Jed Sundwall, Executive Director of Radiant Earth and Taylor Geospatial Engine Industry Fellow.
Innovation and Collaboration
Taylor Geospatial Engine is pleased to showcase Jed Sundwall as a Taylor Geospatial Engine Technical Fellow and core team member of the AI for Earth Observation and Field Boundaries Initiative. Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth and is currently a lecturer at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. His career has been dedicated to democratizing data access, improving the usability of cloud technologies, and advocating for the responsible use of data to address global challenges.
His current work is focused on finding new models to sustainably fund shared data and technology infrastructure needed to enable planetary-scale cooperation across the globe. He is particularly interested in using the Internet to enable global cooperative business models to produce and maintain data products critical for effective environmental management.
Taylor Geospatial selected Jed because he tirelessly leads an organization that aims to share geospatial data openly in the cloud. This effort aids in taking action on climate resilience by ensuring key data products are made widely available. In addition to shepherding open data tools and platforms from a technology standpoint, Jed thinks deeply about the organizational structures that should emerge to maintain and govern the availability of these data resources.
Innovation Pioneer
While Jed has been at the forefront of the rapid adoption of cloud computing within the geospatial community, he’s a pragmatist at heart and is leery of innovation for innovation’s sake. “I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of what’s possible using the fundamental open architecture of the World Wide Web, we can accomplish a lot simply by making it easier for people to share data over the open web” Sundwall said. Instead of focusing on the newest technologies, he is committed to finding practical and sustainable ways to make existing technologies more broadly useful.
Proven Track Record
Over the course of his career, Sundwall has emerged as a leader in the use of technology, especially open data and open source software, for public good and to support and scale global sustainability initiatives. Prior to his work at Radiant Earth, he participated in a number of pioneering projects including building the AWS Open Data program and creating the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative. He founded Open San Diego and served on the Landsat Advisory Group and on the board of directors of NatureServe. In addition to his philanthropic and organizational work, Jed helped create the US Digital Registry and the Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF.
Radiant Earth and TGE’s Innovation Bridge
Since TGE started to create what has become the Innovation Bridge program, Jed Sundwall has served as a trusted advisor, design partner, organizational advocate, and technology and data steward. TGE’s Executive Director, Jen Marcus, has relied on Jed’s perspectives, expertise, collaborative nature, and fabulous sense of humor throughout the formation and startup of TGE’s first programs.
In addition to his individual contributions to the strategic direction of the AI for Earth Observation and Field Boundaries program, under his leadership, Radiant Earth contributes direct developer support and manages the program’s use of Source Cooperative as its data-sharing utility. Michelle Roby is Radiant Earth’s Developer Advocate. Michelle brings a globally-minded and community-oriented approach to technical resource development and developer/user support.
Source Cooperative is a neutral data-sharing utility that allows trusted organizations to share data on the cloud without purchasing a data portal subscription or managing cloud infrastructure. Through Source Cooperative anyone can share, access, or contribute to the datasets created by Dr. Hannah
Learn More About Jed Sundwall and Radiant Earth
Over the course of his career, Sundwall has been an avid contributor to the global discourse surrounding data governance, sustainability, and technology. We encourage you to visit his personal website or follow the links below to explore his recent work.
– Watch Jed Sundwall’s appearance on Minds Behind Maps discussing Making Open Data Actually Accessible
– Explore the full collection of Radiant Earth initiatives, including Source Cooperative
– Listen to his podcast Techs on Texts about the intersection of literature and technology.
– Read Jed Sundwall’s blog note on Unicorns, Show Ponies, and Gazelles to learn more about his approach to sustainable open data for the common good
– Collaborate with the Radiant Earth team as part of the Taylor Geospatial Engine Innovation Bridge program by attending the bi-weekly community call or joining the Google Group
Kerner and Dr. Nathan Jacobs to create Fields of the World using standard cloud methods. TGE is committed to sharing benchmark training datasets, models, and output data on the cloud and in an open data approach. Source Cooperative makes this process easy, and, in its simplicity ensures a wide audience will have access and ability to take advantage of the assets created in our programs. This means people upload files to a repository in Source and then get a simple URL that they can share with other people. Behind the scenes data is stored in an AWS S3 bucket, but knowledge and expertise in that are not necessary at all.
At TGE, we are bringing organizations with a shared vision and disparate expertise together to build a bridge that will eliminate roadblocks to using geospatial data to take action toward climate sustainability and food insecurity. In the Innovation Bridge programs, the disparate expertise needed is in machine learning and AI, cloud compute and storage, and earth observation data. Jed Sundwall embodies the vision that cloud technology along with some new organizational structures can be used in a way to ensure datasets that are deeply valuable to understanding our planet are in the hands of as many experts as possible. We are extremely grateful for his partnership.