Hanging just above the reception desk at our office in Alexandria are three framed posters–one for each of our company values. Now you may think that’s a bit cheesy–in a sort of team-rowing-motivational poster kind of way–but they truly drive our work, decision making and business outlook at Element 84. For me, our most important value is our work benefits our world. It’s the lens through which I view new projects, clients, and business opportunities, and a constant source of motivation in my daily work.
Over the last year, our team has been living that value through our work developing remote sensing products and solutions in the disaster response space. That work came together this week at AWS re:invent as Element 84 became one of the first partners to receive the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency. Our goal with this work has been to make using remote sensing data in less-than-ideal situations easier by making our data processing pipelines and user interfaces available in edge computing devices like the Snowball Edge.
The outcome of this work has been an extension of our FilmDrop processing software. FilmDrop is a set of tools to create ephemeral archives of convenience (AoC) and custom pipelines for remote sensing data that we’ve developed over the last few years for use in petabyte-scale processing for large public and private satellite data providers.
FilmDrop DR is our new offering in the public safety and disaster response space that brings the technology we built for large-scale cloud processing to the AWS Snowball Edge. FilmDrop DR can process raw satellite, drone, and in-situ data in the field and make it available in a simple map interface speeding up time-to-insight for first responders in critical situations. We’ve designed the interface to be learnable in less than 15 minutes by anyone–regardless of experience–and think it will be a best-in-class GIS and mapping application.
We’re excited about where this technology is heading in the next few years and proud that we can continue to work on projects that benefit our world.