[California] Introductions, local chapters

[Matt Hancher]

Okay, since we're doing introductions....

I work at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.  I lead
NASA's planetary data collaboration with Google, publicly-visible
fruits of which include the NASA Layer in Google Earth and the newly
updated Google Moon.  I'm also one of the lead developers of the
NASA Vision Workbench, an open-source C++ image processing library,
which I talked about at FOSS4G '07.  Though it's first and foremost
a foundational image processing library, VW includes support for
things like orthoprojection of aerial and satellite imagery using a
camera model and a DEM, or terrain reconstruction using stereo
correlation.  We're currently releasing public alphas of version
2.0.  Join the mailing list to find out more.  (Just Google Vision
Workbench.)  My background, before I got into the image processing
business, is in electrical engineering and robotics.

I think the idea of having local chapters be the grass-roots
foundation for the state chapter makes a lot of sense.  To that end,
I have put up a stub of a San Francisco Bay Area chapter page on the
wiki.  As it stands, the local chapter has two goals for 2008:
organizing a few in-person get-togethers, and supporting the growth
and formation of the California chapter.

If any of you are in the SF Bay Area, I encourage you to add yourselves
to the list on the wiki:

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

For the moment we can just use this california mailing list for
discussions, unless/until we reach a point where there's too much
local discussion.

Matt

Matthew D. Hancher
Lead, NASA/Google Planetary Content Team
Intelligent Systems Division
NASA Ames Research Center
mdh at email.arc.nasa.gov