The I-GUIDE Forum 2026 & HDR Ecosystem Conference features a dynamic series of workshops and tutorials designed to equip participants with practical skills and in-depth knowledge across key areas in geospatial AI, cyberGIS, and data-driven sustainability science. Led by experts from leading institutions, these hands-on sessions provide opportunities to engage directly with emerging tools, methodologies, and applications shaping the future of geospatial research and innovation.
These workshops and tutorials will be organized throughout the day on Monday August 3, 2026 with both morning and afternoon sessions available.
Registration Required
There is no cost to attend these workshops if you are registered for the I-GUIDE Forum and/or the HDR Ecosystem Conference. However, to ensure a high-quality and interactive learning experience, all workshops and tutorials require advance registration. Please review the list of available sessions below and complete the registration form to secure your spot.
Note: participants will need to be registered for the I-GUIDE Forum and/or the HDR Ecosystem Conference to attend these workshops/tutorials.
Register for Workshops and Tutorials
Morning Sessions
1. Orientation to the I-GUIDE Platform (morning session)
Instructors:
- Members of the I-GUIDE Cyberinfrastructure team
Time & Day: 9:00–11:00 am Central, Monday August 3, 2026 Room: TBA
This session offers an introductory walkthrough of the I-GUIDE Platform, showcasing its capabilities in enabling reproducible, data-intensive geospatial research. Attendees will explore platform components, user interface, example notebooks, and how it supports workflows across disciplines such as sustainability, hydrology, and environmental modeling.
Skills and Background: General interest in geospatial platforms. No technical background needed.
Requirements: Participants should bring their own laptops.
2. Any Model, Any Place, Any Time: A Hands-on Tutorial for Obtaining Remote Sensing Foundation Model Embeddings with rs-embed
Instructors:
- Dingqi Ye, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Daniel Kiv, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Wei Hu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Jimeng Shi, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Time & Day: 9:00 -11:00 am Central; Monday August 3, 2026 Room: TBA
Remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) have shown strong potential for geospatial analysis, but their practical use remains difficult because existing models rely on different platforms, input data, preprocessing pipelines, and output formats. These differences create barriers to obtaining, comparing, and reusing RSFM embeddings in reproducible workflows. This two-hour tutorial introduces rs-embed, a Python library that provides a unified, region-of-interest-centric interface for obtaining RSFM embeddings using location, time, and model ID. Participants will learn the motivation and main features of rs-embed, access its repository and documentation, and follow hands-on demonstrations on the I-GUIDE Platform. The tutorial will cover core API usage, embedding visualization, batch embedding generation, and a simple downstream geospatial task, illustrating how standardized RSFM embeddings may support participants’ future research and applications.
Skills and Background: Participants are expected to have basic familiarity with Python programming and Jupyter notebooks. A general understanding of geospatial concepts, such as coordinates, bounding boxes, spatial resolution, and regions of interest, will be helpful. Basic knowledge of remote sensing imagery, spectral bands, temporal ranges, and introductory machine learning concepts such as embeddings and feature vectors is recommended but not required. No prior experience with remote sensing foundation models is assumed.
Requirements: Participants should bring their own laptops.
Afternoon Sessions
3. Orientation to the I-GUIDE Platform
Instructors:
- Members of the I-GUIDE Cyberinfrastructure Team
Time & Day: 1:00 - 3:00 pm Central; Monday, August 3, 2026 Room: TBA
This session offers an introductory walkthrough of the I-GUIDE Platform, showcasing its capabilities in enabling reproducible, data-intensive geospatial research. Attendees will explore platform components, user interface, example notebooks, and how it supports workflows across disciplines such as sustainability, hydrology, and environmental modeling.
Skills and Background: General interest in geospatial platforms. No technical background needed.
Requirements: Attendees should bring a laptop to fully engage in the interactive exercises and activities.
