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PODCAST

15 Minute Maps

This podcast is dedicated to those people making positive change in the world using GIS, mapping and cartography. Each guest is given 15 minutes to describe their dream map, and how it could impact the work they do.Hello and welcome to 15 Minute maps, where I ask my guests to let their minds roam free and come up with a new idea for their dream map. The first known map of the world was created three thousand years ago, (of a flat disc-like world surrounded by water,) and today we are making maps of

science earth sciences

All Episodes

22:45

Episode 25 - Momin Ashraf: The Foggara System

15 Minute Maps ·

2026/06/09

Forget Silicon Valley. The most innovative "smart technology" for water management might have been invented 1,500 years ago in the Algerian desert. Host Hugo Powell welcomes Momin Ashraf—Oxford graduate, Esri Young Scholar Award winner, and GIS consultant at Satellite Applications Catapult. Momin has done the impossible: using synthetic aperture radar to spot fuel trucks in the desert and tracking human trafficking via informal mines. But his dream map is something entirely different. He want...

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21:00

Episode 24 - Éloïse Neff: All Terrain GIS

15 Minute Maps ·

2026/05/31

What if the best map isn't a map at all—but the system that makes mapping effortless? Eloise Neff spent seven years at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) building geographic information systems from the ground up. But when asked for her dream map, she has a surprising answer: she doesn't have one. Instead, she wants something better. A dream information system. In this episode, Eloise—an engineer turned GIS manager—explains why the "...information system" part of GIS is too often forgotten. She a...

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20:34

Episode 23: Willa Sumer - Wildlife and water......

15 Minute Maps ·

2026/05/25

Why do biologists wake up at 4 AM to look for birds? And what does that have to do with California’s housing crisis? In this episode, California based GIS analyst and conservation expert Willa Sumer takes us inside the world of wildlife surveys, mitigation banking, nature conservation and environmental regulation. She explains why early morning field work is non-negotiable (rattlesnakes, reclusive species, and nesting season), how GIS helps developers avoid wiping out endangered habitats, and...

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20:57

Episode 22: Mathew Roberts - Where the Money Flows

15 Minute Maps ·

2026/05/18

What if you could see exactly where the world’s money goes—in real time? From Swiss bank accounts to mobile money in Sierra Leone, and from colonial resource extraction to modern "resource nationalism," this episode pulls back the curtain on the hidden flows that shape global inequality. Host Hugo sits down with Matthew Roberts, Head of Geography at the International School of Geneva (and Hugo’s alma mater). Matthew shares a provocative dream map: a real-time, interactive visualization of glo...

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20:52

Episod 21: Max Malynowsky - Offline is the New Online

15 Minute Maps ·

2026/05/05

What if humanitarians had an offline-first mapping tool as reliable as a Garmin GPS? In this episode, Max Malynowsky — software engineer at the OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data — dreams out loud about a future where field teams can sync trusted, up-to-date geodata anywhere, even with near-zero bandwidth. From the chaos of contested admin boundaries to the quiet genius of ODK and XLS forms, Max and Hugo unpack why the hardest part isn't building the app — it's building the data infrastructure...

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18:50

Episode 20 - Saïd Abou Kharroub: The One-Stop-Shop Map

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/12/22

What if all the data needed to respond to a humanitarian crisis already existed — but was scattered, siloed, and hard to use? In this episode of 15-Minute Maps, I’m joined by Saïd Abou Kharroub, a GIS specialist turned information management expert, former CEO of Civ API, and current board member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Saïd’s dream map isn’t a single map at all, but a one-stop, layered view of the world’s crises — aggregating data on conflict, displacement, funding, inf...

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20:56

Episode 19 - Yann Rebois: Mapping the Invisible in...

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/12/15

Urban crises are some of the hardest environments to map — and yet that’s where millions of the world’s most vulnerable people live. In this episode of 15-Minute Maps, Hugo Powell is joined by Yann Rebois, Earth Observation Strategist at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and former Head of Geodata & Analytics at the ICRC. Drawing on decades of field experience and satellite analysis, Yann shares his vision for a map that can finally make urban vulnerability visible. Yann’s dream map focuses ...

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19:40

Episode 18: Cornelia Scholz - The Dragon's Map

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/12/09

What if our most trusted maps are quietly lying to us? This week on 15 Minute Maps, GIS technical advisor Cornelia Schultz (Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre) joins Hugo to reveal a hidden truth about the world’s most vulnerable places: the places we think are empty may simply be unmapped. Working at the intersection of climate change, conflict, and humanitarian response, Cornelia explains why entire communities — especially remote, nomadic, or conflict-affected populations — are missing ...

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19:47

Episode 17 - David de Ridder: Rerouting… to Better...

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/11/24

In this episode of 15 Minute Maps, I speak with David de Ridder, Senior Research Fellow at the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG), who specializes in spatial epidemiology and digital public health. David shares his dream map: a next-generation routing system that doesn’t optimize for speed, but for health. Think: a navigation app that automatically guides you through routes with less air pollution, lower noise, fewer allergens, and greater safety — subtly improving your daily environme...

