Bhoo-Mandal Talk on September 11, 2020
Talk title: Google Earth Engine for Planetary Scale Decision Support
Speaker: Mr. Ujaval Gandhi, Spatial Thoughts
Time: September 11, 2020, 6:00 pm IST
Venue: [Virtual Talk] IEEE-Webex
Abstract:
In order to make progress on global problems, scientists and decision-makers need to be able to ask questions of increasingly large and complex geospatial datasets. Due to the volume of the data and computation requirements, traditional desktop-based Remote Sensing workflows have struggled to meet the demands of research problems at global, national, or even regional scales. Google Earth Engine addresses this problem by providing a cloud-based system that hosts a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets and along with massive amounts of parallel-computing infrastructure. It is available for scientists, researchers, and developers to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth’s surface. It has emerged as the platform of choice among Earth Science researchers across the globe.
This talk will give a broad overview of the Google Earth Engine and its capabilities. We will cover a broad range of applications that aid in tackling deforestation, climate change, water resources management, infectious diseases, and biodiversity conservation – with a focus on case studies from India. The talk will also dive into technical details on how the system works and how you can leverage it for your remote sensing workflow.
Speaker Biography:
Ujaval got his Masters in Geospatial Information Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After joining Google Inc. in California, he moved to India in 2006. He was one of the early employees at Google India and part of the team that launched Google Maps for India. He worked on multiple Geo teams at Google and led the GIS team in India. He was also the lead trainer for Google Earth Engine in India and trained over 1000 researchers, scientists, and engineers.
He is a world-renowned GIS expert and training facilitator who is passionate about advancing the use of open-source technologies in teaching and research. He left Google recently to work on his startup – Spatial Thoughts – that is building a learning platform to bridge the skill gap in the geospatial industry. He publishes widely used open learning materials on QGIS and Python at qgistutorials.com and spatialthoughts.com
He is also a visiting faculty/researcher at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.