MAGGIE JOHNSON: The way that Google
started was an academic venture.
JEFF DEAN: How do you find interesting problems
in the world?
ALFRED SPECTOR: Google depends on academia.
So many of the good ideas that we've brought forward
to the world come from academe.
JEFF DEAN: One of the real reasons to engage with academia
is to get a really fresh perspective.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We empower academics
to work on real problems.
And in the other direction, academics bring ideas.
And new approaches then are put into practice
much more quickly than in an academic environment.
JEFF DEAN: Oh, that's interesting,
that's interesting, and that's interesting.
All of a sudden, you've knitted together
something that is really, really, tremendously powerful.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We need their help, because of the problem
we're trying to solve internally.
ALFRED SPECTOR: Academia can look far out into the future
and can take greater risks and look for really interesting
solutions that industry sometimes cannot.
RANDY SARGENT: My name is Randy Sargent.
And I am at Carnegie Mellon University,
where I work on making large sets of time series
imagery and data explorable and understandable.
REBECCA MOORE: My name's Rebecca Moore.
I'm on the Google Earth and Maps Team.
I'm an engineering manager there.
I lead the development of Google Earth Engine, which
is our high performance computing
platform for environmental data analysis.
I first met Randy in 2005.
I had just joined the Google Earth Team as the tech lead
for the Google Earth Layers.
There was an innovative idea that Brian McClendon
had come up with to overlay thousands of aerial images
that had been taken by a National Geographic Explorer
over Africa that were so high resolution.
They were I think, one inch per pixel.
If we could succeed in putting those in Google Earth,
you would be able to zoom from outer space
to see the eyelashes on a camel.
Randy Sargent was the genius who figured out how to do that.
So that's where I first met Randy.
RANDY SARGENT: That was a fun time.
I was working at NASA Ames Research
Center with a team of people at that time.
And we worked with you, not only on that, but also
on other things, taking National Geographic stories
and putting them in Google Earth.
REBECCA MOORE: So from the very beginning,
going back almost 10 years, it was all about innovative use
of imagery and making that accessible to billions
of people who use Google Earth and Google Maps.
RANDY SARGENT: We were starting to work with scientists
who wanted to use time series zoomable images.
So building videos, if you will, where instead of every frame
being 2 million pixels, like 1080p video,
each frame might be a billion pixels or even more.
And we had this technology, and there
were just a few tiny applications of it.
And we were looking for something really interesting
to do with it.
And this is about the time that I
learn about Earth Engine, Rebecca's newest project.
And we brainstormed about how could we connect these two.
REBECCA MOORE: We built Earth Engine
to store an unprecedented amount of satellite data.
US taxpayers have funded missions,
like the Landsat satellite mission, that
have been continuously collecting millions of images
of the planet, going back to the Vietnam War era.
The first project of our Google Earth Engine Team
was to work with the US government
to liberate those PetaPixels of data off those tapes
and bring them online, where now applying our highly
parallel analysis and data mining techniques
that we built a framework for on Earth Engine,
we could start to produce derivative products.
We'd been tracking what Randy's-- his project called
Time Machine, which is this zoomable, panable, explorable,
time-varying imagery.
And he had done one interesting thing
that related to a certain satellite
imagery data set, called MODIS.
And we saw that, and we thought, well,
what if we could connect his time machine methodology
for this HTML5 video capability to the PetaPixels of data
that we now had in Earth Engine.
RANDY SARGENT: Before coming to Google,
the largest video we had ever produced
was maybe a billion pixels per frame.
And scaling by three orders of magnitude
to trillions of pixels per frame to capture
all of the historical Landsat, it really
required new ways of thinking about architecting the software
and interfacing to the large infrastructure here at Google.
REBECCA MOORE: What we did with Randy
is build the world's first interactive, panable, zoomable
animation of the Earth, going back three decades.
The Earth is changing dramatically
over these decades in ways that are observable from space.
You can see urban development, unbelievable urban development,
not only in what we call the developing world,
but even in the US.
Las Vegas was the fastest growing city over that period.
And you can watch in this animation
as Las Vegas is growing.
And nearby, Lake Mead is shrinking.
RANDY SARGENT: Watching the millions of people
come to the site, watching the ways it's being used,
I could not be happier.
REBECCA MOORE: In the first few days of the release,
we had more than three million people around the world
come and view it.
Time Magazine published a huge feature online
and in print on what are the phenomena
that you could see really and grasp
for the first time in this time lapse Earth.
RANDY SARGENT: Going back into the history of Landsat
and looking at how the Earth looked from space,
it's just the tip of the iceberg.
If you look at what Earth Engine was truly built to do,
it was built to also provide analysis
on top of this historical imagery.
What can we quantify what's happening to the planet?
What are the trends?
The sort of information that comes from that,
we need to also make that interesting, useful,
explorable, usable by people in the policy community,
usable by the general public.
We need to figure out what's happening
to the Earth over time.
But we also need to be able to communicate and understand
that.
REBECCA MOORE: This first timelapse was a imagery,
but now we could do timelapses of derived information.
In other words, we're turning those pixels into knowledge.
And now, let's show the timelapses of that.
RANDY SARGENT: Being able to take ideas
and then scale them to real and pressing problems,
scale them not only to huge sets of data,
like the entire planet in this case, but then take the results
and bring those out to everyone on the planet, something
that we could not do at Carnegie Mellon.
REBECCA MOORE: Take something, like the Landsat satellite
catalog, it's a treasure trove of data that has never
fired a single neuron in a single human brain.
And this is sad.
Well now, these projects, like this timelapse Earth,
are causing lots of neurons to fire in lots of human brains.
RANDY SARGENT: If you're interested to see more
about the timelapse Earth that we worked on together,
please stay tuned for my talk.