Jed Sundwall: Making Open Data Actually Accessible (in a world with ChatGPT) - MBM#44

Jed Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth, and formerly worked on creating AWS's Open Data Registry, starting by putting Landsat images and then other Earth Observation datasets on the cloud. Radiant Earth is an NGO focused on making geospatial data more accessible, specifically for Machine Learning applications.

Episode Sponsor: You! (On Patreon)

Please consider supporting the show on Patreon to prevent ChatGPT from ruining traffic to these conversations, taking over the world and crushing all of humanity; or just because you like my work, that's fine too

About Jed 

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

• Radiant Earth

Shownotes

• Genome Aggregation Database

• Common Crawl

• Amazon's Open Data Registry

• The Naive Origins of the Clouds Optimized GeoTIFF

• Radiant Earth Announces New Initiatives to Accelerate Sharing of Earth Science Data

• cogeo.org

• Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants For Training Data

• ChatGPT is the fastest growing app in the history of Internet applications

• The end of the English Major

• Book & Podcast recommendations:

  • Seeing Like a State by James C Scott: (Affiliate Link)

  • Analogia by George Dyson: (Affiliate Link)

Timestamps

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:36) - Patreon

(05:40) - From Humanities to Tech

(06:45) - Marketing

(09:39) - Amazon

(14:01) - AWS's business rationale for hosting free data

(17:16) - History of Amazon Opening Up Data

(18:39) - Common Crawl

(23:09) - How Earth Observation became a big part of AWS's Open Registry

(25:09) - How Cloud Optimized Geotiffs Started

(29:56) - Increasing adoption worldwide

(31:26) - How Sentinel ended up on AWS

(33:26) - Challenges working with non-American companies

(37:17) - What does open and free actually mean?

(42:24) - Marketing Open Data

(43:39) - CERN opening up their data... and nobody knows how to use it

(46:18) - Copernicus Program

(49:16) - Work at Radiant Earth

(52:43) - Mission statement

(01:00:59) - ChatGPT is Changing the value of Data

(01:03:58) - Twitter

(01:07:09) - Census Data Would be easier to get if we could pay for it

(01:11:33) - Search Engine Optimization for ChatGPT?

(01:13:59) - Regulating training data

(01:16:51) - ChatGPT, Google Search & Ads

(01:19:31) - Twitter Checkmarks

(01:21:57) - Podcast/books

(01:27:09) - The Value of Humanities in tech

- Support the podcast on Patreon
- Website
- My Twitter
- Podcast Twitter
- Read Previous Issues of the Newsletter
- Edited by Peter Xiong. Find more of his work