AWS Public Sector Summit 2019 Geospatial Talks
Talks, sessions and workshops that may be of interest to those working with geospatial data. PRs accepted!
AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, downlink and process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations quickly, easily and cost-effectively without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure. In this session, we introduce AWS Ground Station and how it works, starting from understanding the ground station console and onboarding process. We demonstrate how to schedule a contact, gather data, and build architectures to extract data from AWS Ground Station for analysis and storage with other AWS services.
Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) will enable African nations to track changes across their countries and the continent in unprecedented detail. Based largely on openly available satellite data and leveraging technology and services developed in collaboration with Geoscience Australia and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), DE Africa will provide insights on a wide range of issues, including floods, drought, soils, coastal erosion, agriculture, forests, land use, water availability and quality, as well as changes to human settlements. DE Africa is supported by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a partnership of more than 100 member countries and 130 partners that envision a future where decisions and actions for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations. This session will cover how the initiative fits within the GEO Work Programme, successes from related projects and how the platform operates on AWS.
Global sustainable development seeks to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. Earth observations play an important role in monitoring targets, tracking progress, and helping nations and stakeholders make informed decisions. However, this data is not always easily accessible and users may not have the compute power necessary to take advantage of these resources through their own on-premises data centers. The recently launched Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative significantly reduces the cost, time, and technical barriers associated with analyzing large datasets to generate sustainability insights. In this session, we will hear from the Radiant.Earth Foundation, the Group on Earth Observation and Digital Earth Africa on ways Earth observations and AWS cloud technology are supporting governments, NGOs, businesses, and individuals to make more informed decisions and manage challenges such as climate change, soil and coastal erosion, deforestation, desertification, and water scarcity.
Join this session to learn about serverless architectures, their benefits, and the basics of the AWS Serverless stack (e.g., AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Step Functions). We will discuss how to use serverless architectures for a variety of use cases. Learn practical tips, tricks, and take-home architecture patterns to implement immediately.
Volunteers and emergency personnel carefully coordinate their response to natural disasters. This coordination requires data and making data actionable and accessible at the tactical edge remains a challenge. We'll dive into the results of our disaster response user needs study and invite Element 84 on stage to exhibit their prototype disaster response pipeline for field data management. The serverless, cloud-based pipeline combines public and private data sources with open source software. It can provide the field with a ruggedized remote data center (SBE), preloaded with critical information, including reach-back capabilities. You'll see how this works firsthand and learn ways first responders can update data from in-situ sources such as drones.
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth helps you build highly accurate training datasets for machine learning quickly. Not only does Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth offer easy access to public and private human labelers, but it also provides labelers with built-in workflows and interfaces for common labeling tasks. Join us to understand how this new service works, see a demonstration of Ground Truth in action, and find out ways to use Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to lower your labeling costs.
295887 - Aircraft to Clean Energy: How Government and Regulated Industries are Transforming Product Lifecycle Management with AWS GovCloud (US)
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are the record of authority for mission critical product development and sustainment programs, intellectual property, program management, and business processes. Deploying PLM solutions for government and highly regulated industries using traditional on premise approaches has proven costly, time consuming and inflexible. In this session, Collins Aerospace and Smartronix will discuss how they have transformed internal and end customer enterprise PLM strategies with industry solutions from Dassault Systemes and Siemens PLM with AWS GovCloud (US). Learn how many organizations in this space have leveraged the compliance features of AWS to manage sensitive data associated with PLM workloads, and realize the business value and agility offered by cloud. Speakers will discuss technical evaluation and analysis of alternatives, solution implementation, data security and compliance as well as business outcomes.
Understand how nonprofits, non-governmental agencies, and governments are using AI/ML to predict disasters before they happen, and take action earlier to save lives. Harnessing existing weather forecast data, food price data agricultural production data, satellite imagery and other data pipelines, and mobilizing responses faster is transforming how disaster response can be coordinated. Learn how Amazon SageMaker models are identifying patterns early, along with AWS Snowball, AWS Snowball Edge, and image analysis.
299940 - Networking Patterns and Practices: A Case Study of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Cloud Journey
Learn common networking patterns for connecting to AWS resources securely and reliably through the prism of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's journey with AWS. We'll discuss lessons learned and solutions developed from implementing cloud in support of the Space Mission at GSFC. Explore use-case examples of AWS Networking innovations including Resource sharing, PrivateLink, AWS Transit Gateway, and AWS DirectConnect Gateway. We'll also explore performance considerations and the new client AWS VPN service.
