Steve Brumby: Governments Need Better Maps, Impact Observatory, Descartes Labs & National Geographic - MBM#49

Steve Brumby is the founder & CTO of Impact Observatory, a company working on providing rapid land cover maps anywhere on Earth. He puts it as wanting to provide "the maps the US takes for granted, all around the globe". Steve was also a co-founder & the CTO at Descartes Labs and worked at National Geographic.---Episode Sponsor: OpenCageUse OpenCage for your geocoding needs with their API. They have a generous Free trial you can sign up to!---About Steve BrumbyTwitterLinkedInShownotesAlexnet WikipediaImageNetProf Fei-Fei LiRoadrunner supercomputerIBM's Cell-based Roadrunner is world's fastest (2008)Mediations: A Requiem for Descartes Labs by Mark Johnson2015 Bloomberg article on Descartes Labs Corn predictionImpact ObservatoryPromptpod podcastTrue Names by Vernor Vinge (Affiliate Link)Timestamps(00:00) - Introduction(01:37) - Sponsor(03:17) - How would you describe yourself(04:07) - Academia vs Entrepreneurship(05:21) - The urge to implement(12:03) - The rise of Deep Learning in Computer Vision after AlexNet(17:24) - Making a Dataset Equivalent to how much a Human Eye Sees(18:50) - A SuperComputer made of PlayStation 3s(22:17) - Descartes Labs(28:25) - Working at National Geographic(41:06) - Rate of Innovation in different organisations(47:53) - The Cost of Raising Venture Capital(53:30) - Difference between Impact / Angel and VC investors(01:00:17) - Impact Observatory(01:04:45) - Working with the United Nations & US Government(01:13:47) - Greenwashing(01:19:59) - Trust in government/private company(01:22:01) - Validation work(01:28:08) - Communicating Uncertainty(01:30:20) - What are you excited about(01:37:27) - Book/podcast Recommendation(01:41:17) - Googling as the early prompt engineering- Support the podcast on Patreon- Website- My Twitter- Podcast Twitter- Read Previous Issues of the Newsletter- Edited by Peter Xiong. Find more of his work