Points of Interest are just interesting points.

Points of interest (POIs) can make or break a map, but complete, current comprehensive sources of them are elusive. If you need every bar, restaurant, and hotel on your next project, where will you find them? That answer turns out to be more difficult than you might realize. Our job is to help you better understand your choices – and deliver puns about points.

We've gathered speakers tonight that talk about, use and develop points of interest to enhance their work. We will hear how they approach the problem, develop a new dataset – or how they've just used points to make a point.

So join us for this pointed discussion on POIs, whether your interests are the points or the interest, pointedly.

SPEAKERS

Thomas Turnbull [@thomasturnbull (https://twitter.com/thomasturnbull) ]‏ is a UX Engineer at Google, where he works on Google Maps, on local search and data. He's worked with maps since going orienteering as a kid in Scotland. He studied Geography at the University of Edinburgh, then moved to New York ten years ago to work for Green Map System, a non-profit based in NYC that engages communities around the world to make maps around themes of sustainable living. While working at Zagat (a restaurant guide) he published a book for O'Reilly on open source mapping.

Dan Phiffer [@dphiffer (https://twitter.com/dphiffer)] is an artist, programmer, and researcher based in Brooklyn. He helps build open source mapping tools at Mapzen and is an Impact Resident at Eyebeam Art + Tech. Dan is interested in how computers shape our ways of thinking, and how our values are reflected in the systems we build.

Rahul Maddimsetty [@rahulpratapm (https://twitter.com/rahulpratapm)] is an Engineering Manager at Foursquare, where he leads the Venues and Geo teams. The Venues team is tasked with modeling real world places and keeping Foursquare's databases of 100 million places high quality and its community of over 40000 superusers productive, motivated and nice to each other (which is exactly as scary as it sounds). He previously worked over 7 years at Microsoft, most recently on Geocoding at Bing Maps.

Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher [@chrisklapper (https://twitter.com/chrisklapper), @pgallaghernyc (https://twitter.com/pgallaghernyc)] are a husband and wife collaborative art team. In 2011, they embarked on their first direct collaboration with their hugely successful installation, ‘Symphony in D Minor’; a self-contained thunderstorm, which is now installed as a permanent piece at Hydropolis Museum in Wroclaw, Poland. Their work is multimedia, multidimensional and large scale. Their subject matter is data and information and the creation of environments and experiences. Overall, they look to explore new technologies and to use them to express immense ideas on a human scale. Employing sound, sculpture, video, projection mapping, data visualization, composites and digital new media, they look to explore every expressive opportunity that presents itself.

SCHEDULE

6:30PM: Mingle: doors, beer, pizza and people
7:00PM: Presentations & Q&A
8:30PM+: The after-hours celebrations