Satellite imagery can aid development projects

Projects that target aid toward villages and rural areas in the developing world often face time-consuming challenges, even at the most basic level of figuring out where the most appropriate sites are for pilot programs or deployment of new systems such as solar-power for regions that have no access to electricity. Often, even the sizes and locations of villages are poorly mapped, so time-consuming field studies are needed to locate suitable sites. Now, a team of graduate students at MIT and a social-service group of data scientists have come up with a way of automating parts of that evaluation process, by developing software that can identify houses and even types of houses from readily-available satellite imagery -- potentially saving considerable time that would otherwise be spent sending teams from village to village. Their findings have now been published in the journal Big Data. The multidisciplinary team came together in the course of discussions at MIT's Sidney Pacific graduate dormitory, explains team member Brian Spatocco: "We started talking about this problem, and we realized we all had skills that were relevant."