Minds Behind Maps

Tyler Erickson is a Developer Advocate at Google, more specifically working on Google Earth Engine - a platform providing access to many different Earth Observation datasets merged together - allowing users to focus more time on building their solutions.

Dan Hammer co-founded & build the first few versions of Global Forest Watch, and is now working on Earthrise Media, a non-profit that brings data scientists, designers and storytellers together to tackle global environmental challenges. We talk about how Global Forest Watch was built, how journalists have leverage the platform to tell stories and how it lived on until today. We also touch on the importance of design in addition to data science, and the power of telling stories.

Charles Blanchet is the VP of Solutions at Iceye. Charles has over 20 years of experience building start ups, more recently in companies focused around data. Iceye owns a constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, and is also working on providing flood monitoring insights derived from the images these satellites take. We talk SAR, how Charles joined Iceye, the importance of finding focus as a company, and how thinking is an important task in itself.

Chinmay Adhvaryu is the co-founder and CEO of Influunt, a company focused on providing insights around water damage using Earth Observation data. He previously founded, and then shut down Earthlab AI, a platform to aggregate, preprocess and analyze satellite imagery. We talk about both of these experiences, how Chinmay learned from the first one and from his previous experience in the world of Internet of Things, which he now applies those to Influunt.

Joe Morrison is the VP of Commercial Product at Umbra, who builds & operates Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites. He is determined to make satellite imagery more accessible, and has shared many of his thoughts about the Earth Observation industry on this blog "A Closer Look with Joe Morrison".

Dr Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño is the Program Director of the Planetary Computer at Microsoft as well as the author of "Impact Science: The science of getting to radical social and environmental breakthroughs". He has previously worked at the World Bank, Mapbox, Satellogic and holds a Ph.D in Astrophysics...

Dr Nadine Alameh is the current CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which is probably best known for the work they provide around standards within the geospatial industry. In this episode we talk about Nadine's path from Lebanon to MIT, her experience working in aviation and finally we go over her current role as the CEO of the OGC...

Daniel O'Donohue is the host & producer of the Mapscaping podcast & website. We talk about Daniel's journey to creating and growing the Mapscaping podcast & brand, what creating content looks like, specifically for geospatial but also quite broadly. Towards the end of the episode we talk about different life paths, Daniel shares some of the challenges he's had and how he overcame some of them.

Aravind Ravichandran is an independent consultant helping multiple businesses work with Earth Observation data. We talk about how Aravind's background as a software engineer helps him in his consulting work and how he ended up in space sector in the first place, some of the current big picture aspects of the field and Aravind is kind enough to help me understand a bit more about the Indian EO market.

Denise McKenzie works as a consultant, these days mostly at the Benchmark Initiative, having developed the Locus Charter, an open set of guidelines promoting the ethical use of location data. We talk ethics, policy making and the role of education quite broadly.