#58: The Future of Earth Observation with Jed Sundwall, Radiant Earth Foundation

TerraWatch Space Podcast

Jed is the Executive Director of the Radiant Earth Foundation and used be the Open Data Lead at Amazon Web Services. Jed is an influential thinker in the Earth observation space and he has been part of a number of important milestones in this sector.

I wanted to have Jed on the podcast to talk about his thoughts on the future of Earth observation, especially following one of the blog posts he had written last year. I recommend you check it out (linked below).

In this episode, Jed and I discuss what the Radiant Earth Foundation does, his experience at AWS, the importance of building data products in EO, analysis-ready data and what that means, Jed's thesis on the future of EO with the three things we need, the future of open source in EO and more.

• Jed's blog post: https://medium.com/radiant-earth-insights/democratizing-open-machine-learning-technologies-for-earth-observation-cf3fd9f0a432
• Jed's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jedsundwall
• Radiant Earth Foundation: https://www.radiant.earth/
• ML Hub for EO (from Radiant): https://mlhub.earth/

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01:09: Jed's background

03:11: Overview of Radiant Earth Foundation

08:54: Jed's role at AWS and EO milestones

15:24: Thoughts on the state of EO

20:18: Building data products in EO

23:35: Analysis ready data and what that means

29:33: Jed's thesis on the future of EO: New data products, new leaders and new institutions

35:15: A multidisciplinary approach to building data products

39:45: What new institutions for the future of EO?

42:33: The importance of browser-based interfaces

45:41: The future of open-source in EO and cooperative utilities

50:03: Wrap-up questions

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