The view from 36,000 kilometers and the ground
By: Rebecca Woerner
There’s something profound about looking at Earth from high above. I’m feeling that more than ever after an amazing two days at #SatSummit, after connecting with so many of the biggest players putting that perspective into action to reach new frontiers for global development.
We covered big opportunities and successes — how the World Bank is improving global poverty measurement, how Bogotá and Ho Chi Minh City set development priorities, how Facebook, Mercy Corps, and NASA are building cross-sector partnerships, how The New York Times and Daily Overview are finding new ways to tell compelling stories, how the UN, USDA, and the European Space Agency are monitoring crop health and food security.
And we talked through big challenges — opening data access, removing the ground-truth bottleneck to unlock more data insight, and the ethics and social responsibility around collecting data as resolution and recognition open up the potential to collect personal information.
See below for some of the highlights, announcements, discussions, and of course, a party with satellites, an incredible cake, and a real astronaut!
Product launches and announcements:
Global Nightlights Project (https://t.co/6ibpYZXTJE) launches & tracks nightlight output around globe w/ accessible data down to village-level. Will open up VIIRS data as @awscloud public dataset in next couple months #SatSummit
Psyched to show off the team's new open data UI for #GBDXnotebooks at @sat_summit - free data access and compute in the community tier https://t.co/XezUIJN1lo
The satellite systems we use to analyze/distribute data about Earth improve daily & create new opportunities for impact in global development. For an exploratory overview of current/upcoming sources of data, processing pipelines & data products check out: https://t.co/w0YrJeiAbZ
Panels, conversations and workshops:
What we've been looking at from the sky, we're now able to have a perspective of from the ground. What we're starting to see from this level of insight is what we can learn from each other." -@ericg #satsummit
— @Mapbox
There are new ways of distributing and analyzing data. Doing machine learning in the browser allows us to do more with limited environments and bandwidth." - @ianschuler of @developmentseed on scaling our capacity to see development impact. #SatSummit
— @Mapbox
Bridging the skillsets of traditional remote sensing and building ML training data sets is challenging, but it's not hard. It's something we can accomplish." @SeanGorman @sat_summit #SatSummit
Learning about plant scale analysis from @facebook @NASA @TellusLabs @sparkgeo at #satsummit
— @maphubs
Bogota's Habitat Department is using drones and street view cameras to model neighborhoods for development priority, checking every building in Bogota against indicators that measure urban life. @catherinska #SatSummit
— @Mapbox
Going beyond Red, Green, and Blue: @vruba moderates panel with @EarthToLola @YotamAriel @baker14850 talking about monitoring oil production, measuring methane, and determining vegetation structure with multispectral and SAR data #SatSummit
Food Security panel @Sat_Summit where Senior geographer Dave Johnson discussese @USDA-Nass use of data & maps to understand conditions like crop yields. Soybeans forecast to have a greater yield than corn, a $40-50B industry, for the first time in 2018. #foodtech #DataAnalytics
— @Mapbox
Anthony Burn of @OurRadiantEarth talking about building climate resiliency in the small Pacific islands @sat_summit #Climatechange @EOCommonSensing
And the party!
So meaningful to close Day 1 of #SatSummit talking with @bronwynagrios, @smithmegan of @Shift7 and @EllenStofan. And, well, yes - @Sat_Summit was at @airandspace!! #Sat_Summit #EarthFromSpace #Earthrise #Perspective #SpacePerspective
SatSummit 3 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.