About the authors

Abdishakur Hassan is a geographic information systems (GIS) expert and consultant with over 5 years of experience working with UN-Habitat. He holds an MSc in geoinformation science and earth observations. During his tenure as a GIS expert, Abdishakur has developed fully fledged GIS applications in the urban planning and land administration domains. He is interested in all things related to geospatial data science.

I would like to thank my wife, Sirad, who raises our three beautiful children, always prioritizing our family over her professional career, and succeeding in managing and balancing family life with her professional career. My children, Mohamed, Manal, and Almas, have also been an inspiration during writing of this book. I would also like to thank Roshan and Snehal and the editing team at Packt for always being constructive during this period.

Jayakrishnan Vijayaraghavan is a geospatial data scientist, innovator, and author of a book titled ArcGIS for JavaScript developers. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and has over 8 years of work experience. He has built patented technologies and products in the geospatial domain and has coached teams on leveraging mapping and spatial analytics tools for solving pertinent business problems. He is adept at computational geometry, especially in graph networks and in geospatial inferencing. He is a DAAD scholar and a winner of the UN-Habitat special jury award. He is keen on developing intelligent and ubiquitous mapping systems by integrating ML and DL techniques with GIS. He is also a novelist and a certified UAV pilot.

I would like to thank the Packt publishing team; the editors; my coauthor, Abdishakur; and the reviewers for helping me to bring this book, which I was so passionate about, to fruition. Also, a special shout-out to Roshan and Snehal, whose tireless support is highly appreciated.