Upcoming Events
CDS Colloquium
Apr 15, 2022, 3:00 - 4:00 PM
Zoom
Contact CDS for event access information.
Featuring Anirudh Koul, Artificial Intelligence Expert, Frontier Development Lab AI Mentor
Title:
NASA SpaceML Worldview Search: The NoCode Earth & Natural Disaster Dataset Curator from Unlabeled Petabyte Scale Imagery
Abstract:
AI modeling for Earth events at NASA is often limited by the availability of labeled examples. For example, training classifiers to detect forest fires from satellite imagery requires curating a massive and diverse dataset of example forest fires, a tedious multi-month effort requiring careful review of over 196 million square miles of data per day for 20 years. While such images might exist in abundance within 40 petabytes of unlabeled satellite data, finding these positive examples to include in a training dataset for a machine learning model is extremely time-consuming and requires researchers to "hunt" for positive examples, like finding a needle in a haystack.
In this presentation, we showcase a no-code open-source tool built by an international team of citizen scientists whose goal is to minimize the amount of human manual image labeling needed to achieve a state-of-the-art classifier. The pipeline, purpose-built to take advantage of the massive amount of unlabeled images, consists of (1) self-supervision training to convert unlabeled images into meaningful representations, (2) search-by-example to collect a seed set of similar images, (3) human-in-the-loop active learning to iteratively ask for labels on uncertain examples and train on them. In initial experiments, the system has yielded orders of magnitude reduction in time and cost of data labeling efforts and has shown the potential to multiply the efficiency of the researcher's data curation efforts.
Author Bio:
Anirudh Koul is a noted AI expert, UN/TEDx speaker, author of O'Reilly's Practical Deep Learning book and a former scientist at Microsoft Research, where he founded Seeing AI, considered the most used technology among the blind community after the iPhone. He works at Pinterest helping incubate emerging technologies. With features shipped to a billion users, he brings over a decade of production-oriented applied research experience on petabyte-scale datasets. He also serves as an ML Lead for Frontier Development Labs & SpaceML - NASA's AI Accelerator, and coaches a podium-winning team for Roborace autonomous driving championship @175mph. His work in the AI for Good field, which IEEE has called “life-changing,” has received awards from CES, FCC, MIT, Cannes Lions, American Council of the Blind, showcased at events by UN, World Economic Forum, White House, House of Lords, Netflix, National Geographic, and lauded by world leaders including Justin Trudeau and Theresa May. For his work, he received the IET Career Achievement Award in 2019.
