Robin Cole

Tackling the worlds toughest challenges with AI & ML applied to satellite & aerial imagery

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

I just sponsored @torchgeo. Go Sponsor your open source dependencies! You can join me at: https://t.co/NNigf9qfbg

[Frank Rundatz @FrankRundatz]

“Penetration pricing” is the term used when a company burns through Venture Capital money selling a product under its cost to build market share.

Remember how cheap Uber and Lyft used to be? VCs subsidized the drivers and the riders for years. Then they went public and now it costs me $20 for a 3 minute ride down the road.

DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart.

MoviePass, Netflix, Hulu.

All of these companies sold below cost to get market share then massively raised their prices, added ads, diminished their products, etc.

AI today is no different. OpenAI and Anthropic are giving us all cheap rides. To do that, they’re selling $1.00 for 10 cents.

Get it while you can before a different kind of penetration begins.

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

EarthShift: a benchmark for measuring robustness to real-world distribution shifts in Earth observation

[Kelsey Doerksen @spacecadet_kels]

🔥 Hot take: Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) are brittle.

So, we built EarthShift 🌍 — the first public testbed for benchmarking the robustness of GFMs across realistic distribution shifts in remote sensing!

📄 Paper: https://t.co/4z6qWPwgi1

(Thread)

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

@Earth2075 Also waiting on DNO

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

Scaling Transparency: Annual, Pan-Tropical Commodity Maps Powered by AlphaEarth Foundations

[Google Maps Platform @GMapsPlatform]

Today, we're excited to announce a major milestone in spatial transparency: the launch of annual, global commodity tree crop maps (coffee, cocoa, oil palm and rubber) built with Google’s Satellite Embedding dataset, part of Google Earth AI. https://t.co/CO5Hjvn9yK

This dataset represents the first pan-tropical, open source, 10-meter resolution map for cocoa, coffee, and rubber, key commodity tree crops associated with deforestation.

These maps are a core output of the Forest Data Partnership (FDaP), a global consortium dedicated to halting forest loss by collaboratively improving monitoring and supply chain tracking. By scaling our coverage from individual countries to the entire tropical belt, we’re closing a critical data gap that has hindered conservation efforts for decades.

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

FOTBCD: A Geographically Diverse Dataset for Building Change Detection from High-Resolution Aerial Imagery

[Abdel @pyabdel]

Excited to share FOTBCD a new building change detection dataset (0.2m, 512x512).

• Binary: ~28k pairs (change,no-change) — on 🤗 HF
https://t.co/LibRuxJPWA

• Instances: 4k pairs with building polygons labeled
UNCHANGED / DEMOLISHED / NEW

Code & more:
https://t.co/USN2ChjQI1

[EarthDaily Analytics @EarthDailyA]

What happens when you can monitor global cropland daily in near real time?

On the latest #AgTechTalk podcast by @AgBusinessMedia, Andrew Pylypchuk breaks down how next-gen satellite data is reshaping #agriculture and the ag value chain.

🎧Listen now: https://t.co/O2IZjwyLLA

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

Olmoearth v1.1 release

[Ai2 @allen_ai]

Today we’re releasing OlmoEarth v1.1. It’s 3x cheaper to run than v1 while delivering the same state-of-the-art performance—and fully open. 🧵

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

DeltaBit Demo: Change Detection Using Just a Browser 🗺️

[Yasunori Kirimoto @dayjournal_nori]

ブラウザだけで変化検知ができるデモDeltaBit 🗺️
配信側はAlphaEarthの時系列差分を軽量GeoTIFFタイル化。ブラウザ側はGeoTIFFタイルを取得しロジスティック回帰で推論。静的タイル配信&ブラウザ推論でバックエンドゼロが成立する構成。
https://t.co/mW7oeVqhHx

#foss4g #foss4gj

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

@LakelandUK this is the second drysoon that I’ve owned that has failed with this issue - is this built in obsolescence? Thanks

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

@MLWhiz Less time coding, more time reviewing and identifying agent over-reach. This is the new normal

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

@TeslaJigsaw @weareboxt I think they’ve been inundated with enquiries..!

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

AlphaEarth Embeddings, Zonal Statistics, and PCA

[Wherobots @wherobots]

Can AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings preserve interpretable structure after aggregation from pixels to field polygons? We used RasterFlow to build the mosaic and vectorized predictions, then an experimental zonal-stats step computed field-level means. https://t.co/0eNl5mwBpj

[Tesla UK @tesla_uk]

UK Tesla owners can get Powerwall 3 for £149/mo over 4 years including installation

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

@fmenat14 @rptu_kl_ld @DFKI Congrats!!

[LabelMe @LabelMeAI]

LabelMe v6.2 is out.

- Oriented rectangle shape: a rotated bounding box that hugs off-angle objects (parking lots from above, ships, scanned text).
- More AI-assisted shapes: oriented rectangle, rectangle, and circle, fitted from a SAM mask.

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) annotation in LabelMe ☑️

[Kentaro Wada @wkentaro_]

Cars in a parking lot don’t line up with the X axis. Their bounding boxes shouldn’t either.

Oriented rectangles, landing in the next @LabelMeAI release.

[EarthDaily Analytics @EarthDailyA]

With seven satellites now in orbit, @EarthDailyA is moving into the next phase of constellation deployment and commercial readiness.

Our new blog looks at what comes next.

👉Read more: https://t.co/auFZLLHARA
#EarthObservation #SatelliteLaunch #SpaceTech

[Robin Cole @robmarkcole]

@MaxLenormand Congrats to you both! Looks like a lovely venue to tie the knot 🪢