News – Radiant.Earth

The first Satellite Data Interoperability Workshop is happening next week!

The overall goal of the event is to advance the interoperability of satellite data. The reality is that the use of satellite imagery is still a small niche, even though increased knowledge of our planet has the potential to make a huge difference in everyone’s lives. We believe a significant reason it remains a niche field is that going from raw pixels to actionable insight is still very difficult. As an industry, we force users to search for relevant data in many different locations and then put it on them to pre-process the imagery properly to perform their analysis.

Tech Innovation

SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog 0.5.0 Released!

Radiant.Earth is pleased to announce the release of version 0.5.0 of the STAC specification! Most of the activity is in the github repo, as well as lots of great discussion in our gitter channel. The team is excited for the next sprint in August, and it’s shaping up to be a great gathering — submit on the form if you’re interested in joining.

Editorials, Tech Innovation

Radiant.Earth Launches New Technical Working Group on Machine Learning for Global Development

As part of a recent Radiant.Earth workshop, 30 leading international experts participated in the launch of a new Technical Working Group on Machine Learning for Global Development. The group includes Earth observations (EO), machine learning (ML), and land cover (LC) classification experts, all working collaboratively towards the goal of developing a community standard on best practices for use of ML with EO, a commons for labeled training data catalogues, and a hierarchical schema for global LC classification.

Editorials

Combating Climate Change: Satellite Imagery for Small Island Nations

Small island nations isolated in vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean may be the canaries in the coal mine for what could be climate change’s dangerous impact on a global scale. With nearly a third of the island nation’s population living on land less than 5m above sea level, they are especially vulnerable to the global threat of rising sea levels, extreme weather patterns, deteriorating soil quality, and coral bleaching, all of which damage not only coastlines, but also communities and livelihoods.

Tech Innovation

SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog Progress and Sprint #3 in August!

There’s been some excellent progress on SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) in the past month, so we wanted to share what’s been going on. And we’re also running the third community even in August, so wanted to welcome potential participants.

Community Voices

Einar Bjorgo: Earth Observation Data to Build Climate Resilience

Radiant.Earth is pleased to introduce to you Dr. Einar Bjorgo, Director of the Division for Satellite Analysis and Applied Research and UNOSAT’s Programme Manager at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). In this Q&A, Dr. Bjorgo talks about how to contribute to sustainable development and improve disaster responses for small island nations that are experiencing climate change.

Tech Innovation

Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF Advances

The last month has seen a number of great Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF advances, with lots of enthusiasm at the FOSS4G-NA conference. There’s new software supporting COG’s, a new logo, a new mailing list set up for collaboration, and some great ideas of how to make COG’s more useful by surfacing best practices and making the spec a wee bit more formal.

Tech Innovation

Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF Birds of a Feather at FOSS4G-NA

FOSS4G North America was a great time, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF’s. I shared a number of the cool new examples in my keynote, and then Eugene from Azavea gave a really great overview of the format, along with a number of best practices learned as he implemented it in GeoTrellis and RasterFoundry. It was standing room only for Eugene, in an already quite large room, so was quite cool to see so many people interested in COG.

Tech Innovation

COG Map and tiles.rdnt.io

The Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) revolution marches on! I wanted to share a couple cool projects that we’ve been working on to help demonstrate the power of COG’s. The first is called COG Map, and it’s my first real coding project in over a decade, so I’m pretty proud of it. My Technical Fellowship at Radiant.Earth supports me to push forward standards and infrastructure for Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF’s and SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs.

Tech Innovation, Thought Leadership

Creating a Machine Learning Commons for Global Development

Advances in sensor technology, cloud computing, and machine learning (ML) continue to converge to accelerate innovation in the field of remote sensing. However, fundamental tools and technologies still need to be developed to drive further breakthroughs and to ensure that the Global Development Community (GDC) reaps the same benefits that the commercial marketplace is experiencing.