The Ultimate Ground Truth from Space —
Future of Earth Observation and More!
Earth Observation (EO) is transforming from monolithic into distributed systems. Hence, verifiable EO data chains are required, to finally unlock their potential for its stakeholders.
At the European Space Agency’s PhiWeek 2018 in Rome, I was honoured to deliver a keynote speech. The Φ-week was hosted by the ESA’s newly created Φ-department, discussing the latest trends in Earth Observation (EO). ESA also appointed me as a Special Rapporteur to work on propositions for Space 4.0, EO and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Low-cost “nanosats” and reusable launchers are remaking the satellite business, making everything from remote monitoring of crops to broadband access to remote villages cheaper and more accessible.
This confluence of new technologies creates a sharing economy in space that allows the “other seven billion” residents of earth who are not employed by large corporations or governments to contribute to space-based Open Science applications to create a more humane and sustainable world.
In my speech, the emphasis was on the fact that the EO data is moving from monolithic infrastructures to distributed systems. There’s a massive boom in the number of stakeholders, which is resulting in an inflation of users, use cases, innovation and algorithms.
Interlinked Protocol is working towards a trust infrastructure to unlock business opportunities through EO driven insights in the fields of precision agriculture, transportation, logistics, water management, environmental monitoring, energy management, risk management and much more.
Space 4.0
Over the last 30 years, the explosion in inexpensive computing devices and the creation of the Internet created the foundation for today’s digital economy. A similar infrastructure for the sharing economy in space is being created before our eyes.
The first, and most obvious, driver for Space 4.0 is the dramatic and ongoing reductions in the cost to launch satellites into orbit by private start-ups. The most prominent example is SpaceX, which has successfully landed boosters back on earth and plans the first-ever launch of such reusable boosters in 2017.
The second advance is the development of “nanosats” that are dramatically smaller, lighter, and thus easier and less expensive to launch than those typically used by governments or industry. In February 2017 India’s space agency put a record 104 of such small satellites into orbit from a single rocket, 88 of which weighed only ten pounds and belong to a private firm that sells data to governments and companies.
The third advance is the evolution of new services in space such as space robotics. Remote controlled or self-supervised space robots for 3D printing, mining, resource supplies or scientific missions are making space cheaper and much more accessible for us.
Much as the Internet and mobile computing paved the way for the global sharing of skills and services, the falling barriers to space access are creating global space-related supply chains and skill sets.
Blockchain Opportunity Domains for Space 4.0
More distributed, intelligent and lower-cost space-based sensing and communications is a potentially powerful combination. But it could generate a flood of chaotic, unreliable data, and be too expensive for individuals or civic groups to access, without a low-cost mechanism to assure the integrity of data and transactions.
Community or civic organizations must know the sensing data they receive is reliable. If a hedge fund manager is to make a multi-million dollar bet on future oil prices, they need to be sure the satellite imagery of oil tanker movements on which they’re relying haven’t been tampered with. If an NGO is to mount an effective public campaign for climate change action, disaster relief or against a repressive regime, it must be able to prove the EO data chain attributes have not been altered.
By providing low cost, assured trust in the integrity of data and transactions, blockchain can make it dramatically easier to trust, own, share and sell services from this exploding new sensing, communication and data processing infrastructure.
This trust infrastructure provides several benefits in the areas of crowd-funding of space projects, tokenisation of space assets, economically independent devices, sharing economy in space and verifiable data streams.
Developing Trust for New Earth Observation
All these advances in EO mean more and more remote sensing capability in space with a continual increase in image resolution.
EO provides a huge advantage when it comes with benchmarked algorithms and verified (clean) data to the organisations using it. However, a surge in such databases, applications and algorithms — many of which are not (yet) verified or benchmarked — could harm the organisations using it. Hence, a variety of trust problems need to be solved:
- The provenance of EO and terrestrial data
- Quality of the input data
- Transparent set up for an image processing pipeline
- Accuracy benchmarking of machine learning algorithms and training data
- Aggregated accuracy and trustability of predicted labels and attributes
The reliability and accuracy of data from an EO image pipeline pose a risks for its users who have to devote valuable time to evaluate the trustability or associated (unknown) risks with EO data attributes.
Therefore, an EO trust infrastructure becomes a absolute necessity.
Verifiable EO Value Chain — The Ultimate Ground Truth from Space
NGOs, organisations, open science communities, autonomous machines and risk managers are embedding remote sensing data in their decision making. An exponentially increasing number of decisions are starting to depend on EO data in the fields of Precision Agriculture, Water management, Energy, Supply Chain, Environmental Protection and much more.
The key problem to be solved for sound decision making is to feed benchmarked machine learning algorithms and neural networks with “clean data” from space. Clean data consists of verifiable, untampered and authentic satellite images.
Satellites in space are extremely difficult to tamper as they are physically (almost) inaccessible and their communication links are strictly monitored and separated from the internet. But as soon as the data touches the ground and is processed by software and humans, there is room tempering the data or by applying poor algorithms. To solve this, stakeholders in this ecosystem require a verifiable EO image processing pipeline for:
- Image classification
- Object detection
- Semantic segmentation
- Fusion with terrestrial data
- Calculation of aggregated labels and attributes
Information from processing, for instance in convolutional neural networks, generate valuable insights and metrics e.g. for bare soil, land use or asset tracking. When combined with verifiable data chains, Earth Observation delivers valuable information in the resolution of a few centimeters.
Interlinked is providing verifiable data chains for both, the satellite images and the machine learning algorithms including benchmarking data about. Our objective is to establish a trust infrastructure that enables sound and safe decision making.
You can read more about digital identities, twins and agents, in my recently published series “The Future of Identity”. If you want to learn more about Interlinked, check out the article “Most Asked Questions Around Interlinked” from my colleague Georg Jürgens.
Become a part of the community for more details and the future prospects of our EO Interlinked activities.
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