- Hello and welcome to community chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're interviewing Dr. Michael Bewley,
the Senior Director of AI Systems at Nearmap.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Nearmap and how you guys use AWS?
- Hey Aley, thanks for having me.
Look, Nearmap is a technology company.
In fact, we call ourselves a deep tech company
because we do everything from the design
and construction of these aerial imagery cameras,
through to putting them in planes
and capturing vast amounts of imagery,
turning that into visual content,
making it available to customers,
and now even doing location intelligence.
So producing machine learning-derived outputs
for customers to understand the world.
So we do that end to end, and we've been doing it for,
(contemplates)
more than a decade now, and we do it in four countries,
so Australia, US, Canada, and New Zealand.
And it's all about the built environment.
So cities, major towns,
we're covering I think 80% of the US population
at least once a year,
90% of the Australian population and so on.
So it's a really big consistent capture program
built on some pretty amazing technology.
- Phenomenal scale,
and your business is literally changing
the way we look at the world,
because people no longer have to physically get in their car
or their plane to check out a site.
You're allowing amazing visualization of areas
that are really hard to reach.
So, Michael, how does AWS help you
to support your customers?
- That's a really good question.
And it speaks a little to the history of our company
and what makes us different.
So aerial imagery has been for a long time quite bespoke.
You might order a capture of your town or city
at a particular point in time,
and our discs might arrive over coming months.
What Nearmap has been able to do
is to turn that into a subscription-based business model
because we can capture more efficiently than other people.
We can fly higher and faster.
We get this really repeatable program,
and if you're gonna have a repeatable, consistent program,
that has to be built on a really stable base.
So AWS is pretty key for us.
We've gotta store petabytes and petabytes of imagery.
I can't remember how many petabytes we're up to now,
but it's tens of petabytes.
We have to turn that into visual products,
like 3D reconstructions of whole cities,
and that takes a fair bit of compute, let me tell you.
We run deep learning models at massive scale,
so we're pulling GPUs from the cloud,
spinning up whole loads of compute
just to run and build these datasets,
and then we make 'em available to customers.
So we've got lightning fast APIs,
we've got these interactive,
we've got this map browser tool
where people can click and they can measure buildings
and all sorts of things in the world.
And all of that really works well.
If you wanna be an international company
doing that in a reliable way,
you need a base like AWS
that can alight a transition between regions,
have lots of seamless interconnected services,
but most importantly give us the flexibility
to build what we want on top,
because we're trying to push boundaries with our technology.
That's not about just taking what's off the shelf,
but it's really pushing the boundaries
of what's possible.
- Well, after that answer,
it's absolutely clear
why you guys are one of the biggest aerial imaging companies
in the whole world,
and I'm so glad that you partnered with AWS
to help you scale your business.
So, Michael, what insights can you actually generate
from this imagery?
'Cause I know you've got petabytes and petabytes of imagery.
What do you do with it all?
- Yeah, so we used to just do our visual products,
and then we moved to, so that's looking at top down
or multiple angles and going back in time,
which is a pretty powerful thing in and of itself.
Then we moved to 3D
and doing 3D reconstructions,
and now we're in the next phase,
which is around location intelligence.
So we run deep learning models
and all sorts of other algorithms on top of our imagery
to capture a whole lot of semantic information
about the world and what's out there.
One example, just one that we've looked at recently,
relates to sustainable cities quite well.
It's looking at tree canopy.
So we run our AI models on every survey that we fly.
So we did this project where we just pulled
one layer of our trees
across all of the populated parts of Australia
that we capture, and we analyze the tree canopy cover
in all the Australian capital cities and major towns,
and we're able to give some real first numbers
because they've never been done before
with a consistent methodology at really high resolution.
So it's pretty amazing to be able
to just pull a bunch of data from an API and analyze it,
and for that to be new facts
that you find out about the world.
- Yeah, absolutely.
It's really cool to actually speak to you
and hear about the evolution of the business,
'cause as you said, like,
the first step was boots on the ground looking at imagery,
but beyond this,
your company has actually had a huge transformational change
with location intelligence, so really interesting stuff.
And Michael, you've touched on it already,
but as you mentioned with the trees,
you've been doing some really interesting projects
around sustainable cities and building sustainable cities,
so can you elaborate a little bit more about that?
- Yeah, so that tree work that I mentioned
was really driven by a number of our customers,
a large number, actually,
who were starting to ask us questions about trees.
You know, we've built this AI model
which can produce dozens and dozens of output layers,
but they were asking us,
tell us what our tree canopies like now,
tell us what it was like five or 10 years ago,
and help us monitor it in future.
And what they're really interested in doing
is dealing with a whole bunch of things, actually.
One is urban heat islands.
So cities are getting hotter.
When you put a whole lot of concrete and asphalt together
and get rid of all the trees,
that certainly has an impact on temperatures.
I think you even see surface temperatures
differing by up to 10 degrees
between the middle of a dense city
and kind of the native environment around it.
And so you see these really localized effects
of it's not just about average tree canopy
across a whole area.
Even individual trees within 100 meters of your house
can have a really large cooling effect.
And there's other effects that trees have, as well,
like mental health,
livability of areas, just the perceptions of how people move
and understand and enjoy their spaces.
They're hugely impactful, so it's a real pleasure for us
to be able to partner with these government organizations
to help them monitor and work with their communities
to ensure they have a really nice sustainable, livable area.
- It's really easy to forget what came
before all this amazing technology,
'cause we used to rely on memory,
which can be so unreliable and incomplete.
So it's really fascinating
that you've got it all documented over the years.
And lastly, Michael, I wanted to touch
on some of the amazing responses
you guys have actually had in relation to natural disasters.
I mean, currently we're going through huge floods,
so I know you've done some incredible work around this.
So can you share some insights
around what you've been doing in this amazing space?
- Yeah, natural disasters are a big thing for Nearmap.
We've actually been capturing disasters
on top of our normal capture program for a long time,
but we've recently formalized as the ImpactResponse product,
and we run that in Australia and the US.
And what that really means
is instead of our standard capture program,
where we'll get planes up a few times a year in cities,
we actually chase and and look
at what the disasters are that are happening,
and we get those planes up in the air
as soon as humanly possible.
You know, the logistics guys are looking
at exactly when the smoke clears
and when there's gonna be enough space between the clouds
to get that plane up, whether it's a flood or a fire
or some kind of wind event.
And then they're racing to get the plane up in the air,
capture it, pull the imagery down,
process it and do all of that
to get it in the hands of customers as fast as possible.
Because some of our customers have really critical roles
in recovering from disaster.
We work a lot with insurers, we work a lot with government,
and they're really waiting with bated breath
to see what the outcome of these disasters is gonna be.
And it's not just that post-catastrophe flight.
So that's kind of the, that's the race one.
But we also, because we've already captured
a whole lot of areas and we do that regularly,
you can see what was there beforehand,
so you can kind of look at how things change over time.
And then we continue to monitor,
where you can see these really beautiful stories unfolding
of after the disaster,
the recovery effort starts to come in
and those cities start to rebuild themselves
and reshape themselves after the event.
- Michael, thank you so much for the chat today.
If anyone needs any more information, where can they go?
- Yeah, so probably the best place is nearmap.com.
That's N-E-A-R-M-A-P.com.
You can find us on all the standard social media channels.
And yeah, we look forward to having you reach out
and have a chat, 'cause it's,
yeah, there's a lot that can be done
with our data out there,
and we love the possibilities that our customers open up.
- Thank you so much, Michael.
- See you later.