ESA SNAP is the free and open-source multi-mission toolbox for post-processing and analysing ESA and 3rd party EO satellite image data.

SNAP User Forum is an event where users will be able to exchange their experience with the use of SNAP. It will be organised around oral and hands-on sessions where newcomers can get to know all about SNAP and where existing users can potentially learn news tricks.

A Tentative Agenda would be

- Welcome Session

• ESA - Intro to the day
• SNAP Team - Intro do SNAP (user perspective), who is doing SNAP, how can you help, what's new (last year or so)
• Terradue - Keynote: Use of SNAP for an operational use.

• Examples of user usage of SNAP in the desktop
• Examples of user usage of SNAP in a data centre own use
• Examples of user usage of SNAP by service providers

• Open Discussion - what's great, what needs improvement, what's missing

• Install Party / Intro to SNAP (usb stick giveaway with portable snap and data)
• Processing with SNAP for SAR
• Processing with SNAP for Optical
• SNAPpy (pySNAP)

Presentations should follow these guidelines
>In what context are you using SNAP, which parts and to do what?
>What other software do you use along with SNAP? Do they have to interact with each other?
>What works and what doesn't?
>What performances do you get (time, quality)?
>What extra SNAP feature would help your work?
>Did SNAP help you achieve everything that you expect it to?

The main outcome of the event for ESA is to gain a deeper understanding of user needs and user experiences with SNAP. For the user the outcome is to get to know SNAP and to know that SNAP is being actively developed and that they can count on a community to support them.

OneAtlas is the Airbus online Ordering Portal. Access premium satellite data from our multi-resolution optical archive, updated on a daily basis. Our Living Library currently proposes nearly all Pléiades images (50 cm) collected since 2016 over North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Middle East, and since 2013 over 3,000 metropolitan areas in the world as well as selected SPOT images (1.5 m) available on a global scale.

As the leading Space Company, we have an essential role to play in the promotion of satellite benefits to non-space communities. But we don’t do business on our own. Partnerships and cooperation are at the core of our growth plan. And our Open innovation initiative is definitively the key to address new markets and to go beyond usual and traditional businesses.

For this side event, the goal is to introduce the new way to access data on the cloud by using OneAtlas. Also, introducing our open-innovation initiative would be a great plus; because Airbus wants to trigger cross-fertilization by providing a first class set of satellite imagery to startups, and that can be done by using the OneAtlas Sandbox.

The contributors will be Marketing, Sales & open-innovation people from Airbus. At least 1 people will always be there in order to perform demo and answer visitor questions.

We would like to make it as much dynamic as possible. It would be great to have a place to perform the demo. We have videos that we can display on a screen too. Another screen would be great to extend the computer display and increase the visibility for more people.

Also a presentation on stage would be a plus. We can invite Airbus speakers for a presentation + live demo.

The expected outcome will be to gain visibility for the large public, find new potential customers and create new partnerships with startups.

WIA-Europe: 10th years of activities & Award Ceremony

Since its foundation, Women in Aerospace-Europe (WIA-E), organises events in the frame of international conferences, workshops and Air Shows offering a platform for networking, sharing experiences and views on the challenges of global changes in diversity and inclusion (D&I). 2019 marks an important step for WIA-E: our 10 year of activities. As part of our « anniversary» events, we propose to organise our WIA-Europe “Award Ceremony” in the frame of the panel « Diversity in Science ». The WIA-E Awards Program and ceremony aims to encourage and support,upcoming talent – young professionals and students and to honour senior women - for their outstanding achievements.

Moreover, this event will be the opportunity to share with the audience WIA Europe vision, achievements and future activities.

With hundreds of individual members, 12 local groups in strategic European cities and 26 corporate members, WIA-Europe wants to continue to contribute to achieve some of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to build a well-balanced and diverse workplace, to contribute to STEM’s pipeline development, to stimulate more women to cover leadership position.

Please click here to download the programme.

“Diversity drives innovation – when we limit who can contribute, we in turn limit what problems we can solve”

A recent Forbes study has provided evidence that diversity is one of the key drivers for innovation, and is a critical component to being successful. Bringing different viewpoints together can be the spark for breakthrough thinking, where diversity and inclusions are critical.

