A new chapter

2/25/2026

Dear CGA,

After a long and very enjoyable time, it is time for me to move on. 

Thank you, Peter Bol and Wendy Guan, for hiring me back in 2007. At that time, I thought my seven years with a Pennsylvania firm was a long stretch, but I didn’t know what was in store.

CGA and IQSS offered me a chance to envision, and then create new kinds of platforms, tools, and data. I was encouraged to develop collaborations across Harvard and around the world, and it was a privilege to work for organizations committed to trustworthy technology and lowering barriers to accessing it. These and other factors have made the years at CGA among the most rewarding of my professional life. 

During this time we traversed epochs! We moved from desktop to cloud, from artisanal to big, from query+viz to inference, to digital twins, to getting a bead on AI. 

Despite, (or perhaps because of) all the churn, there are rhymes between CGA’s founding and today. In both moments, for example the existing technology was/is coherent enough to warrant a Harvard initiative, but young enough that we could/can shape the field.

Back then, the geospatial field was on the cusp of an online revolution.

Now, we are on the cusp of an inferential revolution. But while inferential and symbolic models like ChatGPT, are ubiquitous, and foundation models for mapping just emerging, inferential models of the physical world, for our purposes, don’t quite exist yet. 

Future breakthroughs (I believe), will be in systems that facilitate cumulative learning about the physical world in ways that enable inferencing between the quite separate realms of physical and symbolic data. 

The work of developing spatial inferencing systems, and making them general, while keeping them open and anchored in the scientific method, is the responsibility of public service oriented institutions around the world, including the academy, business, government, and nonprofit. As I depart CGA, I look forward to helping take on some of this responsibility in various capacities.

I am deeply grateful to the colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends who made these years so rich, and to an institution that gave me room to experiment, to fail, to try some more, and sometimes to succeed. 

I hope to stay in touch with my friends and colleagues at CGA, IQSS, and Harvard.

With thanks and affection,
Ben

Goodbye gathering at IQSS, March 12, 12:30-2pm