Justin Donaghy presented on using spatial data mining techniques to analyze and predict natural disasters. Spatial data mining aims to find patterns in geographical data. Donaghy discussed how John Snow first used spatial analysis to discover the source of a cholera outbreak in London. Challenges include inefficient algorithms when dealing with large datasets and lack of standardization. Data mining techniques like statistics, clustering, and classification could help predict events like heat waves and heavy precipitation. Improving distributed mining and developing spatial query languages may help make disaster prediction more accurate.