The Diversity in Science side event will highlight how diversity in both Technology and Space fields leads to innovation and disruption, and discuss both the challenges and opportunities for stimulating increased diversity and inclusiveness within both fields.

Modernising Farming: Earth Observation to Support Crop Growth Cycle
10 September 2019 @ 14:30-17:30

This session aims at presenting examples of business cases across the agri-food sector that make use of earth observation applications. It will follow the precision farming cycle, from seed planting to data analysis, combining the points of view of users and EO service providers.

14:30 – 15:00 Welcome: Introductory speeches

• Ola Gråbak, Applications Engineer, European Space Agency
• Natassa Antoniou, Market Development Project officer, European Association of Remote Sensing Companies

14:45 – 16:00 Session 1: Earth Observation Supporting the Farming Cycle

Moderator: Eva Haas, Project Manager, GeoVille

• Peter Eigaard, Head of Department, Mapping and GIS, Danish Agricultural Agency, Ministry of Environment and Food - “Monitoring of agricultural Area Based Subsidies in Denmark Using Sentinel”
• Maria Ostergaard, Vice Chair of the WP of Direct Payments and Greening in COPA-COGECA - “The impact of remote sensing in improving farming performance and CAP implementation”
• Haris Kontoes, Research Director, National Observatory of Athens – “Supporting farmers towards the transition from CAP compliance to farm performance (e-shape project)”
• Kristof van Tricht, R&D scientist, VITO - "Providing Services of Combined Data to Support the Agro Industry (e-shape)"
• Nikolaus Neugebauer, Data Scientist, Austrian Hail Insurance & Ralf Ryter, EO & GIS Operations, GeoVille - “EO4I - Earth Observation Best Practice for AgroInsurance”
• George Voutsinos, Sales & Business Development Director, Karavias Underwriting Agency & Manos Lekakis, Agricultural Consultant, AgroApps - “Redefining Agricultural Insurance services using EO (Beacon project)”

16:00-16:30 Coffee Break

16:30-17:30 Session 2: EO supporting innovation in agri-business

Moderator: Eva Haas, Project Manager, GeoVille

• Antonella Catucci, Product and Project Manager, e-geos
• Rene Griesbach, Project Manager / Pre-Sales Engineer, Planet
• David Hello, CEO, TerraNIS SAS
• Jan Misurec, Remote sensing specialist, Gisat
• David Petit, Head of EO applications, Deimos Space

Many of today’s satellite data applications are related to target detection: ships in the ocean, palm trees in plantations, penguins on ice, fires in vegetated areas and plentiful more.

But how do we spot targets?

Traditionally, human operators spend hours in selecting the best images, preparing data, conducting semi-automatic classification and validating the results. However, when looking for targets in vast areas and for a long time, searching through entire archives is not practical. Over years we have improved our targeting techniques and nowadays we count on machines to cover for these tasks. We train our models with large stacks of data, we validate them and we produce maps of our desired scope much more efficiently. Machine learning has taken over our work and currently, with a sufficient amount of data, we can all custom create an algorithm for fast classification and quick results. Not only we made machines learn by pattern, but we went further, created deep learning algorithms and trained them to mimic our brains and learn sequentially as the problems become more complex.

Earth Observation, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and the real necessities.

Here on Earth, we rely on our eyes in the sky. Satellites orbiting our planet are gathering large amounts of invaluable Earth Observation data. With each day and every hour our data centres grow, storing this information. We employ intelligent algorithms for exploiting this data on ground. But what if the same algorithms could be deployed in space? Downlink bandwidth and data storage are expensive, wouldn’t be more feasible to download and save only the data that interests us? Would that enable us to react more promptly to certain events? We are scientists, inquisitive minds looking to analyse processes, we are businesses searching to deliver insights to customers, we are first responders in need of fast data for acting quickly and mitigate risks. We are all aiming for rapid results and a good balance between human and technological resources employed. Moreover…

We are looking for a satellite that can perform AI driven tasks and return actionable data!

Is that even possible? We can surely dream of it and act on it! And we want you, the users, to be part of the journey.

Wait, but how will I do it?

In the first part of our session, we will give you two real world scenarios accompanied by datasets of labelled data. Furthermore, we will teach you about Earth Observation and Machine Learning specific terminology and practices, and guide you through a workflow where you will learn hands-on how to train your own model and get out-of-this-Earth results!

