Speaker Bio & Abstract

 
Moderator & KeynoteBora Beran Director of Product Management
Descartes Labs
USA

BiographyBora is the Director of Product Management at Descartes Labs. He holds a PhD from Drexel University and is a reviewer for several scholarly journals in the area of technical computing. Prior to joining Descartes Labs he worked at Tableau Software, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows HPC Server and Microsoft Research developing tools and infrastructure for visualization, knowledge representation, large scale computational modeling and data mining. AbstractThanks to the internet and open data initiatives, it is starting to become much easier to find data on topics of public interest. Citizen data journalism has a broad outreach through blogs and social media allowing anyone to raise awareness and make a case about issues they are passionate about. Unfortunately, geospatial analytics has been one of the laggards as satellite data is still not easily accessible for most people, many public vector datasets are still manually generated hence out of date and tools have a steep learning curve. In this session, well talk about tools weve been building at Descartes Labs that make access to recent earth imagery and extraction of structured information using computer vision methods accessible to general audiences and allow anyone to easily build visually appealing geospatial visualizations within their companies or to share with the public as aspiring data journalists.