Weekly GEOINT Community News

SpaceFlight Announces Upcoming Launches

SpaceFlight announced a partnership with Rocket Labs for three upcoming launches. The first mission, scheduled for the end of 2018, will launch a BlackSky micro satellite along with several rideshare customers aboard Rocket Labs’ Electron rocket. The second mission will launch satellites from commercial and government organizations in early 2019, and the third mission, also scheduled for early 2019, will launch an Earth observing microsat from Canon Electronics.

Orbital Insight and e-GEOS Partner to Support Federal Disaster Relief

Orbital Insight and e-GEOS (ASI/Telespazio) entered an exclusive partnership bundling their offerings to form a joint service for government emergency response efforts. Orbital Insight will apply its analytics to e-GEOS Emergency Flood Mapping Services, providing government customers with intelligence from SAR data, modeling, field observations, and social media.

Accenture Launches AI Testing Service

Accenture debuted a new service for testing artificial intelligence systems within company infrastructures. The service uses a two-pronged “teach and test” approach, first choosing the most appropriate models to eliminate bias, then comparing system outputs with KPIs to determine the AI’s decision-making effectiveness.

Hexagon Launches Luciad V2018

Hexagon Geospatial announced the release of Luciad V2018, an update of its data visualization and analytics software. V2018 streams point cloud data to desktops and browsers at sub-centimeter accuracy, and equips users with city or countrywide 3D reality meshes to create “smart digital realities” that can be combined with data to track and display trends such as pollution or traffic. 

Boundless Partners with New Light 

Boundless and New Light Technologies (NLT) announced a strategic partnership to bring scalable and cloud enabled open geospatial solutions to federal and state agencies, departments, and offices. The partnership will strengthen Boundless’ consulting and service capacity, expand NLT’s open GIS software offerings, and enable government customers to better extract insight from location data. The companies are currently developing microservices solutions to support the emergency management community.

Tableau Acquires Empirical Systems

Tableau Software announced the purchase of Empirical Systems, an AI startup out of MIT that created an analysis platform for structured system data. At Tableau, the tool will help customers perform automated modeling and analysis to identify trends, test assumptions, and simulate possible scenarios.

Culmen Acquires Analytic Strategies

Culmen International acquired Analytic Strategies (dba PlanetRisk Federal Services). Analytic Strategies’ relationships with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and others will strengthen Culmen’s role in the government sector.

SAP NS2 Acquires Apex Expert Solutions

SAP’s National Security Services (NS2) subsidiary announced the acquisition of Apex Expert Solutions, a 70-person, $15 million company specializing in data fusion for special operations forces. Apex’s data fusion technology will be used within SAP NS2’s High Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) to organize big data into actionable intelligence.

Peer Intel

NGA announced Cindy Daniell, Ph.D., as the agency’s new director of research. Daniell is the former director of advanced technology programs at SRI International and has expertise in sensors, signal processing and compression, energy, and surveillance technologies. The agency also announced the departure of CTO Dr. Anthony Vinci, who will join the private sector in July. The agency is expected to announce a new CTO soon. 

The White House announced Ellen McCarthy, vice president of intelligence and analytics at Noblis, has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary for intelligence and research at the State Department. McCarthy previously served as president of Noblis NSP, and worked at NGA as COO and director of plans and programs prior to her move to Noblis in 2015.

Photo Credit: Rocket Labs