Climate change is perhaps the most significant problem facing humanity. The dramatic rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere over the past 100 year …

Once, a company could live 60-70 years on the S&P 500. Now it averages 15 years. If companies were people, this would be an epidemic on par with the Black Plague. But the same things that dragged humanity out of that dark age can drag companies out of this one.

High-resolution land cover maps help quantify long-term trends like deforestation and urbanization but are prohibitively costly and time intensive to produce. Mary Wahl and Banibrata De demonstrate how to use Microsofts Cognitive Toolkit and Azure cloud resources to produce land cover maps from aerial imagery by training a semantic segmentation DNNboth on single VMs and at scale on GPU clusters.

Climate science is being flooded with petabytes of data, overwhelming traditional modes of data analysis. The Pangeo project is building a platform to take big data climate science into the cloud using SciPy and large-scale interactive computing tools. Join Ryan Abernathey and Yuvi Panda to find out what the Pangeo team is building and why and learn how to use it.

Drawing on his experience with the Pangeo project, Ryan Abernathey makes the case for the large-scale migration of scientific data and research to the cloud. The cloud offers a way to make the largest datasets instantly accessible to the most sophisticated computational techniques. A global scientific data commons could usher in a golden age of data-driven discovery.

Kim Crayton explains how to reduce exclusionary practices in your organizations and communities.

Not a day goes by without reading headlines about the fear of AI or how technology seems to be dividing us more than bringing us together. DataKind UK is passionate about using machine learning and artificial intelligence for social good. Kate Vang and Christine Henry explain what socially conscious AI looks like and what DataKind is doing to make it a reality.

Mike Prorock offers an overview of mesur.io, a game-changing climate awareness solution that combines smart sensor technology, data transmission, and state-of-the-art visual analytics to transform the agricultural and turf management market. Mesur.io enables growers to monitor areas of concern, providing immediate benefits to crop yield, supply costs, farm labor overhead, and water consumption.