Shortlisted for NASA Europa Challenge 2017

I am super happy to share that a startup I am mentoring has been shortlisted for the NASA Europa Challenge 2017. From this, after the evaluation by all the mentors and the panel, a few will be selected for the finals to be held in Helsinki. The competition fosters new solutions to address real problems of a territory and makes the relevant research results available to the entire community of stakeholders. Solutions are to be based on a NASA World Wind virtual 3D maps open source technology made available by NASA. WorldWind allows developers to quickly create interactive visualizations of 3D globe, map and geographical information.

The startup I am mentoring is run by energetic entrepreneur Karthik Ravisankar. “E-Farmerce” platform makes the farms searchable from satellite imagery with Crop-Based Deep Learning Models. Detects visual similarities between scenes, and apply machine learning to recognise different types of Farms (Like Paddy, Wheat and soybeans. The ability to decipher vegetation-type through pixel analysis is a tremendously valuable capability that they are working on.

You can get an idea of the challenge from this short video from 2016: