EAPS

Speaker: Matt Hancher, Earth Engine Technical Lead, Google

Conceived in 2009 as a platform for global forest monitoring, Earth Engine has evolved into Google's cloud platform for petabyte-scale analysis of satellite imagery and other geospatial data. From food and water security to disaster risk management, public health, biodiversity, and climate change adaptation, there is urgent and growing demand in a range of areas for information that can be derived from the flood of raw satellite data. This talk will describe the trends and technologies that have informed Google's development of the Earth Engine platform over the past six years, as well as our experiences helping partners use the platform to address computational problems related to a range of global challenges as we work towards our vision of a living, breathing dashboard of the planet.

Biography: Matt Hancher leads Google's Earth Engine engineering team, which he co-founded in 2009 to bring Google's datacenter computing expertise to bear on global challenges. He originally studied EE and CS at MIT, where he conducted research in robotics and embedded systems at the Media Lab until 2003. In between he was a Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, where he conducted research in robotics and computer vision, including 3D reconstruction of the Moon and Mars from satellite imagery for robotic mission planning.