Tips from Top – “Emerging Applications and Opportunities in Geo-spatial Data Analytics”. Mr. Rajib Roy, C.E.O., Quantum Spatial Ltd.
The Department
of Industrial and Management Engineering at IIT Kanpur played host to a seminar
by Mr. Rajib Roy, CEO of Quantum Spatial Ltd., who put forth an overview of how
analysis of geospatial data can bring about a paradigm shift in the world of
information and how its subsequent analysis can result in benefits to various
organizations.
Mr. Roy was
quite forthright in bringing out some merry factoids about his career and his
perception of the various walks of the world that he had been involved with. He
eased us into the new and emerging world of geospatial data analytics, and the
current playing fields surrounding this mystery. With the detection of trees having
potential to cause forest fires in dry California terrain, to scouting and
negating their possible interaction with live transmission lines with actual
analysis on the z-axis, geospatial data analytics encompasses a very broad
horizon of areas of application.
He then provided
certain insight from the history of Quantum Spatial, a company with its
grassroots dating back to the First World War, when reconnaissance missions
from overhead flights were first used widely, and later on saw uses in crop
dusting; to a current blue chip customer base and a 500 strong
workforce.
The primary
difference between geospatial data and normal data is the conspicuous absence
of structure as Mr. Roy strikingly brought forward. Performing predictive
analysis with unstructured data represents a whole new level of analytics
previously uncharted. This problem is
normally approached in 3 different phases; the first phase being the collection
of data, represents a cost intensive solution where fleets of airplanes,
helicopters, drones and vehicles from land collect data using technologies like
LIDAR, hyper spectral cameras and various sensors. Mr. Roy reflected on the
advancement in data collection technology and the humongous investments it
represents behind the short life cycles of the devices till obsolescence. The
second phase represents a conversion of this data into structured form after
cleaning it. While the first part of the process can be sourced from third
parties, this is generally done in-house where terabytes of data are processed
on a daily basis. The third phase represents analysis and interpretation of
this data, and its representation in a constructive
manner that various businesses can utilize.
Mr. Roy moved
to discussing the exciting new opportunities in the geo-spatial data segment,
commenting on how new problem solvers can truly bring cost effective solutions
onto the table, with this being an area of concern that the new upcoming
startups can very well target. With the movement of technology from passive to
active acquisition, new avenues have opened up, where Mr. Roy explained the
classic example of imagery versus LIDAR, and the problems with collection of
data via satellites. Advances in the geo-spatial segment are also supposed to follow
the classic cycle of defense usage moving on to civil, consumer and finally business
centric uses. Geo-spatial analytics has finally breached the civil usage barrier
and has tremendous new opportunities in the business consumer segment.
Challenges surrounding the same would be in the areas of interpretation of
unstructured data and involving cost effective solutions for the entire
process. Mr. Roy concluded with the possibility of India adopting geospatial
data analytics in the future and making the best use of her fundamentally
immense resource pool.
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