If you ever had pastries at breakfast, drank soy milk, used soaps at home, or built yourself a nice flat-pack piece of furniture, you may have contributed to deforestation and climate change. Every item has a price--but the cost isn't felt only in our pockets. Hidden in that price is a complex chain of production, encompassing economic, social, and environmental relations that sustain livelihoods and, unfortunately, contribute to habitat destruction, deforestation, and the warming of our planet. Approximately 4 billion hectares of forest around the world act as a carbon sink which, over the past two decades, has annually absorbed a net 7.6 billion metric tons of CO2. Conversely, a cleared forest becomes a carbon source.

"Our recent study utilized PlanetScope imagery and deep learning for the … wherein a selected machine learning algorithm (we used support vector …

Every artificial intelligence startup or corporate R&D lab has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how humans annotate training data to teach algorithms what to look for. Whether it's doctors assessing the size of cancer from a scan or drivers circling street signs in self-driving car footage, all this labeling has to happen somewhere. Often that means wasting six months and as much as a million dollars just developing a training data system. With nearly every type of business racing to adopt AI, that spend in cash and time adds up. Labelbox builds artificial intelligence training data labeling software so nobody else has to.

The biggest challenge for businesses today is to better understand the context of your customers. Luckily, the rise of technology and the change towards an'artificial intelligence first' world means that tools are being created that can help you turn customer experience into customer science. These are going to revolutionise your business. Although the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) can feel that it belongs in the pages of a science fiction novel, it's actually already part of today's world and is set to become even more prevalent. Consider Echo, Amazon's smart speaker – this is powered by a bot, which is AI technology.

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C37) has launched into space 88 satellites from earth imaging company Planet Labs, giving the startup the ability to "image all of Earth's landmass every day." Planet Labs earlier this month entered into an agreement to acquire Google's Terra Bella business, including the SkySat constellation of satellites, and said that Google upon closing, will enter into a multi-year contract to purchase Earth-imaging data from Planet. The startup expects its data to be useful for a variety of applications such as measuring agricultural yields, monitoring natural resources, or aiding first responders after natural disasters. The launch of the PSLV-37 on Wednesday morning local time was a record for India's space program as it carried 104 satellites into orbit, the largest number so far on a single launch. Launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in south India, the PSLV-C37 launched its primary payload, the 714 kilograms Cartosat-2 series satellite for earth observation, and 103 co-passenger satellites that weighed about 663 kg at lift-off into a 505 kilometer polar Sun Synchronous Orbit.

February 5, 2017 --Google's parent company, Alphabet, may have sky-high ambitions, but for now, it looks like they'll be capped at around 60,000 feet. With the sale of recently acquired satellite imaging company Terra Bella, Alphabet trades direct control over its own fleet of satellites – and all the hassles that can bring – for rights to purchase pictures for Google Earth from a third party. This reorganization is the latest in a series of moves focusing on balancing the company's eclectic interests with investors' desire for profits. In 2014, Google, as the company was still called at the time, purchased Terra Bella and its constellation of seven high-resolution satellites for for $500 million. Now, competitor Planet Labs Inc. will purchase Terra Bella for an undisclosed sum, it announced on Friday in a press release. The Terra Bella satellites can provide Google Earth with crisp images resolving features smaller than three feet across, which Planet Labs says is more than 3.5 times the sharpness of their current fleet composed of 60 mid-resolution satellites.

On 25 April, Zooniverse launched a website that asks volunteers to analyse rapidly-snapped satellite imagery of the disaster, which led to more than 650 reported deaths and 16,000 injuries. The aim is to help relief workers on the ground to find the most heavily damaged regions and identify which roads are passable. Several crisis-mapping programmes with thousands of volunteers already exist -- but it can take days to train satellites on the damaged region and to transmit data to humanitarian organizations, and results have not always proven useful. The Ecuador quake marked the first live public test for an effort dubbed the Planetary Response Network (PRN), which promises to be both more nimble than previous efforts, and to use more rigorous machine-learning algorithms to evaluate the quality of crowd-sourced analyses. The network relies on imagery from the satellite company Planet Labs in San Francisco, California, which uses an array of shoebox-sized satellites to map the planet.