Out-of-this-Earth?

We are not only aiming for you to dream of the possibility of having AI capabilities on a satellite, but also experience it. We do not have a satellite and will not organize a launch, but we will employ our small drone as a substitute. The algorithm that will have provided the best results during the training sessions, will be deployed on a AI chip attached to vehicle. Then, we will simulate a space flight and you will have to possibility to assess how your algorithm would perform as if it would be looking “from space”.

The number of participants for this side event is limited to strictly 15 participants. There are no requirements in terms of technical background, but familiarity with Python scripting, Jupyter Notebooks, computing and artificial intelligence concepts is desirable

Data driven Earth system sciences increasingly requires requires co-exploring multiple spatiotemporal variables to unravel complex dynamics. Questions regarding the impacts of droughts on land-surface processes, climate change induced trends in vegetation dynamics, or the impacts of land cover change on the biogeophysical feedbacks can only be addressed properly jointly considering climate variability and land-surface responses. One approach to deal with problems of this kind is via high-dimensional data cubes. The idea is that data cubes enable the seamless analysis of multiple variables across time, space, sensors, models etc. To support this approach to Earth system sciences in the future, the ESA has advanced the „Earth system data lab“ https://www.earthsystemdatalab.net/ - a framework that allows to apply user defined functions on analysis ready data via a powerful cloud infrastructure. The community using the ESDL is growing and exploring the potential of this new data cube system. In particular many early career scientist have explored engaged with the ESDL. This side event will give them a forum to present and discuss their experiences using the ESDL in different branches of Earth system sciences. These use cases include examples on i) drought detection and attribution using ESA CCI data, ii) adapting the ESDL to generate regional high-resolution data cubes, or iii) applications of novel machine learning tools for understanding nonlinear dynamics. It will also be discussed how these exercises have been put into practice. Specifically, we aim to discuss the actual needs for the evolution of the ESDL through a direct dialogue with the early adopters and other scientific users. The aim is that we openly discuss these experiences and discuss how to further develop the idea of an ESDL. This side event is a chance to co-design the future developments from a scientific user perspective. We expect that the side event has the character of a workshop with approx. 30 participants. Early career scientists have been supported by the ESA to participate in the activity.

During this Workshop, the two most recent Kelvins challenges: the Pose Estimation challenge and the PROBA-V Super Resolution, will be presented, together with the winning solutions. The workshop will cover and all participants to understand the scientific context, the programmatic rationale and the solution approaches found compared to baseline solutions. It will allow for ample time scientific discussions and exchanges and discuss new research opportunities. The main event will take place in ESTEC in the Erasmus building. Participation from ESRIN will be via video-link.

Short information on both challenges:

Pose estimation challenge: Accurate estimation of distance and orientation (pose) for objects in space are essential for many missions. When approaching an uncooperative target ,the pose can be estimated from camera images. In this challenge, you are tasked to estimate the pose of the Tango spacecraft from its synthetic and real images captured using computer graphics and a robotic testbed, respectively.

PROBA-V Superresolution challenge: In this competition you are given multiple images of each of 78 Earth locations and you are asked to develop an algorithm to fuse them together into a single one. The result will be a "super-resolved" image that is checked against a high resolution image taken from the same satellite, PROBA-V. The 'V' stands for Vegetation, which is the main focus of the on-board instruments. Can you enhance the vision of PROBA-V and help us advance the accuracy on monitoring earths vegetation growth?

The world of STEM education today is faced with a series of operational, methodological and content-related challenges.

The need to attract young people to STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), in order to overcome shortages of specialised STEM workforce in the medium and long term, has already been identified and consolidated in the understanding and agendas of European countries for at least a couple of decades. This is already calling for a non-traditional, innovative approach to the teaching and learning of sciences and technology at all levels.

On the other hand, society is confronted with new global challenges, ranging from safety and security to environment, resources, need for new services, and so on. At the same time, economy is rapidly evolving, with new business models and brand-new jobs appearing at the horizon along with the rise of new space technologies and applications.

Altogether, this requires the timely development of new sets of skills in the young generations and, to a large extent, for a rapid skill adaptation in the current workforce.