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21:42

Episode 16 – John Huth: The Map Hidden in the Waves

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/11/17

Ever Wondered How You’d Navigate the Ocean With No Compass, No GPS, and No Land in Sight? Well this episode once again proves the importance of maintaining indigenous knowledge. That question led Bonner Professor John Huth, Harvard physicist and renowned member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, into an entirely different field of research — mapping the ocean waves that Indigenous Marshallese navigators use to navigate their many atolls. In this episode we discuss: How Marsha...

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20:02

Episode 15 - Guilherme Iablonovski: The Map of Matter

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/11/10

We often talk about rebuilding after a disaster, but we leave so little thought for rthe materials needed. Have you ever thought about where all the rubble goes after a war or a flood? That’s the question that led Guilherme Iablonovski, a geospatial data scientist at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, to dedicate his career to mapping matter itself — from concrete and steel to the global flow of sand, food, and everything in between. In this week’s episode of 15-Minute Maps, Gu...

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29:20

Episode 14 - Brianna Pagan Corremonte: The Story of a...

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/11/03

Professor Brianna Pagan Corremonte - remote sensing expert, technical leader, environmentalist, and ultra marathon runner. How can you marry all these elements together into one map? Well Brianna describes her life post wildfires in southern California and the many stories she came across while supporting her neighbours during this troubling time. She wants blend aural story telling with mapping, tying place with history. Not only does she want to put forth historic data to improve response, ...

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18:44

Episode 13: Esperanza Ortega-Tapia - Climate Change...

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/10/27

In this very moving episode, Esperanza Ortega-Tapia describes her dream of being able to map the loss of farming land within BIPOC communities in the United States. A topic incredibly close to her heart, Esperanza not only takes us on a journey of loss of land but also, a loss of cultural heritage. Having grown up in New Mexico, picking chilies with her grandfather on their family land, she has experienced first hand how climate change and systematic oppression has driven many to abandon farm...

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22:59

Episode 12 - Guido Pizzini: Communities at the Heart...

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/10/20

In this episode, Guido Pizzini - Director, Business Development, Impact and Partnerships at Immap Inc. - takes us through his dream of mapping community response to climate change. This idea is driven by his reading of Landscapes of Retreat: '...a reading of how the climate emergency lands in real places across time by paying close attention to adaptation charged with intimate, local memory' Landscapes of Retreat, ROSETTA S. ELKIN Preparedness is at the core of humanitarian response, b...

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23:17

Episode 11 - Sven Schmitz-Leuffen: The Gap Map

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/10/13

Sven Schmitz-Leuffen, GIS and Technical Solutions Lead at the International Committee of the Red Cross has a problem, how to know where and to whom should the ICRC be delivering support to? Well here is where the Gap Map comes in, a comprehensive collection of needs assessments that allow the ICRC to identify the literal 'gaps' in support. We discuss the practicalities of such a map, the pros and cons of the UN cluster system (and the potential existence of a Data Cluster), and the joys of wo...

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23:17

Episode 10 - Song Huang: Dark Skies

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/10/06

From time to time, one feels the need to break with tradition, and while this podcast has normally only dealt with planetary GIS and mapping, in this episode we go beyond our atmosphere and look up and out. Prof. Sung Huang, associate professor at the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, lets us into his universe and tells us bout his dream map - a four dimensional rendering of the universes almost infinite galactic bodies. Though the subject matter is out fo this world,...

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19:32

Episode 9 - Maaz Sheikh: GIS for All

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/09/29

In this episode I am joined by Maaz Sheikh, young GIS entrepeneur and start up king. Ageospatial, the platform he created, uses AI agents and large language models (LLMs) to assist the less GIS savvy in creating their maps. While a contentious issue, he says his platformed is designed to improve accessibility to geospatial data. He tells us about his passion for calisthenics and sports and why so little geospatial data is available for outdoor activity areas. His map would take down the bound...

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20:30

Episode 8 - Rhiannan Price: STEAM not just STEM

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/09/22

Rhiannan Price, program lead at Nasa Lifelines, blends art and science to create her dream map. An advocate of community mapping, Rhiannan believes that modern mapping does not go far enough to evoke the community implications of places so often reduced to points in GIS. We delve into the implications of a map for decision making, whose primary design is not for decision making. What might that map look like? Rhiannan also takes us into her world, and how Nasa Lifelines collaborates with loca...

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19:29

Episode 7 - Varsha Sivaram: Empowering Research with...

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/09/15

Varsha Sivaram, senior economic geographer at FRAYM, takes us into her world where she blends academic research with practical data solutions. In a world where data is king, how do you harness that data correctly and ethically? How do you ensure that work is doubled up and organisations share information responsibly? These are some of the questions we discuss in this weeks episode. One thing is for certain, Varsha believes that geospatial data is not being used to its full potential. Li...

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20:03

Episode 6 - Andrew Schroeder: Users as Creators

15 Minute Maps ·

2025/09/08

GIS IS DEAD! This weeks guest is Andrew Schroeder, Co-founder of WeRobotics, Co-director of CrisisReady, and Vice President of research and analysis at Direct Relief. It may come as a surprise to some given Andrew's background but he posits that the concept of GIS as a tool for humanitarian response is outdated. With the rise of automated mapping and AI supported GIS, Andrew firmly believes that GIS can move into a future where interacting with a GIS will become the realm of polic...

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25 results

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