A GeoVisual search for baseball stadiums in the lower 48.
Want to know where all the wind and solar power supplies in the US are for some brilliant renewable-energy project? Or plot a round-the-world trip hitting every major soccer stadium along the way? It should be possible with a new tool that lets anyone scan the globe through AI "eyes" to instantly find satellite images of matching objects.
Descartes Labs, a New Mexico startup that provides AI-driven analysis of satellite images to governments, academics and industry, on Tuesday released a public demo of its GeoVisual Search, a new type of search engine that combines satellite images of Earth with machine learning on a massive scale.
The idea behind GeoVisual is pretty simple. Pick an object anywhere on Earth that can be seen from space, and the system returns a list of similar-looking objects and their locations on the planet. It's cool to play with, which you can do at the Descartes site here. A short search for wind turbines had me dreaming of a family road trip where every pit stop was sure to include kite-flying for the kids.
Perhaps this sounds just like Google Earth to you, but keep in mind that tool just allows you to find countless geotagged locations around the world. GeoVisual Search actually compares all the pixels making up huge photos of the world to find matching objects as best it can, an ability that hasn't been available to the public before on a global scale.
Mark Johnson, Descartes Lab CEO
Fun as it is, the tool also gives the public a taste of Descartes' broader work, which so far has focused largely on agricultural datasets that can do things like analyze crop yields.
"The goal of this launch is to show people what's possible with machine learning. Our aim is to use this data to model complex planetary systems, and this is just the first step," CEO and co-founder Mark Johnson said via email. "We want businesses to think about how new kinds of data will help to improve their work. And I'd like everyone to think about how we can improve our life on this planet if we better understood it."
The tool's not perfect. I tried searching for objects that look similar to a large coal mine and power plant here in northern New Mexico and ended up with a list of mostly similar-looking lakes and bridges. Searching for locations similar to the launch pads at Cape Canaveral returned an odd assortment of landscapes that seemed to have nothing in common besides a passing resemblance to concrete surfaces.
The algorithm can easily mistake a whole lot of coal for a whole lots of water.
"Though this is a demo, GeoVisual Search operates on top of an intelligent machine-learning platform that can be trained and will improve over time," Johnson said. "We've never taught the computer what a wind turbine is, it just determines what's unique about that image (i.e., the fact there is a wind turbine there) and automatically recognizes visually similar scenes."
Right now the demo relies on three different imagery sources that include more than 4 petabytes of data altogether. You can search in the most detail using the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) data for the lower 48 United States because it has the highest resolution of one meter per pixel, making it possible to spot orchards, solar farms and turbines, among other objects.
Four-meter imagery is available for China that makes it possible to recognize slightly larger things like stadiums. For the rest of the world, Descartes uses 15-meter resolution images from Landsat 8 that are more coarse but still allow for identification of larger-scale objects like pivot irrigation and suburbs.
"As a next step, we certainly want to start to understand specific objects and count them accurately through time," Johnson said. "At that point, we'll have turned satellite imagery into a searchable database, which opens up a whole new interface for dealing with planetary data."
10
Earth's recent changes, from space (pictures)
Descartes was spun out of Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) and co-founded by Steven Brumby, who spent over a decade working in information sciences for the lab. Near the start of his time at LANL, a massive wildfire nearly destroyed the lab and Brumby's home. More importantly, it sparked Brumby's interest in developing machine-learning tools to map the world's fires.
"At that time when we did the analysis (of satellite images of the fire's aftermath) it was pretty clear the fire had been catastrophic, but there was a lot of fuel left," Brumby told me when I visited Descartes' offices in Los Alamos last year.
When some of that remaining fuel burned in another big Los Alamos wildfire in 2011, Brumby says he was able to help out. During his time at LANL he was often called on for imagery analysis when disaster struck, from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina and the breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia. All those years of insight led to another Descartes project to analyze satellite imagery to better understand and perhaps even predict wildfires around the globe.
"You can use satellite imagery to warn you of stuff that's coming down the road and if you listen to it, you can be prepared for it," Brumby said.
Before and after the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, with the burn scar shown in bright red.
Brumby and Johnson spent the better part of an afternoon laying out the short- and long-term vision for Descartes Labs when I visited. In the short term, the company has been working in agriculture to better monitor crops, feed lots and other data sources.
"One of the things we're building with our current system is a continuously updating living map of the world, which is the platform I wish we had when we had to deal with some of these disasters back in the day," Brumby said.
Being able to check in on any part of the world in real time is one thing, but Descartes hopes to go further by applying artificial intelligence to see things in all those images that might not be immediately obvious to our eyes: the patterns that tie together all the activities captured in those countless pixels.
If a picture really is worth a thousand words, tools like the ones Descartes is developing could help write volumes about what our satellites are really seeing.
Solving for XX: The industry seeks to overcome outdated ideas about "women in tech."
Crowd Control: A crowdsourced science fiction novel written by CNET readers.
Go here to see the original:
Search Earth with AI eyes via a powerful new satellite image tool ... - CNET
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]