The same data that anticipates and mitigates price fluctuations can protect and enhance your environmental reputation — *The following is an excerpt from a new white paper available from Descartes Labs.* Overview Executives in commodity-intensive industries face many challenges today. Not only do they have to improve supply chain efficiencies in the fight against margin compression and increasing competition from algorithmic traders, but they also have to prove…

Illustrating the power of the Descartes Labs Platform to explore agricultural traceability challenges — According to the World Wildlife Federation, palm oil can be found in almost 50% of all packaged supermarket goods. As demand continues to increase, global agriculture and manufacturing companies are searching…

Descartes Labs uses Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to run a 9.95 petaflops High-Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark, placing it #40 in the June 2021 TOP500 ranking. The company improves on its previous AWS-based 2019 TOP500 submission (1.926 petaflops, #136) by 417% in HPL performance and 96 ranking spots in only two years. — SANTA FE — (Newswire.com) — Jun. 28, 2021 — Descartes Labs, Inc. today announced a new cloud supercomputing achievement with a TOP500 run on AWS of 9.95 petaflops using virtualized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The TOP500 organization uses the LINPACK Benchmark-a test that involves solving a dense…

Vaccine rollouts and sluggish supply chains still facing pandemic-related restrictions drove increased demand in the first half of 2021 for basic commodities like soybeans, sugar, vegetable oils, meat, and dairy. — Improving trading and procurement performance with geospatial data and machine learning A recent report by the UN FAO Food Price Index saw global food prices reach their highest levels in a decade in May, up 4.8% compared to April and 39.7% since the same time last year. Vaccine rollouts and sluggish supply chains still facing pandemic-related restrictions drove increased demand for…

Enhancing mineral prospecting and tailings safety with massively scalable models of the earth — “Covid is ushering in a new era of policies aimed at social need instead of financial stability which will likely create cyclically stronger, more commodity-intensive economic growth, that should create the elusive cyclical upswing in demand.” — Goldman Sachs, Commodities Outlook 2021, Nov. 18, 2020 Ever since the launch of…

The combination of global climate models and land cover data can be used to estimate the regional effects of climate change years into the future — By Sepideh Khajehei — Sepideh is an Applied Scientist at Descartes Labs working on the Forestry & Climate team. She has a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Portland State University with domain expertise in hydrology, weather and climate risk, and natural hazard prediction. With collaboration by Alex Diamond…

Predicting Vegetation Indices Using Radar Imagery — By Terry Conlon — Ph.D. Student in the Sustainable Engineering Lab at Columbia University. Terry completed the following work as a Descartes Labs intern this summer, where he worked with Rose Rustowicz to apply deep learning methods to timeseries of satellite imagery. Background Despite numerous advances in the collection and distribution…

Generating realistic but synthetic images to test automated change detection algorithms — By Christopher Ren — Chick Keller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Space Data Science & System Group, Intelligence and Space Research Division (ISR-3) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Chris’s research interests include anomalous change detection, multi-sensor data fusion, remote sensing, and machine learning. Background

How to remotely monitor supply and demand to make better business decisions in times of economic disruption — We’re excited to announce the release of our Economic Activity Signals (EAS) quick-start package — a collection of geographic data feeds that track real-world behavior to help estimate daily changes in supply, demand, distribution, and the operational state of facilities on a global scale.