Descartes Labs opens its geospatial analysis engine to a handful of lucky developers

It's easy to forget that even with the fanciest of machine learning models, we still need humans in the trenches cleaning input data. Descartes Labs, a startup that combines satellite imagery with data about our planet to produce insights and forecasts, knows this all too well. The company ended up building its own cloud-based parallel computing infrastructure to clean and process its massive corpus of satellite imagery. Companies like Descartes Labs cannot just throw raw satellite imagery into machine learning models to extract insights. Images captured contain clouds, cloud shadows and other atmospheric aberrations that make it impossible to compare images taken at different times.