The field of Earth Observation represents a fertile ground for a meaningful and innovative education action. First, many of the contemporary societal challenges can be addressed with space-based EO solutions, creating a natural direct link between EO-based education and some of the key skills and jobs of the future. In addition, EO encompasses the real-life use of STEM disciplines and skills, as well as the ideal methodological model for their interdisciplinary application.

The questions remain on how to transform principles into an effective, successful educational practice and how to understand where and how to intervene. This workshop aims to contribute to set a reference frame for present and future educational initiatives in the field of EO, based on the understanding of the European educational needs, expectations, system constraints and trends, with eyes wide open on the professional world of the future.

The first part of the workshop will feature presentations by education field experts, as well as from experts in EO (mega) trends, skills and emerging professions, in order to set the scene. The second part of the workshop will foresee an interactive discussion between all the actors with a stake or an interest in EO-related education, in order to consolidate a mutual understanding of needs and opportunities.
Event programme:

Part 1, 09:00 – 10:45 – The EO education scene in the 21st century

09:00 Welcome & Introduction

09:10 EO education - approach and experience at times of change, by Monica Talevi, Head of ESA STEM Education and Outreach Unit/ESA Education Office

09:25 Challenges and opportunities for inclusive STEM, by Ersilia Vaudo, ESA Chief Diversity Officer

09:35 EO-based education - the school level perspective:

• Accessing the school system and engaging teachers, by Ana Noronha, Executive Director of Ciencia Viva/ESERO Portugal Supervisor
• Using real EO data in the school context, by Andreas Rienow, ESERO Germany Manager, Ruhr-Bochum University, Germany

09:55 EO-based education - the university level perspective:

• What requests do organizations like ESA receive? by
  • Francesco Sarti, ESA EO Education
  • Natacha Callens, ESA Academy/ESA Education Office
• EO didactics status, best practices and perspectives in European universities, by
  • Nicolas Maestripieri, Terranis/Phi-Unet
  • Robert Eckardt, Friedrich Schiller University Jena/EO College

10:25 EO innovation axes, new technologies and new entrepreneurship, by

• Chris Stewart, ESA Phi-lab
• Amanda Regan, Head of ESA Phi-lab Invest Office

10:40 EO skill mapping and strategy, by

• Mónica Miguel-Lago, EARSC/EO4GEO
• Barbara Hofer and Stefan Lang, University of Salzburg/EO4GEO

11:00 Coffee break

Part 2, 11:15 – 12:20 – Guided splinter group discussions

Part 3, 12:20 – 13:00 – Plenary discussion & conclusions

EO for Energy: A test case for transitioning new technologies to real world applications

Earth Observation is widely used within the Energy industry for a wide range of purposes, including site assessment, operations and logistics planning, monitoring impacts and disaster response. In particular, there has a strong focus on detecting and responding to incidents such as oil spills, forest fires, flooding and human incursion or monitoring facilities and obtaining contextual information. Major disasters, such as the Deep Water Horizon incident, has seen part of the industry developing a Common Operating Picture (COP), a geo-information system providing accurate and timely information to support disaster response by providing actionable information throughout all its phases, including preparedness, emergency response and restoration. In day to day activities, data is imported from various sources and ancillary information is crucial for understanding the environment and providing context to decisions.

However the industry works within a tight commercial, legal and regulatory framework which slows the adoption of new technologies. Having many new data providers increases the number of actors to be dealt with in a fast moving disaster scenario or simply when it comes to sourcing necessary data on a daily basis. Data policies limiting the sharing of data can conflict with regulatory demands for complete openness.

None of these issues are particular to the energy industry, however the high profile of this industry makes it an excellent case study for the challenges faced by new technologies when transitioning to real world applications.

This side event will showcase some of the many ongoing initiatives to improve the use of EO data within the energy industry, including:

• Use of AI for incident detection, monitoring and obtaining contextual information.
• New IT architectures for improving sharing of data and information between key responders.
• New sources of satellite data.

It will then consider the implications of deploying these initiatives into operational systems, and how these can potentially be overcome.

The overall aim is to understand the practicalities of deploying new concepts and technologies to meet the real needs of a key group of end users, while also taking into account the non-technical constraints.

