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

Minds Behind Maps

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.

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About Steve Brumby

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Shownotes

• Alexnet Wikipedia
• ImageNet
• Prof Fei-Fei Li
• Roadrunner supercomputer
• IBM's Cell-based Roadrunner is world's fastest (2008)
• Mediations: A Requiem for Descartes Labs by Mark Johnson
• 2015 Bloomberg article on Descartes Labs Corn prediction
• Impact Observatory
• Promptpod podcast
• True 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

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- Edited by Peter Xiong. Find more of his work