The DDE had three main activities at the GSA annual meeting, in addition to oral and poster presentations by DDE working group participants.

(1)  Short-course, "OneStratigraphy Database and Its Applications in Stratigraphy and Paleobiology" (Sat, 21 Sept, 6 hours), was led by Junxuan Fan, Jia Yang, et al.  This all-day session of didactic lectures and practical exercises on accessing, contributing and analyzing data within the OneStratigraphy portion of the DDE platform, with emphases on its applications in scientific research and education and its essential tools utilized in stratigraphic and paleobiology studies.

(2)  Deep-Time Digital Earth booth suite (Sun-Wed, 22-25 Sept) had two main bays, both of which used dramatic colorful backdrops of geologic outcrops to attract attendees.  Both bays had endless streams of geologist visitors eager to get more information.

One bay was devoted to exhibiting and explaining DDE-oriented achievements, including the deep-time platform, the international lexicon and outcrop 3D.  The three rotating staff members wore special t-shirts with the DDE logo (see photo)

The other bay in conjunction with the Zhejiang Lab was devoted to demonstrations of GeoGPT, the major AI assistant for geologists.  Those staff members included some the team that has developed this wonderful set of tools (see photo). There was a constant line of attendees eager to try GeoGPT first-hand.

(3)  Special noon session "GeoGPT: An open and revolutionary AI assistant for Geoscientists" (Mon, 23 Sept, 12-1pm).

This special session was devoted to explaining the development and numerous uses of the suite of applications within the free GeoGPT system, such as a geology-oriented "Chat' that includes references to the sources of answers, an ability for a person to upload their own subset of articles to enhance the knowledge-base of a personalized "Chat" function, extraction tools for tables and figures, a map-coordinate tool for geologic maps, etc. The presentations included Dr. Jian Wang (co-founder of Alibaba Cloud) who had just participated in a UN session on the future and governance of AI, held at the United Nations headquarters, New York City.

Additional DDE activities at GSA included discussions with the leadership of GSA and the publication divisions of Amer. Geophys. Union (AGU), Internat. Assoc. Sediment., Springer-Nature and Geol. Soc. London about license agreements to release some of their past journals and monographs for greatly enhancing the knowledge-base of GeoGPT.  The community goal is to enable GeoGPT to provide accurate authoritative answers or advice on all aspects of geological sciences.