At TellusLabs, we use satellite imagery and other earth data to deliver actionable insights to customers in agriculture, water, forestry, energy, and many other sectors. While some of this imagery has been collected since the 1970s (the Landsat program), only in the last decade has it been opened for free use in public and commercial domains. This democratization of satellite data empowers industry, academia, and government sectors, worldwide, with access to earth observation research and insights. This spaceborne perspective is also beautiful -- in this post, we combine some amazing scenes of agriculturally active areas (like this scene below from Storm Lake, Utah) with a little more detail on how this whole process works. As compelling as these images are, there is a wide gap between pixel values and a useful signal.

Businesses of today are constantly on the lookout for ways to radically transform their operational efficiencies. Digitization of business processes, technologies and products has enabled them to integrate methods to not only lower their costs, but to meet customer expectations in novel and customized ways. The one driver that many enterprises are wholeheartedly adopting now is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With the help of robotics, enterprises can improve the physically measurable outcomes of manufacturing facilities, and also enhance their virtual operations to deliver the best results. In the simplest terms, RPA is the application of software robots that can interpret the functioning of existing applications and then imitate them with higher precision and fewer errors.

Will smart automation, intelligent software bots and brainy robots take away our jobs anytime soon? Pose this question to any Indian working in a company where unions are strong, or to any Indian who has a government job, or to the majority of Indians who work in the unorganized sector--those who drive taxis, trucks pull handcarts, hawk goods on footpaths or are employed as maids--and you will, in all probability, be looked at askance or even dismissed as an uninformed prophet of doom. The reaction may not be surprising in emerging countries like India, given that a majority of such employees would never have heard about the Industrial Revolution, or terms like disguised unemployment, cloud computing, machine learning, deep learning, automation or artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software bots. They would perhaps have also never heard of drones taking photographs and doing surveillance; of robots delivering pizzas and packages; of assistive robots taking care of the elderly; of robots making hamburgers and others like the Roomba robots that mop floors; of software bots writing articles and movie scripts; of three-dimensional or 3D printing revolutionizing the manufacturing sector; of driverless cars and trucks--all of which would make it very hard for them to imagine the future impact of these technologies that have not yet directly touched their lives or their jobs. They would have surely seen humanoid robots in sci-fi films like actor Rajnikant's Enthiran in Tamil or Robot in English, or a movie like Terminator or Transformers.

Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch stars in a strangely dark but hilarious sci-fi movie written by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was created by filmmaker Oscar Sharp and his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin. CBS News reports how the duo wanted to build a machine that could write screenplays, so they took hundreds of popular sci-fi TV and movie scripts and programmed them into an artificial intelligence Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM) neural network that they originally named Jetson. Ironically, Jetson asked to be addressed as Benjamin instead. "Sunspring" is the first movie written by artificial intelligence https://t.co/MhPA74XGm6 Benjamin is the first AI to write the script of a sci-fi film.

In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"--in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should? To help you get the head start you may need, here are the signs that it's time to fly the nest.

It may be time to add'novelist' to the list of professions under threat from super-smart computer software, because a short story authored by artificial intelligence has made it through to the latter stages of a literary competition in Japan.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – NASA is going after an asteroid this week like never before. It's launching a spacecraft to the exotic black rock named Bennu, vacuuming up handfuls of gravel from the surface, and then in a grand finale, delivering the pay dirt all the way back to Earth. The mission will take seven years, from Thursday night's planned liftoff from Cape Canaveral to the return of the asteroid samples in 2023, and cover an incredible 4 billion miles (6½ billion km) through space. It promises to be the biggest cosmic bounty since the Apollo moon rocks, hand-picked and delivered by astronauts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. NASA has already brought back comet dust and specks of solar wind.

Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population. Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front, and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below. Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S. command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the commander in chief in some music magazine. It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them "in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad." Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.

Driverless cars are coming down the road. Government regulators are already working on guidelines and Tesla and Uber are calling for driverless cars by 2020. With Uber, you can understand their excitement about having driverless cars – no hiring, no salaries, no employee issues, and no firing of employees. On the extreme end of the scale, it is understandable why owners of pickup trucks, Jeeps, and other SUVs are not looking forward to driverless cars – driving is part of the fun of owning such a vehicle. It may come as a surprise to most people but the desire for driverless cars leans heavily to the luxury car class with Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz in the lead according to a MaritzCX survey (seen below.)