1. Why KZ’s work is deep and cool and most of other companies’ work is not
At some point most of us have asked ‘why’? Why we do the work we do? What is the deeper meaning of it? What is my mission? And if you dig deeper, the answers can be horrifyingly empty in most of the companies. Besides the joy of the process and nice colleagues there is usually nothing left besides earning money and making some little process more efficient for our little human problems. Earning more money for what? Making some process more efficient for what?
Optimizing the people and food transport by further 5% – is it really badly needed? Better understanding of our one and only home planet [for solving climate change] is really badly needed, but this is not.
Putting the best brains to trade stocks to make more money for an already very rich company?
Developing yet another online bank or online shop? It is already invented, re-doing it again is boring.
The best data scientists studying customer behavior to improve the targeted ads algorithms. Is it the best use of our talent?
Making bank transfers and currency exchange a bit cheaper? Not bad, but also not the most burning question of our time.
Conquering the climate change and deeply understanding the processes that drive it – is potentially the most burning question of our time! It deserves much more investment talent and focus than we currently do!
The work of KappaZeta helps to solve this question. Making satellite data more accurate, easy to use, visible and accessible for all the interested people – contributes directly for better understanding of our planet. It helps to do better decisions based on fresh and objective data.
It is directly related with the highest values of ours and with the fundamental characteristic of mankind. The meaning of life according to Dalai Lama is extending the limits of human knowledge. It is something bigger and longer lasting than our human lives. New knowledge in the sense of science is also something truly new, it is the only ‘real news’. One of the most fundamental characteristics of humanity is curiosity. Willingness to know more than we already know, to find out new things. A good reason to wake up in the morning as there is so much new and exciting to be found out!
Kaupo Voormansik, CEO, SAR expert
2. Improving our Generative Model for Synthetic NDVI Estimations
Recently, we shared some results from our Synthetic NDVI MVP, showing it was feasible to model Optical NDVI images from SAR backscatter. We also mentioned this MVP was planned to be extended from June, to improve the fidelity of the images generated and their quality (i.e., sharpness, structural similarity, closeness to original NDVI values).
The focus on improving the model so far, has considered more data covering more time periods and agricultural land areas, some new features from the Sentinel-1 satellite (coherence on both polarizations) and some model improvements.
Preparing this new data alone, has required some careful work; Figure 1 below compares preprocessing techniques to scale VV-backscatter values for training. We do not yet understand the relation between Coherence and NDVI and are not sure if this new feature will improve the model. However, we are excited to learn more about the relation between Sentinel-1 data and NDVI (and even more Sentinel-2 features, including RGB bands in the future) and are hopeful for improved results on our evaluation metrics.
Hudson Taylor Lekunze, data analyst
