Securing tomorrow together: Satellite and cloud foundations

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

Welcome to the AiDASH Evolve 2024 podcast. AiDASH makes critical infrastructure industries climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. Evolve 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana was our inaugural event. We gathered industry leaders, innovators and visionaries to explore how cutting edge technology and satellites and AI is safeguarding critical infrastructure and fostering biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future amidst climate change challenges. In this podcast series, we are recapping the entire event, every speaker and session. You can find it all on our content hub at ai-dot-com-slash-evolve2024 or check the show notes for all pertinent links. In this episode, we continue on the broad topic of securing tomorrow together. While the previous episode looked at transforming systems for climate resilience, this episode focuses on satellite and cloud foundations. You'll hear presentations from three expert industry leaders. Sean Wiid, Chief Executive Officer, UP42, Bryan Smith, Director of Product Management, 2D Product Portfolio for Maxar, and Marco Masciola, Senior Partner Solutions Architect for AWS. The presenters talked about how vegetation management challenges in today's climate are mounting, but so are opportunities to leverage satellite and cloud technology to meet future energy needs. They talked about how satellite imagery is becoming more available, with improved resolution and clearer views of lines, but there are also potential issues. They also explained how utilities gain more precise analytics and insights from improved satellite imagery, which they can integrate into workflows. First up is Sean Wiid.

SPEAKER_2 (1:58)

Now, without further ado, we welcome our partner presentation, all about satellite and cloud foundations. Please welcome to the AiDASH Evolve stage, Sean Wiid from UP42.

Sean Wiid (2:28)

Good morning, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here at the Evolve Conference. We are very happy this is a sponsor as well. We sponsor quite a few events in the geospatial industry, and usually I speak to my marketing team afterwards, and like, you know, did we really need to sponsor that one? Did we really get our money's worth? And I'm very happy that Abhishek and the team have put on such a good show for us. I think we've got our money's worth definitely this time around, so thank you for that. I don't normally sound like this. I think, like many of you, I lost my voice somewhere in Bourbon Street last night, so if any of you found it, please return it to me after this session. So what I'd like to talk to you about today is a little bit about what happens behind the scenes, right? So UP42 has been working with AiDASH since 2019, helping them to bring satellite imagery and other kinds of geospatial data into their solutions in order to help you as their customers. And I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the complexities there and what we're doing to help. So I have spent around 25 years now focusing on geospatial data, geospatial solutions, geospatial platforms, and what's kept me in the space for so long is the profound impact that geospatial data of all different kinds, not only satellite imagery, but also aerial imagery and other kinds of data can have on almost every single industry that you can think of. Of course, we've heard a lot about vegetation management and utilities in the last two days, but you take the same scale of problems that you guys are experiencing in your industries and you can translate it into anything you like, whether it's on emergency services or healthcare or supply chain logistics or whatever the case may be. This applicability of this technology to so many aspects of life on earth is really what keeps it interesting and motivating for us. I think particularly what we're seeing now around satellite imagery is even more profound. If you think about the impacts of our entire geopolitical environmental impacts, our economic impacts that we have across the globe, anything that we're doing is having a global effect nowadays. And I think that space is probably one of the only vantage points that we have left, where we can all keep each other honest and really see what's going on. I think this is a very powerful idea. And I think that vegetation management using satellites is one of these examples where we can start looking towards profound impacts on the efficiency, on economies, on the economy, on social impacts, and also making sure that we can keep people alive, as we heard yesterday through all of these disasters. So what is UP42? UP42 is a company that was formed in 2019 We are a startup of around 100 people based primarily in Berlin, in Germany. And we have built a geospatial platform and a marketplace with the goal of making sure that it is easier for people to get access to geospatial data and to build solutions with that geospatial data. We focused primarily on building a collection of data providers all under one roof, a collection of algorithm analytics providers all under one roof, but more importantly, making sure that all of this technology is available via API and that it can be automated and that it can be scalable, because otherwise, as we heard from Josh from Maxar yesterday, there's no ways that you're able to look at all of the data that's collected. You need to be able to order it automatically. You need to be able to process it automatically as well. So we have razor-sharply focused on this problem in the industry, connecting all of the amazing things that are happening in the space industry and with operators like Maxar and others upstream to the downstream applications and the people who really understand the industry and are building the solutions to solve those problems.