JuliaCon 2023

JuliaEO 2023: Outcomes, Overview & Impact
2023-07-26 , 32-144

A community of Julia developers working with Earth Observation was brought together at the JuliaEO2023: Global Workshop on Earth Observation with Julia. 300 hundred people registered and 40 attended in person. All major aspects were covered: big geospatial data, remote sensing, data processing, visualization, modelling, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing. A Docker container and a Dataverse archive complement the notebook collection for reproducibility.


The talk will describe the context and motivation for organizing the JuliaEO 2023: Global Workshop on Earth Observation with Julia, which took place in January 2023. It will proceed with reporting the topics covered and summarize the notebooks used by the 14 speakers. Finally, it will highlight how the Julia ecosystem currently supports most Earth Observation pipelines and the opportunities to expand it.

Currently works as a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Research interests and expertise include satellite observations, ocean robots, marine ecosystems, ocean physics, numerical modeling, and estimation in general (incl. AI, ML, DA, & AD). Created the JuliaOcean and JuliaClimate organizations. Lead developer of a series of Julia packages focused on ocean and climate science. These include MeshArrays.jl (JuliaCon18), ClimateModels.jl (JuliaCon21), and OceanRobots (JuliaCon21).

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Iga Szczesniak is a Project Developer at the Earth Observation Laboratory of the AIR Centre. She graduated with a degree in Geoinformatics and has since worked to support innovative applications of Earth Observation (EO) data using geospatial data and the Julia language. Prior to her current role, Iga conducted a socio-economic analysis of the EO market at the European Space Agency (ESA). In addition to her professional work, she serves on the organizing committee of JuliaEO 2023 - Global Workshop on Earth Observation with Julia. She loves talking about NewSpace, Synthetic Aperture Radar, and innovative applications of remote sensing data.

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Joao Pinelo is the Head of Data Science, Cloud Infrastructure and Development at the Atlantic International Research Centre. He has been at the Earth Observation Lab (AIR Centre) - a laboratory of the European Space Agency (ESA) - since 2020, where he was the project manager for building and setting up a data centre. He defined and manages systems’ architectures for networking, storage and computation of the datacentre, which he set up as a hybrid cloud. He set up and is responsible for the ground segment of the Direct Receiving Station, which streams and processes Earth Observation satellite data in real-time. Joao develops systems and software, including data science pipelines, databases and web applications. He managed several projects, and he is the chief architect of an alert system. He is also the chief architect of the IoT network of the Azores, and the chief architect of the Custodian system (real-time monitoring of small fishing vessels and gear). He is coordinating the set-up of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) node GRID Azores. Between 2010-13, he was Chairman and Chief Product Officer of the startup Strategic Spatial Solutions Inc. which he co-founded in Berkeley, California, with the responsibilities of leading the board to deliver business strategies, while developing high governance standards. He also worked on the definition of user requirements and use cases, liaise with potential clients and final users, and software testing. He an alumnus of University College London, where he earned a PhD in architecture. He has have (co-)authored scientific papers, including in Nature Communications. He has over 18 years of experience in higher education in Europe, the UK, and the Middle East, where I was an Assistant Professor. He is happiest while leading teams, strategising, playing with new ideas and stress-test them, brainstorming, creating systems architectures, exploring a new dataset, and writing code.

Adriano Lima is Senior Project Officer and Scientific Programmer at the Air Centre. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering with emphasis on environmental hydraulics from Hokkaido University, Japan. He has experience working as assistant professor, principal researcher and team manager, with focus on computational fluid dynamics, data science, aquaculture and multiple sectors of the blue economy.

André Valente works at the Earth Observation Lab of the AIR Centre. He holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Azores (Portugal) and a Degree in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Lisbon (Portugal). He specializes in the integration of satellite, models and in-situ data for several applications such as the study of ocean climate variability, physical-biological processes and marine plastic pollution.