On September 23, 2026, the H3 community met at Uber's office in New York City for the first H3 Conference, hosted by Fused and Uber. Eleven talks covered crop acreage, climate data, basketball, energy infrastructure, indoor positioning, newsroom maps and more.
Every recording is in the H3 Conference 2026 playlist. Below is a short guide to each talk, with a link to its full write-up.
Sina Kashuk, CEO of Fused, and Isaac Brodsky, CTO and co-founder of Fused, both worked on H3 at Uber. In this talk at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, they revisited the H3 ideas Sina presented eight years ago and showed two new things built on them: an AI model that scores hexagons offline on a laptop, and an open H3-native climate dataset.
Kristin Scholten is a farmer turned data scientist in the advanced analytics department at Nationwide, and she is building OpenFields, an AI prediction engine for agriculture. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, she argued that crop acreage is decided months before any satellite can see a plant, and showed how she used H3 to put a crop probability on every field in North Dakota.
Guillaume Sueur is the founder of Geomermaids, a Boston-based consultancy that designs cloud-native geospatial systems, with 25 years in GIS. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, Guillaume showed how H3 can give GeoParquet something it lacks today: overviews, built as a self-discovering pyramid of files keyed by H3 cell.
Marie Hoeger is a Staff Engineer at Carbon Mapper, where she works on the data systems behind a freely accessible catalog of global methane and CO2 emissions observations, and previously led a geospatial ML platform team at Pachama. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, she shared lessons from two projects: combining many data layers on H3 to score land for reforestation across Brazil, and mapping sparse global methane detections.
Matt Forrest of Wherobots is a geospatial data expert who helps GIS professionals adopt cloud-native geospatial infrastructure and hosts the Spatial Stack podcast. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, he showed how H3 turned the question "where is the geography of basketball?" into a single index that can be compared across the whole country.
Levente Juhász is an Assistant Professor of Geospatial Analytics at the University of Florida and director of the Geospatial Analytics, Technology and Open Research (GATOR) Lab. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, Levente argued that GeoAI models built on flat, pixel-based maps carry projection distortion into their answers, and that discrete global grid systems (DGGS) such as H3 are a better foundation, as long as you understand their trade-offs.
Mo Fotouhi is a Senior Manager of Data Science at John Deere, where he leads teams working on geospatial intelligence and AI for agriculture. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City he gave a lightning talk he described as a love letter to H3 with footnotes: H3 makes agricultural data easy to combine, but field-level questions need finer detail and a sense of time that H3 does not provide on its own.
Robert Murphy is CEO of Othersphere, a spatial economics platform spun out of Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy that helps decide where energy-intensive infrastructure should be built. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City he showed how Othersphere tiles the world with H3 so developers and financial firms can screen everywhere for good sites before digging into the details.
Sean Gorman is a co-founder of Zephr, a positioning and navigation AI company. In a talk pre-recorded and played at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, he showed how Zephr uses one H3 index, at two resolutions, to organize both GNSS corrections and indoor visual map tiles for a single positioning engine.
Xun Li, a Software Engineer at Foursquare who works on the Foursquare Spatial Agent and the Foursquare H3 Hub, presented three free tools Foursquare has built on H3. The key point: when every dataset already shares the same H3 cells, an AI agent can answer a spatial question from a single sentence, because it only has to choose and weight layers rather than solve geometry. The talk was pre-recorded and played at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City.
Tim Wallace, Senior Editor for Geography at The New York Times, toured maps made for the news and for fun, from newsroom projects built on building footprints and satellite imagery to grid-based art drawn by a pen plotter. In the Q&A, Tim made the case that everything about a map, from its shape and tone to what gets labeled, shapes the reader's experience. The talk was presented at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City.