Minds Behind Maps

Dan Pilone is the CEO and co-founder of Element84, a software engineering company focused on building geospatial solutions at scale. We touch on Dan's experience working on geospatial software engineer problems and how those have changed over the past decade. We discuss the work Element84 has done to contribute to AWS's Open Data program, as well the journey of co-founding a company with Dan's wife Tracey, and how they're thinking of growth through a people-focused mindset.

April Speight leads the Spatial Computing Cloud Advocacy team at Microsoft. This team focuses on helping developers understand technology & raise awareness, mostly with the Mixed Reality team, most famous for the HoloLens. We talk about April's work at Microsoft, but also about her journey from the the fashion industry, to entering the field of Tech in general. We touch on fashion and branding, and what the Tech world can take away from them...

Dr Beth Tellman is the Chief Science Officer at Cloud2Street, a company focused on flood monitoring using mostly satellite imagery. They recently published their “Global Flood Database” - featured in Nature - containing 15 years of data on 913 floods with human settlement maps across 169 countries.

Keith Masback was CEO of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation for over a decade and is now an Angel Investor and Advisor to multiple start-ups, mostly related to Earth Observation & Remote Sensing. Keith started in the US Army, working as an Infantry Officer, and went on to join the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We talk about Keith's perspective both in the military and in the civilian world of Earth Observation, or as he points out, Geospatial Intelligence...

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...