WIRED -
A battle royale called the SMART program has charged teams with a daunting first task: Identify construction sites on Earth using only data from orbiters.
SMART stands for Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique, and its goal is to “harmonize” data from many kinds of Earth-watching satellites and then task software with searching through it for signs of change, natural or human-made. Everyone—from spy agencies to climate scientists to insurance companies to wildland firefighters—wants to use those visuals to understand what’s happening on Earth. But there’s more satellite data than human analysts can keep track of. Automating at least part of the analysis takes advantage of the terabytes (and terabytes) out there and eliminates the tedium so people can focus on interpretation.