The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is a nonprofit member organization supported by NASA, NOAA, and USGS, with a belief that the quality of life, economic opportunities, and stewardship of the planet are enhanced by regular use of timely, scientifically sound Earth science data. Many agencies, academic institutions, and scientists rarely have the resources and expertise to explore computationally intensive Earth science research in the cloud. Still, the opportunity is within reach. Through small grant funding, AWS Cloud research credits, and community input, ESIP’s lab supports projects aimed at adopting community-accepted best practices in scientific data management and analysis. In this session we highlight several lab projects, including how one team is leveraging the Pangeo project on AWS to build an open-source pipeline to infer snow cover at meter-scale resolution from CubeSat data, using machine learning.
Can cloud power ground-breaking research? This session provides a deeper understanding of ways cloud computing can accelerate scientific discoveries. The National Science Foundation is changing research communities in fields ranging from biology to astronomy to education, through its Harnessing the Data Revolution. In South America, the government of Chile dives deep into its Data Observatory initiative, which is expected to create a single digital platform involving a combination of astronomy, data science, informatics, and communication technologies. And in the United States, the Cornell Lab demonstrates how it uses eBird to study migration habits, species movement, population density, light pollution, and climate change. Join us to witness firsthand how cloud computing is revolutionizing the future of research, and see for yourself what this future really looks like.
New astronomy projects are emerging amid the troves of data new telescopes produce. This session explores the government of Chile's cloud transformation to create a digital platform that provides an interdisciplinary field of study involving astronomy, data science, informatics, and information/communications technologies. These data, including information about light emitted from some of the coldest objects, help astrophysicists explore the universe's greatest secrets. We go beyond examples found in astronomy and provide insights that can be applied across other industry verticals. We also examine the use of Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, EC2, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and Amazon Sumerian.
The Pangeo project is building a flexible, open framework for scientific analysis and visualization based on tools widely used in the Python ecosystem. We will demonstrate the flexibility of the system, showing how the user needs only their browser to access the framework via JupyterHub. Data is stored in cloud-friendly formats on Amazon S3, while Xarray provides tools for efficient data manipulation. Dask schedules fine-grained parallelization on a Kubernetes cluster, and PyViz provides interactive visualization. We will also discuss performance, security, and transferability across public cloud platforms, costs to operate, and approaches to encourage a cultural shift in scientific computation.
SpaceNet is a nonprofit LLC designed to accelerate machine learning against geospatial problems, such as mapping road network routes after a natural disaster using exclusively remote sensing data. Over the last two and half years, SpaceNet has released over 6500 sq km of high-resolution satellite imagery, with ~800,000 building footprint labels and 8000 sq km of road network labels. In addition to open sourcing a large, curated data set, SpaceNet has developed and administered four data science challenges to solve the problem of extracting building footprint and road networks from satellite imagery at scale. We will discuss the challenges of deploying these machine learning algorithms in operational timelines, and how AWS products be used to accelerate delivery of timely information derived from satellite imagery after a natural disaster. We will also highlight upcoming analytic challenges.
Traditional commercial Geo monitoring GPS solutions need servers running around the clock, require expensive mapping licenses, and only work with proprietary GPS devices that lack compatibility. In this talk we will explore how to build a 100% serverless GIS/Geo monitoring GPS system, using open data to visualize the geographic information without GIS licenses fees. Our solution has a built-in alerting system based on Amazon Connect and will be open to any device (IoT, Mobile, GPS device) to provide a geofencing capability. This solution is based on a serverless paradigm, freeing customers to focus on applications on top of the solution. Join us to discover how it's done!
317954 - From Unattended Ground Sensors (UGS) to Installations; Leveraging AWS IoT for Effective, Flexible Sensing
Attendees will learn how to apply cutting edge AWS IoT and machine learning technologies at the edge. The session will cover a broad set of use cases from the remote disconnected fringe, to situational awareness for an installation. Novetta will demonstrate a flexible sensor platform, which uses business logic and machine learning to interpret sensor outputs for a broad array of physical security and tactical missions. This session is sponsored by Novetta.
Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a new storage class that provides secure, durable object storage for long-term data retention and digital preservation. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for customers that retain data sets for 7-10 years or longer to meet business or regulatory compliance requirements, such as organizations in media and entertainment, financial services, healthcare, and public sectors. At just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage class in the cloud, at prices significantly less expensive than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries and/or archiving data offsite.
Astrophysics has just entered a new era where computational power (parallel and distributed) and state-of-the-art technology are mandatory as off the-shelf tools for daily activity. In this talk we focus on two scenarios in which AWS services (Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3) have greatly improved project performance. In the first, we explore the use of EC2 coupled with AWS Lambda in heavily parallelized CUDA based simulations to design innovative instrumentation in search for life on extrasolar planets. Next, we dive into serverless HTC architecture used to create simulations of astrophysical sources such as astronomical high energy gamma rays. You'll leave understanding how these architectures propelled innovation and decreased execution times all while optimizing overall cost.