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Speakers
Aaron Addison
Executive Director
World Geospatial Industry Council
Aaron Addison is the Executive Director of the World Geospatial Industry Council (WGIC), where his focus is geospatial industry outreach working with companies and organizations around the globe on challenges related to the policy, implementation and communication of geospatial data. His 30 years of international experience includes extensive work in the public and private sectors as well as NGOs and higher education institutions. Addison currently provides program management leadership for WGIC activities in education, workforce development, digital twins and recently initiated GeoAction Africa project examining the contributions that geospatial tools and services may provide to countries in Africa. In addition to his operational and project management roles, he also staffs the WGIC Industry\Academia committee working to bring education and research together with geospatial industry. Prior to joining WGIC, Aaron served as the Director of Data Services for Washington University in St. Louis. In 2006 he joined WU to build a university-wide geospatial program for teaching, research and administration. His teams delivered analytic and technical services to faculty, students and staff as well as leading the creation of a GIS Certificate curriculum and teaching courses at multiple universities.
Ryan Ciesielski
Global Head of Geospatial
National Grid
Ryan Ciesielski is Global Head of Geospatial at National Grid, a FTSE 20 critical national infrastructure operator serving over 30 million customers across the UK and United States. He leads an enterprise-wide geospatial transformation spanning seven business units, underpinning billions of planned infrastructure investments across the full asset lifecycle, from planning through to operations. The first chapter of Ryan’s career was spent in the Royal Engineers, The British Army, where he built deep expertise in military geospatial intelligence, including serving as the designated geospatial expert supporting the UK’s Nuclear Bomb Disposal capability, and later as Head of Geospatial for UK Special Forces. The second chapter of his career has focused on applying that decision-intelligence foundation to energy systems and critical national infrastructure. Today, Ryan leads the strategic application of geospatial intelligence to improve resilience, safety, net-zero delivery, and investment confidence across one of the worlds most complex energy systems. Ryan specialises in elevating geospatial from a technical function to a board-level, value-generating capability, aligning people, data, systems, and intelligence to enable faster, more confident enterprise decisions that improve customer outcomes. He is a globally recognised geospatial thought leader in utilities and energy, and a pragmatic advocate for applied geospatial intelligence at scale, focused on delivering real-world business and customer value.
Geeth De Mel
Manager, Climate and Sustainability | Senior Research Scientist
IBM
Geeth de Mel is a Senior Research Scientist and Manager at IBM Research Europe (UK), working at the intersection of AI, scientific computing, and sustainability. His work focuses on building AI systems that can understand, reason, and collaborate with scientific solvers to accelerate discovery. Geeth leads strategic research efforts on algorithmic innovations for knowledge-intensive discovery challenges in sectors such as Earth and space, materials, and climate resilience, working closely with NASA, STFC, and industry partners.
He earned his PhD from the University of Aberdeen in knowledge representation, semantics, and reasoning under uncertainty, followed by postdoctoral research at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), where he led work on decision support and fusion reasoning. In 2013, he joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, contributing to semantically aware IoT systems, stream information interpretation, and policy automation. At IBM Research Europe (UK), he now leads teams in Earth and space informatics, scientific foundation models, and knowledge-centric AI. His current research includes natural-language grounding for scientific problems, agentic workflows, scientific model orchestration, solver-aware AI, and domain adaptation for complex scientific and environmental systems.
Ed Parsons
Digital Geographer
Ed Parsons is a Digital Geographer, a Geospatial Technology Advisor and Keynote Speaker. He was Google’s Geospatial Technologist, with responsibility for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using Geography. In this role he maintained links with Governments, Universities, Research and Standards Organisations which were involved in the development of Geospatial Technology. Ed also lead Google’s efforts in maintaining a healthy Open Data Ecosystem to support AI in Europe. Ed is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium and was co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. He also represented Google at the EMTEL committee of ETSI developing geospatial solutions for emergency telecommunications. He is a Visiting Professor at University College London and has been an industry advisor to a number of international universities. Ed was the first Chief Technology Officer in the 200-year-old history of Ordnance Survey, and was instrumental in moving the focus of the organisation from mapping to Geographical Information. He came to the Ordnance Survey from Autodesk, where he was EMEA Applications Manager for the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Division. Ed earned a Masters degree in Applied Remote Sensing from Cranfield Institute of Technology, holds a Honorary Doctorate in Science from Kingston University, London. and is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Institute of Navigation. In 2024 Ed was awarded the inaugural “Professional Geography Award” for excellence in the use of geography in professional practice by the Royal Geographical Society.
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