Dr. Sangram Ganguly Invited to Speak at Aalto University in Finland

On October 13 and 14, 2015, Dr. Sangram Ganguly of BAER was part of the faculty for a graduate course in Geomatics presented by Aalto University’s School of Engineering in Espoo, Finland. During the two-day course, entitled “Global Monitoring of the Environment Using Satellite Data,” Dr. Ganguly’s lectures and practical assignments demonstrated how the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) and OpenNEX, collaborative data and computer platforms designed to solve grand challenges in Earth sciences, are lowering the barriers to sharing Earth Science data and computational cost, which otherwise in a traditional setup requires heavy demand in resource allocation. NEX provides a platform for rapid analysis of large data sets along with scientific workflows and has been used in many areas of Earth Science study, including global drought monitoring, the National Climate Assessment, and the analysis of forest disturbance in North America. Dr. Ganguly also focused on new innovations in Machine Learning for Earth sciences and highlighted the important aspects of scaling processing requirements for Big Data using open source tools and techniques.

Slides from one of Dr. Ganguly’s lectures are available here.

Image: NASA satellite data incorporated into OpenNEX shows global views of drought conditions in North America in 2012. Green regions are areas with more vegetation than an average July (2000-2013) while red regions have less vegetation than average.