensor in the ground. He also covers how the approach compares with SCATS and inductive loop sensors, where AI fits into predicting the effect of storms and big events, a case study from Thessaloniki that measured a 40% travel time impact from a major road project, and why the congestion an agency knows about is often not the congestion costing it the most. Prefer to watch? Key Topics Covered: Resources Mentioned: About the Guest: Oliver Looker is Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS and an active member of ITS Australia. With more than 25 years in spatial science, he believes location intelligence is the key to the future of transport and sustainability. Oliver studied at Curtin University, began his career with Western Australia’s Department of Conservation and Land Management and an agricultural consultancy in the UK, and joined NGIS in 2004. He now leads the team behind TraceMark Flow, which won a Google Maps Platform award in 2025 for its work turning Google’s road data into decision-ready intelligence for transport agencies, logistics operators and emergency services. Know someone working in transport, local government, logistics or geospatial technology? Share this episode with them.
How Industrial Sites Can Be a Positive Force for Nature
Episode Description: In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai sits down with Aditi Kale, who works on strategy for Google’s consumer electronics division and its Nature & Biodiversity pillar. Aditi walks us through a case study from the industrial Red River Delta area of northern Vietnam, developed alongside NGIS’s TraceMark™ platform, which shows that factories and…
The best data for emergency services CAD systems
HERE Technologies has just been recognised as the top ranked location platform by industry analysts at Strategy Analytics. The annual report benchmarks the world’s largest location companies and ranks HERE, Google, Mapbox and TomTom across seven categories. We were lucky to speak with two experts in the location technology industry recently, and our discussion dives…
Coastal Risk Australia gets an update.
Location Matters welcomes CEO of FrontierSI, Graeme Kernich to the podcast for the first time to get the scoop on the updated Coastal Risk Australia, climate modelling tool which was first built in 2015. In partnership with FrontierSI, NGIS developed Coastal Risk Australia to illustrate the severity of rising seas based on the latest scientific…
Drone mapping with Karen Joyce
We are excited to have Karen Joyce, She Maps Founder and Senior Lecturer in Remote Sensing, back on the Location Matters podcast this week! Karen sat down with our Senior GIS Consultant, Marty Rocks, and Winyama IT Coordinator, Time Cable, to talk about everything drone mapping. Tune in to this episode to learn about some of…
Empowering women to enter tech careers
Find out what ‘rubber-ducking’ is. Hear why Khia has been crying happy tears and celebrate the perspective that women bring to the table in this special edition of Location Matters, curated in lieu of International Women’s Day. New Location Matters host, Claire Wilson, is joined by guests Kate Kirwin, founder of She Codes, Daphne Yu, Graduate…
What does the Esri utilities upgrade mean for your business?
In this week’s episode we are excited to welcome two colleagues from our new Brisbane office onto the Location Matters podcast to talk about the Esri ArcGIS utilities upgrade. Alex Geer, NGIS Queensland General Manager, and Conway Pene, Principal GIS Consultant have worked on many utilities GIS projects and give us some insight into what…
What is First Nations Earth Observation?
We’re back with a brand new season of Location Matters! To kick off the first episode, we’re joined by Andrew Dowding, Managing Director of Winyama, and Yvonne Fong, Data Scientist at EO Data Science, to discuss the importance of First Nations Earth Observation and how Winyama are working towards seeing more Indigenous communities utilise Earth…
The NGIS upgrade solution
This is the final episode of season three of Location Matters! Thank you to all of our listeners who tuned in this season to hear about the latest trends and technologies in the GIS industry. In this week’s episode our podcast host and Marketing Manager, Sarah Butler co-hosts with our Marketing Coordinator Claire Wilson and…
