Seffat Chowdhury
Seffat Chowdhury is the Digital Earth Africa Platform Technical Lead. He obtained his BSc and MSc qualifications in Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering from UKZN in 2009 and 2012 respectively, currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Pretoria in ML for autonomous vehicle safety. He has worked in guidance and control engineering for aerospace systems and the exploitation of remotely sensed big-data for various commercial and social applications. His interests are in AI, GIS, remote sensing, aerospace and big data. He serves as the Systems Engineer in the Data Systems Management team at the South African National Space Agency’s Earth Observation division, performing end-to-end architecture and life-cycle management of satellite data reception, processing and dissemination systems.
Sessions
Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) is an operational platform with a mission to produce decision-ready products and to harness and increase the capacity of Earth observation users across the African continent. DE Africa’s mission is supported by a platform that involves delivery of data and services hosted in the public cloud. More than three Petabytes of Earth observation (EO) data covering the African continent are routinely updated and made available for free.
This talk will explore how cloud native geospatial technologies, such as the Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF data storage format and Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog metadata standard, enable us to more easily organise, share and analyse these petabytes of data. We’ll discuss how we work with the global EO community to develop standards that enable federation and interoperability. And we’ll demonstrate how DE Africa has been able to to build capacity across Africa, from enabling individuals to run scientific analyses through to assisting national space agencies set up their own platform and supporting industry to deliver innovative products on top of our service.
We will conclude with covering key lessons learnt in building the DE Africa platform, and look to the future, as we transition to African-led operations. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Digital Earth Australia team, international partners and many individuals who have helped the platform become realised.