{"id":6214,"date":"2018-10-23T05:52:49","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T12:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/garage-en-us\/?p=6214"},"modified":"2019-06-12T14:47:52","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T21:47:52","slug":"new-garage-project-earth-lens-pairs-ai-with-aerial-imagery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/garage\/blog\/2018\/10\/new-garage-project-earth-lens-pairs-ai-with-aerial-imagery\/","title":{"rendered":"New Garage project Earth Lens pairs AI with aerial imagery"},"content":{"rendered":"

This summer, Microsoft\u2019s AI for Earth team and the office of the AI CTO decided to challenge a group of Garage interns to pair AI with aerial images to make a difference. Today, we announce the release of their summer project: Earth Lens, a Microsoft Garage project<\/a>, a Xamarin-based, open source project for iPad that identifies, tracks, and analyzes objects in aerial imagery to assist in scenarios such as disaster relief and environmental conservation. Earth Lens releases on the heels of Microsoft\u2019s announcement to commit over $40 Million to a new initiative to leverage AI in efforts to save lives, joining a suite of programs known as AI for Good, including AI for Earth, AI for Accessibility, and now, AI for Humanitarian Action<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Earth_Lens_Screenshot_2\"Imagine yourself as a data analyst working to identify objects in aerial imagery. Maybe you’re tracking fishing vessels through the ocean to support ocean sustainability and protect marine ecosystems, or perhaps you’re looking at cities that have been hit by a natural disaster to determine where to allocate your relief efforts. In either case, you would need a dedicated team to comb through thousands of satellite images, manually identifying, tracking, and analyzing relevant objects. Extracting insights from imagery data is an expensive process that could take upwards of days, delaying the decision-making process in mission critical situations.<\/p>\n

Inspired to make this process more efficient, the two co-sponsors decided to team up to pitch Garage interns on tackling this problem by leveraging AI. The Garage Internship Program<\/a> offers teams of 5-6 university students the opportunity to design and build their own project in response to a challenge by sponsoring Microsoft groups. The Vancouver-based group of interns loved the AI for Good pitch. \u201cIn the start of May, our sponsors came to us with an idea that immediately sparked interest among the six of us: an opportunity to leverage AI to help with environmental efforts headed by researchers and conservationists,\u201d shared Michelle Chen, Program Manager intern for Earth Lens.<\/p>\n

AI for Good<\/h2>\n

The team was especially inspired by the work of the organizations helping victims of natural disasters by providing satellite imagery to hasten relief. She continues, \u201cOur vision for Earth Lens was to use technology and AI to transform the way humanitarian work is conducted. The rise of automated image recognition has empowered humanitarian organizations to triage damage, and prioritized areas that require immediate help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Equipped with a trained machine learning model from the AI for Earth team, the interns set out to build a minimally viable product over the course of their remaining 16-week internship. They approached design with a customer obsessed mindset and interviewed prospective users like to the Red Cross<\/a>, OceanMind<\/a>, and FarmBeats<\/a> to identify useful features and iterate on their prototype. The team quickly realized that, in addition to disaster relief, such a tool might be useful in a variety of social impact and sustainability applications such as agriculture, forestry, fishing, and land conservation.<\/p>\n

The team built an iPad app that offers a host of features that humanitarians and environmental researchers can leverage to accelerate their analyses:<\/p>\n