News – Radiant Earth Foundation

Hamed Alemohammad: Addressing global challenges with models that are faster

It is our pleasure to introduce Dr. Hamed Alemohammad, Chief Data Scientist with Radiant Earth Foundation. Dr. Alemohammad is a technical leader and researcher with extensive expertise and knowledge in remote sensing and imagery techniques, and statistical and machine learning models for geospatial and big data analytics. With a proven record of developing new algorithms for multi-spectral satellite and airborne observations and analyzing them to infer actionable insights, he is spearheading Radiant MLHub’s open repository of Earth observation training data and ML models.

Radiant MLHub is democratizing ML data and models, and, diversifying EO applications. At its core, Radiant MLHub provides an open source “Hub” for discovery and access of thematic training data and models, which are necessary to innovate for sustainable development globally.

Machine Learning, News

Embracing the New Era of the Digital Revolution for Global Development

A core goal of Radiant Earth Foundation is to raise awareness around innovation in geospatial analytics with a particular focus on ML and EO for the global development community. In this spirit, we present Illuminate, a collection of specially-selected courses and other educational resources.

Standards

Exploiting Multi-Region Data Locality with Lambda@Edge

Last month I had the opportunity to present the architecture behind tiles.rdnt.io: Customer Showcase: Exploiting Multi-Region Data Locality with Lambda@Edge — AWS Online Tech Talks.tiles.rdnt.io is interesting for a few reasons: 1) it dynamically renders map tiles for imagery sources anywhere on the internet, 2) it’s entirely serverless — the tiler itself is implemented as a Python Lambda function, and 3) it’s replicated worldwide to reduce latency when rendering and network egress costs for imagery providers.

Standards

Dreams do come true: STAC Sprint #4 Recap

A couple of weeks ago, the core SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) community gathered in San Francisco (and virtually) to advance the ecosystem and specification, in our fourth in-person sprint. We decided to focus more on the tools and data this time, dedicating the first day to building catalogs and software. Since the start of STAC, there have been two milestones that I’ve been dreaming of — a QGIS plugin and an interactive Javascript image browser; and amazingly, we had huge progress on both, which are now available for everyone.

Machine Learning

Refocusing Radiant Earth Foundation’s Efforts to Impact Global Development with Machine Learning

Data drives decisions. Whether it’s the number on a scale signaling the need to diet or a satellite image showing the extent of flooding for disaster response, data, imagery, and the resulting analyses they enable guide valuable insights and actions.

Radiant Earth Foundation was founded on the premise that much of the world’s best data and imagery was difficult to find and even more difficult to use because of access issues, making these valuable assets stranded and underutilized.

Tech Innovation

STAC 0.7.0 Release and New Website

Chris Holmes is pleased to share two pieces of news about the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs Spec. The first is that we now have a website! The goal of the website is to be a much more approachable set of explanations than the specification itself. Having the specification live on GitHub was done on purpose to make it more accessible to developers, but it can be intimidating to non-developers. Putting up the website is indeed a milestone, signaling that STAC is maturing enough to welcome a wider audience.

A big thanks goes to David Gavin of Digital Earth Australia for doing all the initial website copy and styling at the 3rd STAC Sprint, with his ‘outreach’ group. We are hoping to have another outreach group do comparable tasks at the 4th Sprint, though the group at the last sprint set a very high bar.

Thought Leadership

Geo-Diverse Open Training Data as a Global Public Good

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, Hamed Alemohammad, Chief Data Scientist at Radiant Earth was invited to share how the organization is using open data and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to support the global development community.

Machine learning in support of the SDGs
To effectively leverage open EO data and analytics in support of the SDGs, we turn raw EO data into insights that can guide the decisions required to create a sustainable future. Machine learning is an important part of that process but has one major drawback – the lack of geo-diverse training datasets. Radiant Earth is actively working to fill that gap.

Tech Innovation

Join STAC Sprint #4!

Things have been moving along well in the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog community, but we’ve decided it’s been far too long since our last sprint. While STAC is primarily an online collaboration, the in-person sprints are where we’ve always made our most substantial progress. After our initial inception at a sprint in Boulder, we paired our next two sprints with other groups — the second with WFS 3.0, and the third with Analysis Ready Data. It was great to have the interchange between related groups, but for this sprint, we’ve decided to make it all about STAC.

Community Voices

Awa Thiam: Creating Efficient Sustainable Food Systems with Geospatial Data

It is our pleasure to introduce to you Ms. Awa Thiam, Founder of Lifantou and 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow alumna. Lifantou is an innovative social enterprise connecting smallholder farmers with school canteens in Senegal using geospatial data and tools.

African social entrepreneurs are considered essential for social progress in Africa. Often combining innovative technological solutions to address local societal challenges, these social entrepreneurs are not only creating jobs. Perhaps more interesting, their businesses are transforming all facets of society …

Editorials, News

The stage of maturity — Earth observation in a new era of space exploration

2019 First Quarter EO Market News Round-Up – Space commerce is enjoying a renaissance period mainly due to technological advances that have dramatically decreased cost and increased data and related services. A $17+ billion market (and growing), today’s space industry is on the verge of entering maturity — the stage of self-discovery, boldness, and adventure.

The maturing space industry is evident with players in both private and public sectors accelerating the recent advances in science and technology that makes operating in space more viable for commercial and research interests. This year thus far, the European Space Agency (ESA) tested its new 3D printed rocket thrust chamber to help design more efficient rocket engines.