The Army Corps of Engineers is looking to automation capabilities to extract valuable insights from satellite imagery data, particularly as the agency grapples with an overwhelming influx of information, a senior Corps official said today.
At today’s Google Geo for Gov event in Reston, Va., Austin Davis, technical director of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Geospatial Laboratory, discussed how the increasing volume and variety of data require new techniques and approaches to identify key features, manage information, and make it “queryable.”
“As data becomes larger, and you have this proliferation of data sources those techniques to identify what … information matters versus information that doesn’t matter to specific [decision-makers] … is key,” Davis said. “So, a lot of our focus is on providing autonomous workflows.”
The Corps, he explained, relies on satellite imagery data to make informed decisions for mission operations. The influx of data has prompted the Corps to prioritize the development of autonomous workflows that streamline data processing and enhance the ability to generate actionable insights.
According to Davis, geospatial engineers at the Corps traditionally spent over 15 hours processing remote sensing data to create usable maps for decision-makers. Today, he stated, the Corps aims to reduce that timeframe to just a few minutes.
By providing autonomous workflows, “all of a sudden that provides tremendously better situational awareness. [It] allows the users to really think through what are the conditions there? Not just how can I wrestle with this tool to get the output that I need but be able to intuitively understand what that output is trying to communicate,” Austin said.
However, Austin emphasized that the actual technology to deliver that autonomous workflow for the Corps is a “second class citizen in that problem, because [there are] a variety of solutions that could deliver that final outcome.”
“There is a lot of innovation. There are a lot of cool new approaches that can help us. But the way we approach this development is thinking about what our users need, what those decision makers need for them to do their jobs better, and then we look at what technology can do,” Austin said.
