Scientist develops app that lets students tell earth’s story
S.F. resident will unveil his idea during the National Geographic Explorers Festival
Tucked among paleoanthropologists, ocean explorers, and astronauts, several of Silicon Valley’s emerging innovators will take the stage this week at the National Geographic Explorer’s Festival in Washington, D.C.
Among them is UC Berkeley-trained data scientist and San Francisco resident Dan Hammer. During a Friday panel on “The Power of Data-driven Storytelling,” he’ll announce a partnership between National Geographic, the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, and the nonprofit he cofounded, Earthrise Media.
In conjunction with the development of The Tech Museum’s new Center for Technology and Sustainability, the Bay Area startup plans to launch an educational app that will file large quantities of satellite imagery from companies such as DigitalGlobe into a database, where it can be picked through and analyzed by unlikely environmental watchdogs: high school students.
“The imagery is there, the satellites are up, the algorithms are done,” said
Hammer. “It’s just about assembling it.”
Within the Earthrise Media Storytelling app, students are assigned an environmental issue — such as drought or deforestation — by their teacher. They’re then tasked with searching the database for images from across the globe that convey those environmental changes. Similar to an Instagram story — the students then string together a series of snapshots that highlight these changes. They can share it with their teacher, peers in their class, and across the platform, where it can be picked up by media organizations. Eventually, Hammer said, computer algorithms within the database will become trained to recognize hotspots of environmental degradation based on the stories the students create.
“If hundreds of thousands of kids are using or engaging with changes that occur on the earth’s surface, we can help teach the computer to find those (changes),” said Hammer. “We can start reporting from changes on the earth’s surface without ever having a human look at it.”
Throughout Hammer’s career, he’s sought the answer to a key question: “What is a good story that can be told from satellite imagery?”
This question is central to National Geographic’s mission, said Fabien Laurier, the vice president of National Geographic Labs, a branch of the organization that focuses on utilizing technological innovation to reframe Earth’s most challenging environmental issues.
First, Laurier said, National Geographic hopes to “accelerate people’s ability to understand and appreciate the planet, and feel a greater sense of responsibility for it.” Earthrise Media’s storytelling app, he continued, democratizes satellite imagery and remote sensing data, providing students with “a unique global context for stories that can happen at a very specific geographic scale.”
Gretchen Walker, The Tech Museum of Innovation’s Vice President of Education, said the museum is excited to partner with Earthrise Media and National Geographic because it aligns with their mission to increase sustainability messaging
both in the museum and through classroom materials and professional development programs for educators across the Bay Area.
“The real connection for us is that we’re working really hard to inspire the next generation of Silicon Valley innovators to tackle problems like sustainability,” said Walker. “We’re big believers in the effective use of technology to solve problems, so this is a really interesting example of how young people can use technology to advocate for and raise awareness about something they care about.”
Hammer and his colleagues at Earthrise Media have worked to make high-resolution satellite imagery accessible to communities around the world, so journalists, environmentalists — and now, school kids — can track environmental changes in their own neighborhoods. Hammer also co-founded its parent company, Earth Genome, this year with Glen Low and Steve McCormick, formerly of the Nature Conservancy and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The immediate goal, said Hammer, is to get today’s youth to hunt for stories within the data. The larger goal is to put those kids on track to becoming the changemakers of tomorrow.
“Dan is a visionary in his ability to leverage satellite imagery and distill insights from large sets of satellite imagery,” said Laurier. “He’s been pioneering the use of remote sensing to allow us to better understand and track, in near real time, deforestation.”
Hammer cut his teeth wrangling satellite data as a consultant and research assistant at the Center for Global Development, where he worked on a program to track changes in rainforests around the world using remote sensing. As chief data scientist for the World Resources Institute, he co-founded Global Forest Watch 2.0 in 2014, an online platform which tracks evidence of deforestation throughout rainforests across the globe. Within the first week, the website garnered 250,000 views from 171 different countries.
In one instance, satellite images from Global Forest Watch uncovered a gold mining operation tucked away in the remote forests of Peru. The photos revealed a grisly scene inside the bounds of a United Nations protected area. Mining equipment tore precious metal from its bedrock, flattening trees and desecrating the local habitat. Examples like this crop up in Brazil, Indonesia, and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Like the meandering streams and rivers illustrated in the images he shares, Hammer’s path through life has been circuitous. The quest to define his role as a data scientist in the world, and in the modern environmental movement, has taken Hammer to NASA, the TEDX Stage at Berkeley, and the White House.
In 2014, Hammer was
awarded the prestigious Presidential Innovation Fellowship along with 27 other applicants. He worked with a team at NASA to make it easier and quicker for people around the globe to access NASA’s treasure trove of satellite images. In Washington, D.C., he worked under U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, as a senior policy advisor.
Now, with this latest venture, he’s looking to take this lifelong mission of making data accessible even further.
“We’re in a world where 10,000 people in the world have access to all this information,” said Hammer. “Now let’s figure out how to get it to hundreds of millions of people to help contribute to the content and then share it.”