Aim and Philosophy

The Space and Security domain is more and more relying on effective processing of big geospatial data to provide value added products for decision-making. The exploitation of EO data is traditionally performed through visual analysis and annotation by expert Image Analysts but the sheer volume of available data to be processed now makes this approach impractical. The sharp growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions for EO applications is opening the opportunity for a change of paradigm in the adoption of new disruptive technologies and analysis approach.
Artificial Intelligence, when scientifically interpreted together with the underlying physical principles, has shown its capabilities to enable the efficient exploitation of data as well as to bring new insights and predictive capabilities. The application of Deep Learning tools can support the extraction of information from huge amounts of heterogeneous data in a timely manner.
The aim of this session is to promote the contribution of innovative technologies to the implementation of cutting-edge applications in the Space and Security domain.

Contributors
Representatives from European institutions will present the usage of AI within their organisations. Representatives from industry will present some examples of AI based services in the Space and Security domain. Representatives from academia will present operational use cases on AI for security applications.

Side Event Overview

The aim and philosophy:

Citizen Science (CS) has emerged as a concept to produce reference- and in-situ data by involving citizens in data collection. Combining Earth Observation (EO) data with CS data has enormous potential for characterising environmental phenomena over large areas to achieve insights for pressing societal challenges.

One of remaining challenges is how to technically link and complement CS based observations with EO based features. Here DataCube technologies, web interface standards, and APIs can be used to link pixel-based EO observations with coinciding CS data points. But, more work is needed to identify exactly what the most promising opportunities are for linking CS and EO data, and to develop practical proof-of-concept demonstrations.

As a first step, this side event will take shape of an interactive workshop bringing together experts and practitioners to further explore the linkages between CS and EO.

The workshop has the following objectives:

1. Discuss concrete use cases where there is a high value for linking CS and EO data, as well as specific data that could be leveraged;
2. Explore technical solutions to efficiently link CS observations with EO observations and features through API functionalities;
3. Explore simple but effective Quality Assurance approaches to perform “plausibility checks” that characterise the quality of CS based observations using EO data served from datacubes;
4. Set up a roadmap and a key user group for a dedicated hackathon event to be held in the near future to work on coding solutions for objectives two and three.

The first part of the workshop will feature a set of lightning talks while the second half will focus on round table discussions three main different topics.

The preliminary agenda for the presentation part of the workshop:

• Juan B. Pedro, Starlab, “POINTOUT: A collaborative dataset generation web platform for object detection on satellite imagery.”
• Mariano Biscardi, e-geos, “AI and Crowdsourcing for the Creation of Event Based Geolocated Dataset”
• Uta When, U Delft, “The CSEOL toolkit: Must-have tools for designing & implementing Citizen Science for Earth Observation projects”
• Landon C. Van Dyke, US State Department, “Use of data analytics, citizen science and IoT at the State Department”
• Anne Bowser, Wilson Centrer, “Earth Challenge 2020 priority areas & pilot datasets”
• Landon Van Dyke, U.S. Department of State, “Earth Challenge 2020 Tech Stack and Pilot Data Set”
• Sven Schade, JRC, “OGC Interoperability Experiment on Citizen Science & linkages to GEO”
• Patrick Griffiths, ESA ESRIN, “Potential for linking citizen science with Earth Observation data”

The different contributors:

Side event organisers:

• Patrick Griffiths – ESA ESRIN, Frascati, Italy
• Anne Bowser, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, USA
• Sven Schade - European Commission Joint Research Center, Ispra, Italy
• Landon C. Van Dyke, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, USA

The expected outcome:
- Recommendations and actionable next steps on the different topics
- An agreed roadmap for a dedicated hackathon on CS and EO

The aim of this session or side event is to present the new Investing in Industrial Innovation (InCubed) programme. This programme is focused on supporting the commercial earth observation sector. Participants include companies who have activities in the InCubed pipeline, possible investors will also be invited and the InCubed programme office.

Details about the InCubed programme will be presented including the set-up, proposal writing, evaluation and running activities within the programme. Representatives from companies already involved in InCubed activities will present their activities and their experience of the InCubed programme. Possible investors are also invited to present key aspects they look for when investing in activities. The session shall be presentation and round table based.

Please click here to dowload the agenda.

