Remote sensing data is becoming crucial to solve some of the most important environmental problems, especially pertaining to agricultural applications and food security. Effectively working with this large data source requires different tools and processing, such as cloud computing and infrastructure. Participants will become familiar with data format and quality considerations, tools, and techniques to process remote sensing imagery at large scale from publicly available satellite sources, using cloud tools such as AWS S3, Databricks, and Parquet. Additionally, participants will learn how to analyze and train machine learning models for classification using this large source of data to solve environmental problems with a focus on agriculture. Participants will have a basic understanding of tools such as Pyspark and TensorFlow. We hope that participants in this course will walk away with the skills and tools to train algorithms using satellite imagery to solve environmental problems anywhere on the planet.

Learning Objectives: 

By the end of this training attendees will be able to:

• Use recommended techniques to download and process remote sensing data from Sentinel-2 and the cropland data layer (CDL) at large scale (> 5GB) with cloud tools (Amazon Web Services [AWS] Simple Storage Service [S3], Databricks, Spark, Parquet)
• Filter data from both the measured (satellite images) and target (CDL) domains to serve modeling objectives based on quality factors, land classification, area of interest [AOI] overlap, and geographical location
• Build training pipelines in TensorFlow to train machine learning algorithms on large scale remote sensing/geospatial datasets for agricultural monitoring
• Utilize random sampling techniques to build robustness into a predictive algorithm while avoiding information leakage across training/validation/testing splits

Course Dates: March 5, 12, and 19, 2024

Time: 10:00 -11:30 or 2:00-3:30 EST (UTC-5, UTC-4); There will be identical sessions at two different times of the day. Participants need only to register and attend one daily session.

To Register: https://go.nasa.gov/4aSQmYP

Audience: This training is primarily intended for remote sensing scientists, practitioners, and geospatial analysts from local, regional, federal, and non-governmental organizations who use remote sensing for agricultural applications. Agronomists, data scientists/data engineers/ML engineers may also be interested in this training.

Relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals:

• Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Course Format: Three 1.5-hour parts including Q&A.

Retweet option:  https://x.com/NASAARSET/status/1750164146589462906?s=20