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MATT HANCHER: Thanks, Raleigh.
And hi, everyone, I'm Matt.
I originally joined Google as a founding engineer
on the Google Earth Engine team.
But these days I have the great privilege
of leading the set of engineering teams
that build the variety of products
that you'll be hearing about today.
To begin, I wanted to join Raleigh and Rebecca
in extending a warm welcome to all of you,
whether you're joining us here for the very first time
or whether you're one of our old friends
who's been with us on this incredible journey
over the last 10 years.
This is my favorite week of the year.
We get a chance to give you updates
on what we've been doing building new features
and products.
But more importantly, we get to hear from all of you
on the amazing things that you've
been doing with those products and how
it's been going, so that we can continue
to make them better and better for you in the future.
So now, before we dive in to the five exciting thematic areas
that Rebecca mentioned, we're going
to start by giving you the latest
news about those products.
And what I'm going to do right now, for the next 10 minutes,
is take you on a quick tour of those products
and tell you a bit about the talks that are coming up
over the next couple of hours, so you
can decide which talks are going to be the most important
to you.
You're going to hear today about five product areas.
The first two, Google Earth and Earth Engine,
are the platform tools that we built for all of you
to tap into the amazing power of satellite imagery
and geospatial data analysis.
The other three products are aimed
at more specific problems-- helping all of us
stay safe and informed during natural disasters
and as other crises unfold around us,
helping serve the billion plus people around the world that
don't have the benefit of conventional street addresses,
and helping cities around the world
reduce their carbon footprint to help address climate change.
So let's dive right in.
I suspect most of you are already
familiar with Google Earth, which
lets you tap in to Google's rich 3D model of the world
and mash it up with your own information
to help you make decisions or tell stories about our planet.
You may not all be familiar with the fact that Google Earth is
available across a variety of platforms,
including on the web, on Android, and on iOS,
in addition to the original desktop application that we
call Earth Pro.
We've been hard at work on lots of new features
this year, especially starting to build more power
tools into the newer Earth products on web and mobile.
You'll hear all about all of that in the first session
today, starting with some great examples of how people
are using Google Earth today in a variety
of different settings.
Then you'll learn about some new ways
of getting your own data into Google Earth, such as ways
to bring your existing KML documents into the cloud,
or bringing data visualizations over from Earth Engine.
You'll learn about new power features for better data
management.
And you'll hear about some of the other much loved features
that we're bringing forward from Earth Pro to these newer
platforms.
As Rebecca mentioned, a lot of these new features
are preview features that we're excited to make
available to just you, our closest friends, for now
to try out and give us early feedback.
So today you'll learn more about how
you can join our trusted tester program to get
that early access.
In that talk, you'll also learn about the latest updates
to Google Earth Studio, which is our companion
product for video production using Google's 3D imagery.
You'll hear about how we've been making it even easier to get
started making videos end to end with our studio,
and you'll hear about powerful new features
for integrating Earth Studio into professional 3D video
production environments.
After Google Earth, the second session
will focus on Google Earth Engine.
If you're not familiar with Earth Engine,
it's our cloud computing platform
for satellite image processing and large scale geospatial data
analysis.
We started building Earth Engine over a decade ago
to help scientists, governments, and NGOs
contend with the vast explosion of raw satellite data
and other Earth data that's so critical to understanding
our changing planet and addressing some of the Earth's
most pressing issues-- from deforestation and climate
change to food and water security.
It's been incredibly gratifying to see
all of the amazing things that you, our ever-growing community
of users, have been doing with this platform over the years.
Along the way, we've heard from more and more private sector
companies and operational government agencies who
want to take advantage of Earth Engine in an enterprise
environment.
Now, to make real progress on the world's most pressing
issues, we know that the private sector
needs to take action too.
That's why we're so excited that we have launched the Earth
Engine Cloud Preview, bringing Earth Engine into the Google
Cloud platform product family.
As Rebecca mentioned, Earth Engine
remains free for non-commercial use.
But now we're excited that we'll also
be able to offer our commercial customers a clear roadmap
for how they can tap into the power of Earth Engine as well.
