It’s no secret that Google’s greatest asset is its data. But beyond its social and knowledge graph, what else is all of that information good for? Well, good, for one. Here’s how a sample of nonprofit, grant-powered projects we saw at Google I/O last week are harvesting the company’s resources to effect global change.
Monitoring the Environment with Google Earth Engine
If you use Google Maps regularly, it’s probably to hunt down a coffee shop in a new neighborhood or check traffic on your commute. But Google Earth Engine, part of the greater Google Maps umbrella, is all about thinking big – really big. Google Earth Engine collects petabyte-scale satellite images at a range of wavelengths and then crunches them together using Google’s powerful cloud server clusters. The Earth Engine platform incorporates “trillions of measurements,” including elevation and atmospheric data, dating back as much as 25 years. The result is a rich set of environmental data with an even richer array of applications, including
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