WASHINGTON – The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has selected a team of commercial and academic partners to build an artificial intelligence system with synthetic data, which will further help the agency determine how it builds machine learning algorithms moving forward. Orbital Insight was issued a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract by the NGA, the company announced. It will collaborate with Rendered.ai As the organization charged with analyzing satellite imagery for the intelligence community, NGA has put increased emphasis on using AI for its mission. The agency sees human-machine pairing as critical for its success, with machine learning algorithms taking over the rote task of processing the torrent of satellite data to find potential intelligence and freeing up human operators to do more high level analysis and tasks.

What was once unknowable can now be quickly discovered with a few queries. Decision makers no longer have to rely on gut instinct; today they have more extensive and precise evidence at their fingertips. New sources of data, fed into systems powered by machine learning and AI, are at the heart of this transformation. The information flowing through the physical world and the global economy is staggering in scope. It comes from thousands of sources: sensors, satellite imagery, web traffic, digital apps, videos, and credit card transactions, just to name a few. These types of data can transform decision making.

The Japanese bank will help customers understand key social and economic activities using Orbital Insight's combination of satellite imagery, location data and artificial intelligence Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) announced today that it is partnering with Orbital Insight, the geospatial analytics company, to offer customers access to new data sources for better business decisions. SMBC will use Orbital Insight's GO platform to launch an analytics service that visualizes social and economic activities in near real-time by combining satellite imagery, anonymized location data and artificial intelligence. The service will initially focus on understanding macro trends like how people are shifting daily activities amidst current remote work requirements. SMBC has already piloted Orbital Insight's data for its proof of concept projects and confirmed its effectiveness. "When it comes to business risk, geospatial analytics and AI can make the invisible visible," said Katsunori Tanizaki, Senior Managing Executive Officer at SMBC. "The uncertainty of the pandemic makes that an even more important need for our customers, who are often managing global assets. Working with Orbital Insight on this new service combines SMBC's business insights as a financial institution with Silicon Valley's cutting-edge technology to help customers navigate the right decisions. Access to daily trends on thousands of global locations will be extremely valuable, especially across the construction, finance, retail and maritime sectors."

You don't need satellite photos to know that Sears is failing. Companies like Orbital Insight are typically tight-lipped when it comes to more important data -- as are their customers -- mainly because they see this information as a competitive advantage. But the line graph showed how Mr. Crawford and his start-up can target the performance of individual businesses. Orbital Insight tracks activity in more than 260,000 retail parking lots across the country, and it monitors the levels of more than 25,000 oil tanks around the world. Not surprisingly, Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow said, some of their customers use this satellite data to track the progress of their direct competitors, though those customers and their competitors are very reluctant to talk about it.

Geospatial analytics, an industry where satellites are used to track everything from retail footfall to food production. Companies working on the technology have attracted big money. Orbital Insight raised $50 million in funding last year, while Descartes Labs attracted $30 million and SpaceKnow raised $4 million. One of the industry's pioneers is James Crawford, who worked for NASA and Google before founding Orbital Insight in 2013. "We were seeing an explosion in commercial satellites," said Crawford.

On April 20, 2010, when BP's deep-water drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil giant claimed that the spill was just 1,000 barrels per day. A small non-profit in West Virginia, SkyTruth, studied the satellite observations of the oil slick, cataloged its computations, and concluded that the spill was at least 20 times bigger than what was being claimed. The report was quickly picked up by the media, and lead the US government to straightaway increase the estimate to 5,000 barrels of oil per day. The same year, UBS Investment Research had two teams quietly working on Wal-Mart's quarterly earnings preview – one using time-honored traditional methods, the other studying the satellite pictures of the American retail brand's parking lots to gauge the customer footfall. Each came up with a different revenue forecast.

In a paper from California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the author laments the loss of connection between machine learning and solving real-world problems. The main question that seems to come up is: what good can machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) do? A lot, as it turns out. AI could play a big role in aiding and even solving the issues of world hunger and poverty in ways that are surprisingly simple, but increasingly necessary. When you think of AI, it's possible that fixing world hunger isn't the first application that comes to mind.

I'm Emma Wall and I'm joined today by Jeremy White to talk about Artificial Intelligence. Wall: Just a bit of buzz word at the moment AI, but what does it actually mean? It actually means many different things and people use it as a catch-hold to try and workout what they are talking about really, because it includes machine learning and it includes narrow AI, and broader AI. So, most people have encountered narrow AI what they consider to be with these chat box that you talk on your phone and you think you're having an conversation with somebody but you're not. It's almost like a decision pre-process you can very easily fool them.

Geospatial analytics, an industry where satellites are used to track everything from retail footfall to food production. Companies working on the technology have attracted big money. Orbital Insight raised $50 million in funding last year, while Descartes Labs attracted $30 million and SpaceKnow raised $4 million. One of the industry's pioneers is James Crawford, who worked for NASA and Google before founding Orbital Insight in 2013. "We were seeing an explosion in commercial satellites," said Crawford.

Updated In 2013, James "Jimi" Crawford founded a company called Orbital Insight, barely noticed at the time amid the Silicon Valley froth. Crawford had worked at NASA for 15 years and wrote software for Mars rovers. He left NASA to run engineering for Google Books, and while there he noticed that Elon Musk's SpaceX and other new companies were driving down the cost of building and launching satellites. Crawford saw an opportunity to collect and analyze what he anticipated would be a deluge of images from a surfeit of new satellites that would circle the Earth, taking readings and pictures. Orbital Insight's first product looked at images of cornfields all over the world, analyzing the health of plants to predict yields for traders who bet on future price swings. About two years later, Silicon Valley's top investors decided Orbital Insight might be huge.