Look to technology startups for professional opportunities and how Astraea's new Earth observation platform can provide innovation and career growth.

1. IEEE WIE Forum USA East 2018
Seeking Opportunities for Innovation and
Professional Growth? Try a Tech Startup!
Kim Scott, Co-founder and VP of Data Science, Astraea, Inc.
www.astraea.earth kim@astraea.earth @AstraeaInc

2. What is a Startup?
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3. 3

4. 4
“…like trying to solve a very complicated puzzle with
1000's of pieces but without access to the picture on the
front of the puzzle box.”
Brendan Richardson, Co-founder and CEO of Astraea, Inc.

5. What is a Startup?
The Engineer/Tech enthusiast perspective
• A startup is a temporary organization created to rapidly solve a
difficult problem – and then figure out a sustainable business
model
• Find a big problem, and solve it:
– Create innovative product, service, or platform
– Fill a major gap in the market
– Disrupt the industry
• Designed to grow and scale rapidly
• Requires a good deal of seed funding:
– Usually financed by investors (Angel, Venture Capital)
– High uncertainty/risk, potentially high reward
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”…there is a common thread connecting most startups…a mission or goal to
disrupt, change, or enhance, the traditional mindset of whatever industry
they’re in.”
- Mark Winokur, Founder and CEO of Workforce First Aid and Safety

6. Startup Innovation:
From ideas to results
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Who can turn ideas
into results?
▪ Creative problem solving:
– Start from scratch
– Design experiments
– Rapidly iterate and learn
▪ Build solutions:
– Design architecture
– Use cutting-edge
technologies
– Leverage software, data
and analytics
▪ Push boundaries:
– Face the unknown
– Try things that have never
been done before
– Be undeterred by
uncertainty

7. About Astraea, Inc.
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8. 8 www.astraea.earth

9. Next Machine Learning Frontier:
Earth Observation Data
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600+ active EO Satellites
50+ Tb per day
200+ Petabytes
300X in next 5 years
>1000 planned EO Satellites

10. Astraea’s Founding Team
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Brendan Richardson
Chief Executive
Officer
Co-Founder, PsiKick
Dir. P.E., Investure
General Partner, Vision
Capital
Adjunct Professor,
University of Virginia
Daniel Bailey
Chief Technical
Officer
Director of Commercial
Analytics, Elder
Research
Founder/CEO, DBRI
Combat Intelligence
Officer, US Army
Fluent in Arabic
Active Top Secret
Matt Eldridge
VP Engineering
Data Scientist, CCRI
Sr. Technical Mgr
Fulcrum
Principal Res.
Engineer, BAE
Systems
M.S. Applied Physics
Johns Hopkins
Active Top Secret
Simeon H.K. Fitch
VP R&D
Dir. of SW
Architecture, Elder
Research
Founder, Mustard Seed
Research Eng, SWRI
Technical Staff, DSA
Recipient of two R&D
100 Awards
Kim Scott, PhD
VP Data Science
Data Scientist, UVA
Health System
Data Scientist, Elder
Research
Post-Doc, NRAO
Post-Doc, UPenn
PhD Astronomy, UMass

11. Pixels to Insight: The Challenge
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Produce
Pixels
Provision
Cluster
Ingest &
Store Data
Create AI
Models
Deploy
Models
Insight
Satellite
Operators
Prep &
Fuse Data
?

12. Pixels to Insight: The Challenge
12
Provision
Cluster
Ingest &
Store Data
Create AI
Models
Deploy
Models
InsightPrep &
Fuse Data
Data Sourcing and Pre-processing
Big Data Computing / Dev Ops
Data Dimensionality
Data Science, Remote Sensing & GIS Expertise
Deployment Chasm
Timeliness & Delivery
Produce
Pixels
Production
Algorithm
X -
^

13. Pixels to Insight: Our Solution
13
Produce
Pixels
Provision
Cluster
Ingest &
Store Data
Create AI
Models
Deploy
Models
Insight
Satellite
Operators
Prep &
Fuse Data
?

14. Astraea earthAI
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The first integrated AI platform for big geospatial data
• Includes analytics-ready satellite data
• Provides push-button super computing
• Enables greater access for non-experts
• Decreases time to deployment
• Build custom decision support tools
Data Sourcing and Pre-processing
Big Data Computing / Dev Ops
Data Dimensionality
Data Science, Remote Sensing & GIS Expertise
Deployment Chasm
Timeliness & Delivery

15. Technical Team
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Courtney Whalen
Data Scientist
Jason Brown
Sr Data Scientist
Tom Schroeder
Dir. Cloud Comp.
Ben Guseman
Sr SW Engineer
Eric Culbertson
Data Scientist
Billy Hunt
UI/UX Developer
Simeon H.K. Fitch
VP R&D
Kim Scott, PhD
VP Data Science
Matt Eldridge
VP Engineering
Phil Varner
Sr SW Engineer

16. 16
Tracking Growth of Renewable Energy
Locating Solar Rooftop Opportunities
Controlled Burn Site Characterization
The Nature Conservancy
Monitoring Boreal Forest Loss and Degradation

17. Platform Development Cycle
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 Build solutions
for clients
 Define new
features for
earthAI platform
 QA testing and
feedback
 Develop features
for platform
 Increase compute
performance
 Convert code to
map-based visual
programming

18. Astraea earthAI
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The first integrated AI platform for big geospatial data
• Includes analytics-ready satellite data
• Provides push-button super computing
• Enables greater access for non-experts
• Decreases time to deployment
• Build custom decision support tools
Astraea earthAI Beta Release
Q1 2019
Wanna try?
info.astraea.earth

19. Startups for
professional growth
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20. Startups = Opportunities
• To survive the first few years, a startup
must:
– Continuously demonstrate ability to execute
on vision
– Determine product-market fit
– Get user adoption
– Generate revenue
• And must do this with limited resources:
– Big problem + boundless solution space =
innovation
– Many roles to fill + small number of people =
professional growth and advancement
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21. Opportunities for professional
development and advancement
• Get exposure to a broad range of skills (technical and soft
skills)
• Gain expertise in some of the latest technologies and
methods
• Work on a project from start to finish, and contribute at
every phase in its lifecycle
• Interact with top leadership and learn about the business
side of things
• Take on managerial and leadership roles in a short period
of time
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Career Advancement

22. For the Entrepreneur, a Sampling of
Every Business Unit…
• Give pitches and demos for
investors
• Business development
• Marketing/outreach
• Hiring
• Develop strategic roadmap for R&D
projects and platform development
• Create and manage tactical plan
for data science activities
• Project management
• Manage and mentor data scientists
• Design machine learning solutions
• QA testing for platform
• Build training examples and
tutorials for platform
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Business
Development
R&D
Marketing
Production
Strategy

23. Summary
• Startups are:
– Business ventures out to solve big problems
– Looking to disrupt business as usual
– Designed for rapid growth
• Startups need people like you to get from
vision to execution
• Can be a rewarding environment:
– Build something completely new
– Fast-pace, quick returnssi
– Team work, learn from peers
– Accelerate career goalsonal career
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24. Interested? Astraea is Hiring!
careers@astraea.earth
• Director of Business Development
• Product Manager
• Data Engineer
• Data Scientist
• Remote Sensing Scientist
• Front-End Software Developer
• Front-End Software Architect
• Full-Stack Software Engineer
• Cloud Devops Engineer
• Lead QA Engineer
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