Orbital Insight to track all activities of economic significance
Orbital Insight, which uses data science to help explain global trends, is developing its software platform and algorithms to fully leverage its satellite and drone imagery networks. The firm currently measures a wide array of items, from footfall in shopping malls by counting cars in retail parking lots, to the level of crude oil in storage tanks and aims to expand the scope of objects and events that it can track to ultimately include all visible activities of economic significance. 

James Crawford is the founder and CEO of Orbital Insight, which uses advanced image processing and data science at petabyte scale to understand global and national trends.

He has two decades of experience leading innovative software projects: empowering farmers with climate data at the Climate Corporation, working to get a commercial robot on the moon at Moon Express, making the world's books searchable at Google, and managing robotics at NASA Ames Research Center.

James will be speaking on the Main Stage at WIRED Retail, our second annual one-day summit focusing on the future of retail, being held in London on November 23.

He will take part in the session "Commerce in the cloud and into orbit" alongside Paul Clarke of Ocado and Ken Denman from Emotient.

What are you planning to speak about at WIRED Retail?

Commercial satellite and drone imagery is increasing every year in quantity and quality -- driven by the same trends that bring you cell phones with the power of mainframe computers. At the same time, artificial intelligence has made major breakthroughs with algorithms that can automatically process more imagery than a human could ever look at. These two trends are enabling unprecedented visibility into socio-economic trends. My talk will discuss these trends in more detail and what they will mean for the retail industry.