Sentinel-1 is the first freely available source of global C-band SAR data. Since the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014 non-traditional users of SAR data got massively interested in exploring the usefulness of this data source for various application domains, benefitting from the day and night sensing as well as cloud penetrating capabilities, and its complementary character to optical data in general.

One fundamental difference to the more widely used optical data regards the pre-processing steps to prepare the downloaded product in a way that makes it analysable. The freely available SNAP Toolbox from ESA allows new users to create their own workflows, but as can be seen in the user’s forum of SNAP, many people struggle to get the rather complex workflows set up straight away.

The Open SAR Toolkit (OST) aims to overcome this issue providing SAR newcomers a more gentle introduction to SAR pre-processing for land applications. Its main component therefore provides wrapper functions, written in python 3, around ready-made workflows that automatically generate higher-level products. Furthermore, OST provides easy functionalities for data inventory and download from different data portals as well as advanced concepts for the generation of time-series and time-scan data as well as large-scale mosaics.

OST will be introduced by ESA’s phi-lab using well-documented Jupyter notebooks that can be freely accessed via github and demonstrate the basic functionalities and concepts. Additionally, it will be shown how that eases the use of SNAP on cloud infrastructure and a discussion on the use of cloud computing clusters for parallelised execution is foreseen.

After the side-event, participants will be familiar with the basic concept and usage of OST and how they can use it for their particular application domain. An open discussion with the developer should stimulate future directions of development.

Planned outcome of openEO

Copernicus and other novel Earth Observation (EO) programmes are generating data of unprecedented quality and volume. To scope with this, Petabyte-scale EO data centres and cloud computing services have been set up over the last decade, resulting in a variety of customised EO processing platforms. Nowadays, available services are ranging from Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), are tailored by their user's needs and are often closed-source up to different degrees (e.g. DIAS, VITO, EODC, Copernicus Global Land Service, Google Earth Engine, Amazon Web Services, …). This heterogeneity, the diverse user demands as well as the emergence of the various service offerings makes it currently difficult for end users to compare results from different platforms, or costs of offerings.

openEO is a user-driven open source project that develops an API (a language) for communication between users of diverse programming environments (e.g. web browser, Jupyter notebooks, RStudio) and various EO service providers. It aims at cross-cloud platform interoperability (i) to merge heterogeneous user communities of different platforms, now developing combinable workflows and thus to enable more holistic and specialised cloud computing approaches in the EO sector, (ii) to allow users an easier switch between service providers, (iii) to implement cross-platform communication strategies and thus to develop de-centralised workflows, considering the capabilities of individual service providers, and (iv) to allow the comparison of the platforms processing results, capabilities and pricing. For the communication between clients and EO cloud providers, the workflows' commands are chained to standardised process graphs in a JSON format and transferred via web request to an interface at the service provider. The jobs are then translated by the openEO back-end to the platform's local syntax and are either executed as batch jobs, or lazy evaluated as part of secondary web services for web-based access or executed synchronously in case of lightweight jobs. With openEO, former needed many-to-many connections between clients and the cloud providers are reduced to many-to-one connections.

The openEO API entails processes from all aspects of the EO data life cycle. It prepares the data as a 'virtual data cube' – independently of the back-ends storage data structure. The openEO processes support following data manipulation: (i) EO data can be subsetted, (ii) dimension can be removed or added by computation, (iii) resampling and aggregation processes allow e.g. reprojecting or rescaling of EO data, (iv) pixel-based math processes are available (e.g. sorting algorithms, unary functions), and (v) the capability of processing user-defined functions (UDFs) will allow openEO to meet extremely specialised user demands. All currently available processes are listed and described at https://processes.openeo.org.

While openEO is designed as language neutral, clients for Python, R, and JavaScript are currently developed. Compatible service providers are momentarily VITO, EODC, mundialis, Sinergise, EURAC Research, JRC and Google Earth Engine; further connections are planned. The openEO API is conceived to be used as a template for further service providers to easily connect to the freely available API (https://github.com/Open-EO/). A stable version was released in July 2019, which will be demonstrated in this workshop.

Aim of the workshop

This workshop will provide participants with an overview of using openEO on different cloud platforms. Service providers will gain insights in implementing the open source API on their system and thus connecting to the joint user community.

