In this episode, we speak with Swetha Kolluri, who works on AI and Digital Innovations at the World Bank. Previously serving as Head of Experimentation at UNDP in India, Swetha has dedicated her career to applying frontier technologies to social and environmental challenges. With her background spanning rural development, data science, and sustainability initiatives across India and the US, she brings unique perspectives on transformative solutions using AI and cloud computing.

In this conversation, Swetha shares insights from her work designing innovative development experiments, and her vision for how earth observation, citizen science and AI can address global challenges such as environmental degradation and climate change. She also shares some tips managing cloud costs for organisations who may have low resource bases.

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Sign-up for thriveGEO's Cloud-Native Geospatial 101 training and use the exclusive discount code CNGPODCAST - https://bit.ly/geospatial_cloud

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More about Swetha:

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/swetha-kolluri/

Projects that Swetha mentioned in the episode:

GeoAI for brick kilns in India. This digital innovation applied AI to detect 48,287 brick kilns from satellite data with an accuracy of 96%, empowering environmental regulators in India to expedite climate action.

https://geo-ai.undp.org.in/

DiCRA (Data in Climate Resilient Agriculture) is an accredited digital public good (DPG) that has democratized satellite data for informing climate finance in agriculture. This innovation provided data and intelligence on climate resilience across 50 million hectares of agriculture land across 7 states in India.

https://github.com/undpindia/dicra

‘VAYU – OpenAir’ with open software, open algorithms and open data collected on air pollution produced through hyperlocal mapping of air pollution in two cities - Patna and Gurgaon. This dataset is used to map point sources of air pollution and enable cities take action on specific sources.

https://github.com/undpindia/VAYU_OpenAir

More about thriveGEO - https://thrivegeo.com/

Welcome to Season 15, during which we will host a series of conversations around the question: 'Is the future of geospatial in the cloud?' With ever increasing amounts of satellite data and computational power available, moving geospatial workflows to the cloud opens the doors to powerful insights. But what does it take to really switch to doing things in a cloud-native way? Let's find out together.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Brianna R. Pagán, Deputy Manager of the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data Information Centre. In her current role, Brianna is responsible for orchestrating the transition to the cloud while managing various engineering, science, and data curation teams. She has also recently been appointed as an Editorial Board member of the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum. Brianna shares about her career trajectory, her reflections on the intersection of technology, climate change and social justice, why she believes that the future of geospatial is all about collaboration and how the cloud is one piece of the puzzle…

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Sign-up for our Cloud-Native Geospatial 101 training and use the exclusive discount code CNGPODCAST - https://bit.ly/geospatial_cloud

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More about Brianna:

Website - https://www.briannapagan.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianna-r-pagán-phd-8a49a46b

More about Openscapes - https://openscapes.org/

More about the NASA TOPS initiative - https://science.nasa.gov/open-science/tops/

Watch this episode on YouTube - https://youtu.be/HB9ycjEsg0M

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Season 15 of Scene from Above is brought to you by thriveGEO.

Welcome to Season 15, during which we will host a series of conversations around the question: 'Is the future of geospatial in the cloud?' With ever increasing amounts of satellite data and computational power available, moving geospatial workflows to the cloud opens the doors to powerful insights. But what does it take to really switch to doing things in a cloud-native way? Let's find out together.

In the first episode, we talk to Jed Sundwall, the Executive Director of Radiant Earth. Jed has been instrumental in bringing open geospatial data to the cloud. Under Radiant Earth, he started two initiatives, the ‘CNG - the cloud-native geospatial forum’ and the ‘source cooperative’. In this conversation, Jed will shed some light on where he sees the geospatial industry heading...

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Sign-up for our Cloud-Native Geospatial 101 training and use the exclusive discount code CNGPODCAST - https://bit.ly/geospatial_cloud

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Github discussion about the definition of cloud-native geospatial data - https://github.com/cloudnativegeo/cloudnativegeo.org/issues/18

More about Jed:

Website - https://jed.co/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jedsundwall/

More about Radiant Earth - https://radiant.earth/

More about the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG) - https://cloudnativegeo.org/

Watch this episode on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-86IH4DouY

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Season 15 of Scene from Above is brought to you by thriveGEO.