MALCOLM CAMPBELL vice-president (research): Welcome everyone to University of Guelph’s Innovation of the Year Award, the 2020 edition.
You know, we’ve been innovating here at University of Guelph, creating phenomenal innovations for almost 150 years now, spanning right back to our founding colleges. In 2016, we decided to more formally recognize fantastic innovations on a yearly basis — innovations where our researchers have converted fundamental discoveries to real-world, impactful applications.
This year, we’re delighted to have two Innovation of the Year Awards. I have the innovator of one of those innovations with me right here, John Lindsay. Welcome, John.
LINDSAY: Thank you, Malcolm. It’s truly a great honour to be here with you today. It’s wonderful to have an opportunity to chat with you about your innovation.
CAMPBELL: John, your innovation is Whitebox Tools. Tell us a little bit about how it came into being.
LINDSAY: So I guess I have been developing GIS software, which is really what Whitebox is for about 20 years now — really since I started my PhD. The project is really my most recent effort in developing GIS software and it served, really, as my platform for experimenting with the types of novel spatial analysis algorithms that we use in my research lab. The software that we develop in our research lab is really the means by which we can get the products of our research out into the hands of GIS practitioners. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s always been incredibly important to me that Whitebox Tools be open source and accessible to the community of users that I have.
CAMPBELL: Fantastic, John. Tell us a little bit about what GIS is. Obviously, Whitebox Tools is meant to be serving GIS practitioners — what does a GIS practitioner do? What is GIS?
LINDSAY: GIS is essentially a software package that’s used to store and visualize spatial data. But probably the most important component of a GIS is its ability to analyze those spatial data in order to provide answers to spatial problems, to sort of large-scale spatial problems that society grapples with. GIS is really widely applied in all sorts of fields; for example, criminology and epidemiology. It’s used in precision agriculture to guide farmers with respect to the application rates that they apply to their fields, and it’s applied by entire governments to model regional scale crop production, to provide forecasts for crop production. GIS is used to help model flood risk and it’s used for things like modelling pollutant transport in watersheds.
The common thread, really, that joins all of these wide range of applications is that they all rely on extracting information from spatial data.
CAMPBELL: That’s fantastic, John. So in some ways, you’ve got a perfect storm of conditions, if you will, for a community to take on an application like Whitebox Tools. That said, were you surprised with the extent of uptake that you’ve had? It’s literally hundreds of people that have adopted Whitebox Tools.
LINDSAY: It didn’t come as a great surprise to me that there would be a large community around the world that would centre around Whitebox and and its use. But what has really surprised me and truly continues to surprise me at this point are all of the stories that I frequently hear from Whitebox users about the interesting and particularly shocking ways, for me, in which they apply the software.
So recently, I’ve been able to take on a collaboration with my wife, Sally Lindsay, who is a disabilities researcher in Toronto at a hospital in Toronto. We’ve received funding from the province of Ontario in which we’re using the capabilities of Whitebox Tools to map sidewalk encroachment. For people with disabilities, sidewalk encroachment poses a very significant obstacle and reduces the accessibility of these sidewalk corridor spaces. This is work that I never would have imagined that I would have been able to do before, and Whitebox Tools has effectively provided the catalyst for me being able to carry out types of work in in this area.
CAMPBELL: That’s absolutely amazing, John. I love the arc that you’ve described today, the 20-year trajectory to getting to the point that you’ve got to, the ingredients for success that have helped you enjoy such a remarkable success with Whitebox and now the direction that you see taking things in the future with the sort of supports that we have at University of Guelph through Accelerator Guelph. It remains for me just to say congratulations on this fantastic achievement.
LINDSAY: I’m truly humbled by the experience of being honoured with this award. When I think about all of the amazing research that’s taking place on campus, the fact that Whitebox and the work that I’ve been doing over the last 20 years is being recognized among all of these people doing fantastic work, it’s truly humbling for me. You know, I’m sure that there are many people out there who are just as deserving as I am to receive this award in all honesty.