Roelof Pieters - Watching Millions of Trees with Python: For Impact and Profit | PyData Fest AMS

Forests are essential to our future. More than 1.6 billion people depend on forests for food, water, fuel and medicines. They support 80% of non-human life on land and safeguard the climate by sequestering carbon. But forest fires, pests, diseases and especially deforestation lay waste to tens of millions of hectares a year. And under pressure of climate change this is only increasing.

At 20tree.ai we apply machine learning to high resolution satellite imagery, looking at trees and other vegetation all over the world constantly! In this talk I will dive into some of the work we do around monitoring both urban and rural green space. Secondly I will talk about how we bridge experimental R&D with applied ML work using nbdev, a framework made popular through the use of the second version of the popular fastai ML framework. And finally I will go over some of our continued challenges of dealing with large volumes of extremely noisy data, and reconciling this with the need to being cost-effective as a scrappy startup

Roelof Pieters is CTO and co-founder of 20tree.ai, double Computer Science dropout (once as Bsc and more recently his Phd), has double degrees in Social/Development Anthropology and has the double distinction of running two earlier failed startups, most recently creative.ai. Roelof also heads up Sunshine Lab, a sustainable design studio, and only codes in python (of course)

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