The side event is split into 2 sessions of 2 hours each, showing live demonstrations and covering various aspects of the openEO API. The first session will concentrate on the clients perspective, demonstrating its use via Python, R, and web interfaces on various service providers (VITO, Mundialis, EURAC Research, Google Earth Engine). The second session will deal with the installation of openEO instances on service provider’s premises and chosen standards of the openEO API.

"

When a scientist had more than 1000 followers they exponentially increase their reach and broaden the spread of what is perceived to be credible scientific information" concluded a recent study.

We live in times where the virtual dimension is as relevant and impactful as face-to-face reality. 

Is it important for scientists to engage on social media?

Which tools to use to better outreach and communicate about your work?

How can one juggle a busy research life with time-consuming social media?

What are all the tricks to reach wider audiences using Twitter?

...And is all the effort even worthy?

Join this workshop and learn tips and tricks from social media and science communication experts, but also from influent scientists who use social media on a daily basis.

"

Aim and philosophy:

This side event will explore how additive manufacturing, foldable structures and in space manufacturing are impacting space and in particular Earth Observation satellites. The workshop will address a variety of related topics with first a series of talks and then open discussion. It is expected to bring together people from many horizons : Industry, Academia and startups.

Organisation:

This side event will take place on the 12th of September in the morning during the Phi Week at ESRIN. It will last for 4 hours in total. The draft agenda is below:

The ExtremeEarth project (http://earthanalytics.eu/) develops geospatial analytics techniques and technologies that scale to the petabytes of big Copernicus data, information and knowledge, and applies these technologies in two of ESAs thematic exploitation platforms (TEPs): Food Security and Polar. ExtremeEarth is funded by the European Commission under the H2020 program for the years 2019 to 2021 with 5.6M Euros.

With this abstract we propose the organization of a *side event* in the ESA Phiweek-2 to take place in September 2019. The event will last 3 hours (including one coffee break), it will be dedicated to ExtremeEarth applications and technologies and will have the following organization.

1. ExtremeEarth Overview (Manolis Koubarakis, UoA, Co-ordinator, 15 minutes)
2. The Food Security Use Case in ExtremeEarth – Extreme Data Analytics to Manage an Extreme Dynamic Planet (Florian Appel, VISTA, 30 minutes)
3. The Polar Use Case in ExtremeEarth (Alistair Everett, METNO, 30 minutes)
4. Coffee Break (15 minutes)
5. Scalable Deep Learning for Copernicus Data (Sina Sheikholeslami, KTH, 30 minutes)
6. The ExtremeEarth Infrastructure (Vlad Vlassov, KTH, 30 minutes)
7. Big Linked Geospatial Data Tools in ExtremeEarth (Dimitris Bilidas, UoA, 30 minutes).

More Details:
ExtremeEarth Main Objective.

The main objective of ExtremeEarth is to develop big data and geospatial analytics techniques and technologies that scale to the PBs of big Copernicus data, information and knowledge, and applying these technologies in two of the ESA TEPs: Food Security and Polar. The technologies to be developed will extend the HOPS data platform to offer unprecedented scalability to extreme data volumes and scale-out distributed deep learning for Copernicus data. The extended HOPS data platform will also run on CreoDIAS and will be available as open source to enable its adoption by the strong European Earth Observation downstream services industry.

The detailed scientific and technical objectives that will be studied in ExtremeEarth and will be highlighted in the talks of the side event are the following:

• To develop scalable deep learning and geospatial analytics techniques for Copernicus big data.
• To develop very large training datasets for deep learning architectures targeting the classification of Sentinel images.
• To develop distributed deep learning techniques that minimize the time it is needed today for training a deep neural network for satellite image classification.
• To develop techniques and tools for linked geospatial data querying, federation and analytics that scale to big Copernicus data, information and knowledge.
• To extend the capabilities for EO data discovery and access with semantic catalogue services that scale to the big data, information and knowledge of Copernicus.
• To integrate the big data and geospatial analytics technologies of 1 to 4 in the HOPS data platform and deploy them in the selected DIAS and the two TEPs.
• To develop high resolution water availability maps for agricultural areas allowing a new level of detail for wide-scale irrigation support. The maps will be available as linked data together with other geospatial layers (e.g., OpenStreetMap, field boundaries, crop types etc.) and made available to farmers.
• To produce high resolution ice maps from massive volumes of heterogeneous Copernicus data. The maps will be made available as linked data and will be combined with other information such as sea surface temperature and wind information for informing maritime users.

