8 September 2024

‘AI gold mine’: NGA aims to exploit archive of satellite images, expert analysis

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

The director of data and digital innovation at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency said the NGA has started training artificial intelligence algorithms on its unique trove of visual and textual data.

This data is “an AI gold mine,” said Mark Munsell. That’s not just because it consists of large amounts of well-labeled, well-organized, and carefully vetted data, accumulated over decades by the intelligence agency tasked with compiling and analyzing geospatial data for policymakers from the president on down. It’s also because this data is what experts call multi-modal, combining images with text descriptions.

Contrast that to how GenAI companies are feverishly scraping everything from Reddit posts to YouTube captions in their desperate quest for training data — and that’s all pure text, without any ability to cross-reference other kinds of sources.

“We’re in the early days of some really cool experiments,” Munsell told the annual INSA Intelligence & National Security Summit on Tuesday. “Those experiments involve taking the visual record of the Earth that we have from space … and merging it with millions and millions of finely curated humans’ reports about what they see on those images.”

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