Monday 5 June 2017

UK Space Conference part 1, Copernicus




If you follow me on twitter it won't be news to you that last week I was lucky enough to be sponsored by the mighty Zero Dependency to go to the 3 day UK Space Conference. I had an amazing time and there was a bewildering amount of stuff to see and hear and I'm going to share a few posts of curated bits and pieces I took away from it.

One of the first talks I went to was by Georgy Dean from Astrosat talking about the Copernicus Masters program, the ESA Copernicus  program is astonishing. Within the Copernicus mission three satellites Sentinel 1,2 and 3 are currently on orbit and have a wide range of sensors and imaging equipment doing earth observation. Every time they pass over the EU region they complete a full capture of all the sensors... and all this data is opensource. That’s an amazing amount of data that anyone can use and use cases were shown from local authorities looking at the change in green zones around cities to flood management research.

The Copernicus masters program seeks to maximise the impact the mission can have by promoting Copernicus data and enticing people to consider innovative uses for it in creating applications.
Joining the Copernicus masters competition means people can get a whole heap of support through from the program with regular series of online webinars and other support activities. There are competitions and funding opportunities for those creating interesting applications. In the closing part of Georgy’s talk it was notable that she felt that (due to the overwhelming amount of data available from Copernicus) the future of tackling this big data will possibly lie in the creative application of machine learning and AI.. so if you are into open data, big data and neural networks... get stuck in!


Stay tuned for part 2... when I get chance!

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