Global Big Data Conference

Geoscientists invented a machine learning tool to sift through satellite data. Today's Earth scientists are spending less time standing in fields collecting soil samples, and more time behind a computer screen. Most geoscience data is automatically collected by sensors and satellites. The big challenge is making sense of all that data so that scientists can get back to what they do best: Observing the world, asking questions, conducting experiments, and finding evidence. Scientists use large, publicly available datasets from government programs such as NASA, NOAA, and USGS (that's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and US Geological Survey, in non-acronym speak). Many Earth scientists also have private sources, and combining these public and private datasets is difficult and time-consuming.