4. From Dam Risk Metrics to Interactive Maps: A Hands-on Jupyter Tutorial for Open Geospatial REST APIs
Instructors:
- Jungha Woo, Purdue University
- Xiao Liu, Purdue University
- Erick Li, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Michael Englert, Utah State University
Time & Day: 1:00 - 3:00 pm Central; Monday August 3, 2026 Room: TBA
This tutorial takes participants on a journey from web-based data discovery to advanced spatial database validation. We begin with the "finished product"—the High Hazard Dam Dashboard—to establish a research context for dam-failure vulnerability. Participants will then "peek behind the curtain" at the Swagger API documentation to discover the endpoints that power the service. Moving into Jupyter Notebooks, we transition to a programmatic workflow: mastering the "functional plumbing" of REST APIs to query risk metrics, constructing complex ordinal filters, and rendering interactive GeoJSON maps. The session culminates in a "Trust but Verify" challenge. Using The Littlest JupyterHub (TLJH), each student will access a private PostGIS sandbox to push API-sourced geometries into a database and run their own spatial joins ($ST\_Intersects$). This "round-trip" teaches a vital lesson in data provenance: how to verify precomputed web results against raw spatial logic computationally. Attendees will leave with a complete, reusable toolbox of notebooks for bridging the gap between high-level web services and defensible spatial data science.
Skills and Background: No programming experience required. The tutorial utilizes The Littlest JupyterHub (TLJH) to provide a zero-install environment. Each participant is provisioned with an isolated container with a pre-configured PostGIS sidecar. This infrastructure allows students to focus on spatial logic and SQL rather than database administration, ensuring even those new to databases can complete the validation challenge.
Requirements: Attendees need to bring their own laptop.
5. From Compliance to Confidence: Applying the I-GUIDE Data Ethics Toolkit for Effective, Responsible, and Reproducible Geospatial Research
Instructor:
- Peter Darch, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Time & Day: 1:00–300 pm Central; Monday August 3, 2026 Room: TBA
This interactive workshop introduces participants to the I-GUIDE Data Ethics Toolkit (I-GUIDE DET), designed to support responsible, reproducible, and policy-compliant research across the full geospatial data science lifecycle. Drawing on long-term research of I-GUIDE platform leaders, and this suite of lightweight tools was developed specifically for the needs of the I-GUIDE platform. Participants will learn how to integrate the toolkit into their projects from the outset, and update it iteratively throughout. Each component of the toolkit is designed for manual use or future automation and supports compliance with policies such as GDPR, the EU AI Act, and major funding agency requirements for data management and Open Science.
Skills and Background: No prior experience required. This topic is well-suited for geospatial data scientists and researchers interested in data and AI ethics.
Requirements: Attendees should bring a laptop to fully engage in the interactive exercises and activities.
6. Hands-on with Data to Science (D2S): An Open-Source Platform for Managing, Sharing, and Analyzing UAV Geospatial Data
Instructors:
- Jinha Jung, Purdue University
- Minyoung Jung, Purdue University
- Benjamin G. Hancock, Purdue University
Time & Day: 1:00 - 5:00 pm Central (with a break); Monday, August 3, 2026 Room: TBA
Data to Science (D2S) is an open-source ecosystem developed to address a wide range of practical challenges in processing and managing high-quality geospatial data, particularly voluminous Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) data. Since the release of its first official version in 2024, D2S has been continuously expanded and refined. To enhance user accessibility, D2S centers around a web application with a modern, intuitive interface that connects users and their data through a common API, supporting companion tools such as the Python library (d2spy), QGIS plugin (D2S Browser), and centralized open data repository (D2S STAC repository). This integrated ecosystem has been actively applied to a variety of multidisciplinary research projects, supporting data-driven analysis and collaboration. In this workshop, participants will learn, together with the D2S development team, how to effectively utilize the components of the D2S ecosystem in real-world applications. Using our user-friendly tools, you will explore and visualize data within the D2S ecosystem.
Skills and Background: Accessible to all user levels and completely beginner-friendly, with no prior technical or programming experience required.
Requirements: Participants must bring their own laptops and have installed both an Internet browser and the latest stable version of QGIS. Participants are encouraged to bring their own UAV datasets, though sample data will be provided if needed.