Monitoring Changes from Air & Space: Alternative Data meets AI- WIE ILC 2021

Speaker: Daniela Moody, VP of Artificial Intelligence, Arturo

With space commerce exploding into a $330 billion/year global industry, remote sensing datasets at the petabyte scale are now available, with new commercial satellite constellations generating petabytes/year of Earth observations. The computing performance revolution has driven improvements in sensor, communication, and storage technology, which combined with Artificial Intelligence advances are enabling understanding of the world at a scale and level of detail never before feasible. 

The democratization and commoditization of Low Earth Orbit resulted in over $6 billion in hardware investments in recent years in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite market alone, and much more so when other sensing modalities are considered. The convergence of these key technologies now unlocks alternative data sources for persistent remote sensing and smart decision fusion that will fundamentally change the level of global transparency.

This talk will focus on the benefits and challenges of developing AI for alternative data types, including SAR, as a disruptive technology in the context of interoperability and usage within the existing global computing infrastructures and sensor networks. The complexities associated with extracting unbiased, consistent, all-weather measurements and developing machine learning and computer vision analytics will be characterized. Additionally, opportunities will be discussed for fusing heterogenous data sets to characterize places and spaces globally, correlate and analyze trends, patterns and changes that are revolutionizing the insuretech vertical.