Descartes Labs with Tim Kelton

Descartes Labs is creating an incredible living atlas of the world from huge datasets leveraging the power of Google Cloud Platform and Tim Kelton, one of the co-founders of Descartes Labs, is here to your cohosts Francesc Campoy and Mark Mandel all about it.

About Tim

Tim is a co-founder of Descartes Labs focuses on building distributed systems using cloud architecture to better see how the earth changes every day. Prior to Descartes Labs, Tim was a Research and Development engineer for 15 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on problem areas such as deep learning, space systems, nuclear non-proliferation, and counterterrorism. In his free time, Tim enjoys mountain biking and skiing in the mountains above Descartes in Santa Fe New Mexico.

Cool things of the week

• Check the transcripts for every episode!
• All Google Cloud Platform episodes on YouTube
• gRPC Project is now 1.0 and ready for production deployments blog post

Interview

• Descartes Labs home page
• Advancing the science of corn forecasting Medium
• Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer Google Research
• Preemptible VMs docs
• Managed Instance Groups docs
• Celery: Distributed Task Queue homepage
• “Tatooine†then and now from space: 40th anniversary of filming of Star Wars Medium

Some maps

Three maps of Humboldt, Iowa in July 2016.

Cloud free image in true color

We detect fields automatically, using machine learning. This is a map of all the fields in Humbolt.

Vegetative health (using NDVI)

Question of the week

What can you get for free on Google Cloud Platform?

• App Engine pricing
  • 28 free instance-hours per day
• Cloud Datastore pricing
  • 1 GB of storage
  • 50k Entity Reads
  • 20k Entity Writes
  • 20k Entity Deletes
• Vision API pricing
  • 1k units/month (a unit correspond to a feature e.g. facial detection)
• BigQuery pricing
  • Loading, Copying, and Exporting data is always free
  • First TB of processed data in queries is free every month
• PubSub pricing
  • First 250M Operations: $0.40/Million