2024 EYS winner Alysha van Duynhoven has advice for future candidates

Last year, Alysha van Duynhoven demonstrated that a computing science background can lead to winning an Esri Young Scholars Award. Now, she has advice for students hoping to become Canada’s next Esri Young Scholar.

Every year in late January or early February, Esri Canada starts its search for Canada’s Esri Young Scholar (EYS). After a few years of awarding a cash bursary to the winner due to travel restrictions, the prize in 2024 was once again a trip to the Esri User Conference (UC) and Education Summit @ Esri UC in San Diego. Last year’s winner, Alysha van Duynhoven, shared her experiences at the UC through a post in the Esri Canada Centres of Excellence blog.

As we launch our search for the 2025 Young Scholar, I asked Alysha to share more about what she has studied, what other conferences she has attended – and whether she has any advice for students applying for the EYS Award.

As I find is often the case with award students, you’ve taken a few intriguing courses as part of your studies. For example, you took one called Artificial Intelligence Survey several years ago. Is what we are seeing with AI now similar to how it was described in that course?

It has been a while since I took that course! I remember that the professor invited guest lecturers, and we discussed videos or articles of AI in the media at the time. We explored AI applications such as medical diagnoses, interactive personal assistants, self-driving cars, autonomous agents, activity recognition from video, and tabular data classification. The advancements in these areas have occurred more rapidly than anticipated, in both good ways and bad. 

Have you had an opportunity to use any of the GeoAI tools or AI assistants in ArcGIS?

Yes, I have been exploring the GeoAI tools in ArcGIS Pro for my research work. I am a big fan of the AutoML tools from the Feature and Tabular Analysis toolset, which have simplified previously custom programmed solutions for my work. The tools are beginner-friendly, so I often encourage lab colleagues and keen undergraduate students in courses I TA for to explore these first. In the application example of my EYS project, I integrated outcomes of the AutoML tools with cellular automata models implemented with the Geographic Automata Add-In to guide allocations of new urban developments. I implemented a similar procedure using the same tools for a case study described in one of my papers published last summer. I look forward to trying other GeoAI tools and am excited to explore new AI workflows supported in ArcGIS Pro in the future!

You majored in Computing Science as an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University. Do you feel this gave you any insights about GIS or skills that students majoring in Geography may not have?

I think that one of the amazing parts of GIS is that it bridges so many disciplines. It does not exclude participants who did not major in a particular field. Having majored in Computing Science, I know I lack the domain knowledge that students majoring in other disciplines have. Participating in GIS requires an interdisciplinary skillset, and I believe it thoroughly benefits from collaboration with and between domain experts.

In terms of GIS skills, my technical background certainly drives my curiosity about how tools and techniques are or can be implemented. However, GIS skills are accessible to those with or without interests in programming. What I would recommend to students who are interested in expanding their GIS skillset is to find a problem they are passionate about and build skills toward solving it.

You also completed the Computing Science Co-operative Education program. Did any of your co-op placements have a geographic or spatial information component?

No, unfortunately, they did not. However, my co-op experiences provided an essential foundation to my GIScience journey. During my software development internships, I was provided incredible opportunities to expand my technical skills while being enmeshed in real-world projects at two different companies. In my first placement, I worked mostly with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS on an Energy Intelligence Software web application. At my second internship, I worked primarily with C++ on an ODBC driver solution. This is where I learned how to use Visual Studio and its debugging features more fully, which was vital to developing the Geographic Automata Add-In described in my Esri Young Scholar award project. In hindsight, my co-op experiences were central to my initial encounter with GIS and discovering how my skills and interests converged in this field.

Have you attended any other conferences recently – and if so, how do they compare to the Esri UC?

In April 2024, I attended and presented at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Honolulu. This was my first experience presenting at a conference outside of Canada. My experiences at the Esri UC in San Diego just a few months later were certainly very different.

At the AAG conference, everyone in the special session I presented at worked in a specific research area. As a graduate student, attending AAG provided an opportunity to connect with others pursuing the depths of similar research areas that I work in. It was also a great opportunity to meet researchers behind the papers that shape my own work.

In contrast, the Esri UC forced me to “zoom out” from my doctoral research to learn more about how GIS is being used in other domains and expand my knowledge of what tools are available. The environment cultivated at the Esri UC is one-of-a-kind – everyone there is open to connect and excited to discuss such a vast variety of work. Explaining my work to such a diverse audience at the Map Gallery Reception was a valuable experience. I also had amazing opportunities to connect with the developers of ArcGIS Pro tools and the ArcGIS Pro SDK for .NET.

While academic conferences are important for connecting with others who are pursuing similar topics in depth, the Esri UC is beneficial for expanding views of available tools, technologies, and applications to inspire student research work. I highly recommend that other students consider attending the Esri UC in addition to academic conferences.

Do you have any advice for students who may be hoping to win an Esri Young Scholars award in future years?

Absolutely – here is some advice I would provide to anyone applying for the Esri Young Scholars Award in Canada:

• Start early. Read through the requirements and, ideally, find a mentor to discuss your project with. For example, if your school is part of the Esri Canada Centres of Excellence program, this is a great place to start looking for resources and connecting with someone you can discuss your ideas with.
• Check out previous award-winning projects from Canada’s Esri Young Scholars Award program and from international Young Scholars as well. I found it beneficial to survey a wide range of projects to get ideas for how story maps are laid out.
• If you are unfamiliar with ArcGIS StoryMaps, create a test project and try out various components. For example, I did not know how to add interactive map components and learning how to add more custom elements took time to figure out.
• Write content for your poster and story map in a separate document first. This makes referencing and in-text citations easier to adjust, too.
• Create or collect visuals as soon as possible. I absolutely underestimated the time required to create video elements, GIFs, and images to support the text in the poster and story map submissions!
• Just go for it. If you are passionate about your work, it will shine through. With my project being of a very technical nature, I was worried about how it may be received and that it would not measure up to previous award-winning work addressing other kinds of problems. Regardless of the outcome, the award application was tremendous practice for communicating my work, expanding my GIS and related technical skills, and developing a project for my portfolio that I was excited to share with others.

Applications are now being accepted for Canada’s 2025 Esri Young Scholars Award! The deadline is March 19, 2025. For more information and to apply, visit Esri Canada’s Scholars portal.