News – Page 2 – Radiant Earth Foundation

Data Challenge Winner: Q&A with Christian Ayala Lauroba

A conversation with the First Place winning team’s lead of the AI4FoodSecurity Data Challenge.

Hosted on ESA’s AI4EO platform, the AI4FoodSecurity data challenge brought together participants worldwide to find the best machine learning/AI solutions for crop identification using Planet Fusion data and Sentinel-1 and -2 data. The challenge covered two areas of interest, Germany and South Africa, with high-quality cadastral data on field boundaries and crop types as ground truth input.

Machine Learning

Enabling Agricultural Dataflows in Radiant MLHub for Geospatial Machine Learning Analytics

How Radiant MLHub strengthens the data collection to analytics pipeline for agriculture projects.

Radiant Earth Foundation is strengthening geospatial machine learning (ML) workflows for organizations working on agriculture projects by streamlining the process, from ground reference data collection to insight analytics, through Radiant MLHub.

Radiant MLHub is an open-access library dedicated to geospatial training data and ML models. Since its inception in 2019, Radiant has focused on developing and aggregating geo-diverse benchmark data that practitioners can use to create applications and enable data-driven policies that impact lives worldwide. The datasets vary from…

Community Voices

Radiant MLHub Spotlight Q&A: Victor Faraggi

Accelerating climate change applications with machine learning models and remote sensing data.

Meet Victor Faraggi, our Community Voice for the second quarter of 2022. Victor is a Computer Science Engineering graduate from the University of Chile. There, he’s been part of the Teaching Staff of multiple courses, such as Algorithm Design and Analysis, Introduction to Data Mining, and Machine Learning. Currently, Victor is working towards his M.Sc. at the intersection of Graph Representation Learning and scientific discovery. The nature of his work sparks due to his interest in contributing his grain of salt to problems that can help tackle climate change.

Standards

Next Week: See an Incredible Selection of Cloud-Native Geo Talks

I am very pleased to announce the schedule for the Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Event that I’m organizing with the Open Geospatial Consortium next week (April 19th and 20th). We’ll have over 70 5-minute lightning talks, along with 6 in-depth tutorials, from an incredible set of speakers. The event will be entirely virtual and completely free and is spread across time zones to be friendly to a global audience. The talks will also be posted as quickly as possible, so everyone can see the ones that aren’t in the right time zone.

Standards

Join us for the Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Event!

April 19th and 20th brings together the COG, STAC, Zarr & COPC communities to share experiences and welcome new users.

I’m pleased to announce that we have just opened registration for the Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Event we’re putting on with the OGC on April 19th and 20th. You can read more background in my previous post and in the recap from the first event. The core idea is to highlight an exciting new trend in geospatial, welcoming new users to learn about some incredible communities. From the sign-up page:

Standards

Get funded to code software for STAC

Announcing three open requests for proposals for SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) projects.

In my previous post, I shared that we’ll be funding a number of different STAC initiatives. One of our goals with the STAC ecosystem funding is to grow the number of contributors working on STAC. To that end, we have three completely open requests for proposals that are designed to help fund developers to have some paid time on a few key projects. We encourage everyone to apply and are especially interested in proposals from traditionally underrepresented groups.

Standards

Save the date! Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Event on April 19–20

Mark it on your calendars and apply now to speak about COG, STAC, Zarr or COPC.

In September of 2020, we organized the first ‘Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Day’, which shared all that was going on with Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COG) & SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) with a wider audience. Though I am clearly biased, it was my favorite event of the last three years, as it really showed how far these new emerging specs have come and it brought many new collaborators into the community.

Standards

STAC Updates, February 2022

In the last update post, I shared that we had a great set of sponsors come in to further the greater STAC ecosystem. I’m pleased to share that we had a first successful ‘funders call’ to determine the priorities for the money we raised. This probably slowed the process a bit, but it was super valuable for the STAC Project Steering Committee to hear from key sponsors what they see as most needed in the STAC ecosystem. It was a great conversation, and I look forward to future calls.

Machine Learning

Detecting Agricultural Croplands from Sentinel-2 Satellite Imagery

A guide to identifying croplands with reasonable accuracy using a semantic segmentation model. We developed UNet-Agri, a benchmark machine learning model that classifies croplands using open-access Sentinel-2 imagery at 10m spatial resolution with ground reference data provided by the Western Cape Department of Agriculture in South Africa. This post is a step-by-step walkthrough of how we developed the model and evaluated its performance. Understanding what UNet-Agri does will help you build your model and deploy it for a similar application.

News

Winning Solutions to Prediction Crop Types in Western Cape, South Africa from Data Challenge

In this webinar, the first-place winners of the Radiant Earth Spot the Crop data challenge on Zindi present their winning solutions to prediction crop types in Western Cape, South Africa. Raphael Kiminya from Kenya won the track that used satellite image time-series of Sentinel-2 multi-spectral data as input to his model. MG Ferreira from South Africa and Tien-Dung LE from Belgium teamed up to win the track that used Sentinel 2 and Sentinel-1 (radar) satellite data as input to their model. Mike Wallace from the Western Cape Department of Agriculture and Phillip Olbrich from GIZ will provide brief remarks, followed by a Q&A session. Watch the recording.