Weekly GEOINT Community News

Vencore to Support NGA Analytic Services

Vencore secured a prime position on a potential five-year, $980 million contract to provide technical support services to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The company will help NGA integrate analytic services and GEOINT sources to track and build up collection strategies as well as modeling and simulation operations for NGA’s Multi-Intelligence Analytical and Collection Support Services program.

Planet Launches Satellite Data Competition

In an effort to spur on machine learning advances in the satellite imagery field, Planet launched a satellite data competition on Kaggle, a data science competition platform. Planet is releasing thousands of image chips from the Amazon basin, labeled with information about atmospheric conditions and the presence of roads, mining, agriculture, human habitation, rivers, and more. Data scientists from around the world are challenged to label each chip as accurately as possible, competing for $60,000 in prizes. Join the competition.

East View Geospatial Building Training Data Library

East View Geospatial (EVG) is building a library of geospatial training data for use in supervised machine learning applications. Developers will use the data sets to enhance and calibrate the performance of their algorithms. Geospatial professionals will rely on the training data to improve the results of machine learning applications in real-world projects. Currently, EVG is offering at no charge a sample foundation geospatial training data set developed during a research and development pilot in Papua New Guinea.

Georgetown University Opens Data Center

Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy opened the Georgetown Research Data Center (RDC). The Georgetown RDC is a joint project of the U.S. Census Bureau and the McCourt School’s Massive Data Institute and provides secure access to qualified researchers at Georgetown and other nearby universities and institutions examining a wide range of social and economic issues. The Massive Data Institute is an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the study of high-dimensional data to answer public policy questions using real-time sources such as the internet, social media, sensors, and more.

Peer Intel

Army Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mary Legere joined Accenture Federal Services as managing director of the company’s national and defense intelligence business. Prior to joining Accenture, Legere was deputy chief of staff (G-2)—the Army’s senior intelligence officer.

Photo Credit: Planet