Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over the virtual world. A machine that can build its own intelligence through learning patterns and observing facts. The technology has a wide scope. It can be useful in every sector, even monitoring the receding forest areas.
Orbital Insight is an AI firm developing a system that uses AI to monitor the forests. It uses the satellite images of the forests and takes notice of the minuscule changes in them that human eye might miss.
The software is trained to access millions of forest images captured through satellites and then delivers the conclusion. The disappearing forests have a pattern that can be inferred from those images. On the basis of that, the software understands how a disappearing forest looks like and give a warning if something similar is happening on the ground level.
Keeping an eye on the forests is a necessity because we simply cannot afford to lose anymore forest area. They are the lungs of our planet and home to millions of ecosystems consisting of millions of species. They are under threat, legally or illegally. The rate at which the trees are being stomped down is astonishing. It’s almost always too late for authorities to react. Satellite monitoring could be the much-needed solution to this problem.
Orbital Insight is the brainchild of James Crawford, former NASA robotics and AI expert and the man behind the AI technique to search through millions of books on Google Books. He’s the CEO and the founder of Orbital Insight, leading the company’s efforts to create geospatial analytics for an interconnected world through AI.
The company does not own any satellites. The images are provided by other satellite firms like Planet, Astro Digital, and DigitalGlobe. Orbital Insight has millions of images to train its software. They pay these firms for their ultra high-resolution pictures and sell the resulting interpretations.
The potential that AI holds in the field of sustainability is immense. In the near future, it may be possible to monitor trees, lakes and migratory animals and generating conclusions from the pattern that follows. These conclusions could be of high importance in our collective aim of protecting the planet. An interconnected world is a more secure world.