You'll hear more about that in the talk.
And you'll also hear about a range of improvements
that we're making to the product itself,
and to how we support all of you in using it.
For example, you'll hear about some of the new data sets
that we brought into the public data catalog
over the past year, as well as what
we've been doing to make the data sets that are already
there even more useful and timely.
You'll also hear about improvements
that we've been making to the scalability and performance
of the computational platform in a variety of scenarios,
including in hybrid use cases, where you may be integrating
Earth Engine into a larger computational
environment in the cloud.
You'll hear, as well, about some of the new features
that we've been building into the Code Editor, which
is our data science user interface,
as well as to Earth Engine apps, where you can quickly
build and launch apps for data analysis and exploration
powered by Earth Engine.
Last, but certainly not least in this section,
you'll hear about some of our newest tools
for machine learning intervention,
including improvements to our classical machine learning
functions, as well as in our integration with Google's Cloud
AI platform for deep learning.
As part of that, you'll hear about some exciting updates
to our global land cover classification product
that we've been working on called Dynamic World, which
can be a great way for you to tap
into the power of modern machine learning for land cover mapping
without having to become an expert in deep learning
yourself.
After that, we'll move from talking
about our general purpose platform tools
to talking about some of the specific work
that we've been doing to apply those tools and others in three
particular domains, starting with crisis response.
In that talk, you'll learn about some of the work
that we've been doing to improve how we deliver
timely information about global crises
to users who come to Google looking for the latest news.
During a natural disaster, like a tropical storm
or an earthquake, or a flood, or a wildfire,
the situation can change very rapidly.
And that's why you'll hear today about what
we've been doing to bring you even more timely
and complete information in situations like those.
Other crises play out over a longer time frame.
With that in mind, you'll hear updates
on what we've been doing over the past year and a half
to help deliver and share accurate and authoritative
information on the COVID-19 pandemic
and how it's evolving in different places
around the world.
You'll also hear some news that I'm
very excited about, about new projects
that we're working on to share information
about local air quality.
Air quality is another critical, slow moving public health
crisis whose global significance is only
increasing as climate change leads
to more and larger wildfires.
After crisis response, next you'll
hear the latest news about Plus Codes, which is our open source
solution for bringing the benefits of street addresses
to the billion plus people and places
around the world that don't have an address today.
You'll hear about Address Maker, which
is our free tool that lets NGOs and governments easily create
Plus Codes addresses at scale.
And you'll hear about some of the exciting projects
that we've been involved in using
Address Maker around the world to bring Plus Codes
addresses to communities and countries
like the Gambia, Kenya, and Brazil.
You'll also hear about some of the new features
that we've been building right into Google Maps itself to make
it easier for people to create Plus Codes
addresses for their own homes, and to navigate
to other destinations using Plus Codes addresses as well.
Finally, in the last session in this block,
we will focus on climate change.
Specifically, you'll hear about why
cities are so central to effective climate action
and what we've been doing to make our Environmental Insights
Explorer, or EIE, even more useful to give cities the data
that they need to make effective decisions to reduce
their carbon footprints.
This includes data about transportation emissions,
building emissions, rooftop solar potential,
as well as pilot programs in the related areas of air quality
and the urban tree canopy.
You'll hear about what we've been
doing this year in a few key areas,
including expanding data access at scale,
validating that data to help build trust,
and expanding our partnerships with third-party tools,
and consultants, and networks, to better support
the cities that are adopting EIE data
and incorporating it into their own sustainability projects.
You will also get to hear about some
of the exciting projects along those lines
that cities around the world have already been undertaking.
OK.
I hope that gives you a sense of what's coming up.
I think there should be something
in there for everyone.
It's going to be a lot of information, so buckle up.
If you're watching this live, please keep asking questions
throughout these talks.
Just click the Ask a Question button down below this video.
We're going to be keeping an eye on those questions
throughout the summit.
And I'll get a chance to see you again
in a couple of hours for a Q&A session,
where we'll be able to answer some of your questions live.
So, with that, I'm going to hand it over
to the Google Earth team, and I'll see you after the talks.
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