Introducing Penny, an Interactive Tool for Exploring the World of...

At DigitalGlobe we spend a great deal of time focused on urban areas, where the majority of the world's people now live, and thus where the majority of commerce, conflict, and change take place. Earlier this year an interesting thought crossed my mind: "What would a perfect city look like from space?" Would it have large open venues or lots of public transportation? Would there be an abundance of parks or the tallest skyscrapers in the world? How would this vision of idyllic urban design change depending on where in the world you were? Since I spend my days at DigitalGlobe working to bring cutting-edge analytics to our GBDX platform, I naturally wondered if we could apply machine learning to our satellite imagery to explore this idea.