About Shaam
Shaam Adam has been with U-Spatial since December 2022. In that time, he moved from Undergraduate Research Assistant to GIS Technician to his current role as GIS Specialist.
He's currently pursuing a Master of Geographic Information Science with a minor in Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Minnesota, building on his B.S. in Geography with a GIS minor (2023).
His work centers on web GIS development, Python automation, and applied AI, including deploying locally-hosted large language models for internal chatbot tools.
Key Projects and Initiatives
Global Climate Geodesign Competition
This international contest invites designers and researchers worldwide to develop spatial plans that maximize climate resilience. Shaam contributes spatial data analysis and builds custom tools to support the University's entries, work that builds on UMN's earlier regional study for the competition spanning an area from the Red River to Duluth.
Statewide Lead Service Line Project
As part of U-Spatial's ongoing work with the Minnesota Department of Health to map lead service lines across the state, Shaam cleaned and geocoded large datasets and modified Python and ArcPy scripts to process spatial and tabular data, helping ensure the underlying data was accurate and ready for statewide analysis.
RAG-based AI chatbot
Shaam is developing a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot to support internal collaboration between University of Minnesota researchers, staff, and faculty, with a planned migration to Azure AI Foundry and LiteLLM to support the tool at scale.
Areas of expertise
- GIS & Spatial: ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS JavaScript SDK
- Programming: Python (ArcPy, Pandas, GeoPandas), SQL (PostgreSQL/PostGIS), R
- Web Development: JavaScript, HTML, Arcade, Vite/npm
- Applied AI: RAG-based LLM applications, Azure AI Foundry, LiteLLM
Work with Shaam
Reach out, consultations are free for the U of M community.