Minds Behind Maps

Zhuang-Fang Nana Yi is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Regrow, though today's conversation is about her story from going to school not speaking the language, to mapping rubber tree plantations and ultimately using global satellite imagery methods to solve local problems.

Jed Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth, and formerly worked on creating AWS's Open Data Registry, starting by putting Landsat images and then other Earth Observation datasets on the cloud. Radiant Earth is an NGO focused on making geospatial data more accessible, specifically for Machine Learning applications.

Marc Prioleau is the newly appointed Executive Director to the Overture Maps Foundation (at the date this episode comes out). Overture was originally announced in December 2022, founded by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom as part of the Linux Foundation, with the goal of providing a open map data. That sounds a lot like what OpenStreetMap set out to achieve... so why start something new? Marc has some answers to that question, and it isn't his first time thinking about the future of mapping

Grega Milčinski is the founder of Sinergise, the company behind Sentinel Hub & EO Browser which recently got acquired by Planet. While the deal of the acquisition isn't closed just yet at the time of publishing, we discuss the story behind Sinergise, how it's more of an engineering than remote sensing company and why they decided to get acquired.

Mila Luleva is the Head of Remote Sensing at Rabobank, the 2nd biggest bank in the Netherlands. Specifically she works on the Acorn Initiative which aims at supporting small holder farmers transition to more sustainable agriculture practices by selling carbon credits for the biomass these farmers produce. Carbon credits are a messy, complicated and often times controversial topic, all of which I wanted to ask Mila about.

Renny Babiarz is a former Analyst at the NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and the VP of Analysis & Operations at AllSource Analysis, a company focused on providing geospatial Intelligence investigations. One of the angles of Renny's work is better understanding China's Nuclear testing using satellite imagery, Open Source Intelligence methods & location data.

Kuo-Yu 'Slayer' Chuang is the co-founder of GeoThings, a Taiwanese company leveraging SMS to share GPS location, images & any useful information for disaster response. He was also on the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team; and has focused on applying mapping to supporting humanitarian endeavours mostly in Asia.

Benjamin Grant is the founder of Overview, which started as a project of sharing 1 satellite image per day on Instagram, now to an audience of nearly 1.5 million. It has since turned into books, exhibitions and collaboration with huge brands like Louis Vuitton; all in an effort to showcase Earth using satellite images.

Iain Woodhouse is a Professor of Applied Earth Observation at the University of Edinburgh, the author of multiple books & course on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and one of the best people to explain radar remote sensing with decades of experience teaching but also working in the industry.

As 2022 wraps up, I wanted to bring some of the most insightful moments from conversations over the past year: 12 clips from 12 conversations.