Another important activity of ExtremeEarth is innovation management where the project will demonstrate the innovation potential of the ExtremeEarth technological advances and use cases during and especially after the project duration.

The ExtremeEarth Consortium.

ExtremeEarth brings together a consortium of two companies leading the activities of the Food Security and Polar TEPs (VISTA and Polar View), one organization specializing in polar science for the Arctic and the Antarctic (British Antarctic Survey), one company specializing in big data, analytics and deep learning technologies (LogicalClocks), the German Aerospace Center with its TerraSAR-X satellite and expertise in SAR and multispectral EO (DLR), five top European academic institutions specializing in big data, linked data, Artificial Intelligence, deep learning and extreme earth analytics (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, University of Trento, University of Tromso, KTH and DLR), one research institute specializing in big data and Artificial Intelligence (National Center for Scientific Research - Demokritos), and one research institute specializing in big data, high performance computing applications, and provision of Metocean information, including sea ice (Norwegian Meteological Institute). The consortium is led by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

A one day workshop will be dedicated to the design of the new set of use cases on the crossover of Earth Observation, blockchain/DLT and IoT which were identified in ESA White Paper as suitable for testing the feasibility and added value of DLT solutions in the EO sector (available at https://eo4society.esa.int/results/blockchain-and-earth-observation-2019/).

The participants will present innovative ideas and evaluate requirements, success criteria and necessary resources needed to accelerate developments in the key focus areas:

• New data markets for algorithms training
• Machine to Machine economy (monetizing data and incentivizing quality data)
• AI and Blockchain convergence (certification of models, data rentals)
• Smart Contracts (automated transaction settlements: significance for redesigning EO value chain and new levels of operational productivity)
• Representation and tokenisation of physical assets ( “digital twin” concept)
• Role of EO data and services in Decentralized Applications

Currently one of the biggest obstacles to development of the integrated digital information services are data silos which host proprietary data, often not available for distribution due to lack of interoperability, their high cost or associated privacy constraints. At the same time the AI driven applications which will underline future EO-based information services will require accessible data and models for AI analytics. Distributed ledgers strive to solve these problems by providing incentives for shared economy and means for making data, models and algorithms both private and sharable, at fraction of the cost.

The workshop will be dedicated to identify the industries and stakeholders that could benefit the most from EO and blockchain/DLT crossover, in particular it will elaborate the framework for the following use cases:

• Smart Cities
• Carbon Markets
• Land Management (including agriculture and commodities supply chain tracking)

The preliminary workshop agenda:

Introduction of the day – Anna Burzykowska, ESA, Agenda and objectives of the day

Presentations – Setting the stage

• Introduction to Distributed Ledgers & Blockchain
• Tokenization of physical assets,
• Impact of AI and IoT

Presentations - Existing implementations.

- CB-XEO: Consensus Based Explainable Earth Observation, Daniela Drimarco Planetek Italia, Italy
- Satellite Imagery and Land Registries on Blockchain, Francesco Cimmino, Spark Blockchain, UK
- Enhancing EO Data Provenance with Distributed Ledger Technology, Robert Keenan, Consensys, USA
- Agricultural Asset Securitisation Using Satellite Observations, Robin Sampson, Trade in Space, UK
- Distributed Ledger Technology in the Analysis of Earth Data and Its Use in Decision-Making for Sustainable Food Systems, Genevive Leveille, Agriledger
- Blockchain as layer for interoperability for Smart cities, Jean-Charles Cabelguen, iExec, France

Working Session:
Framework for Use Cases and overcoming technical hurdles

This side event will demonstrate best practices of EO data processing using various data cube options – from on-the-fly virtual data cubes to xarrays embedded in the Python environment, from basic algorithms to advanced machine learning techniques – focusing to how these tools are exploited by various groups of users, from researchers, data scientists in the commercial sector to application developers. The aim of these presentations will be to demonstrate that almost anyone can now get on the large-scale data processing wagon without significant investment in infrastructure, tools or programming expertise. Presenters will also provide their thoughts on how data cube tools should develop further on, providing important input to various service providers.

Please click here to download the agenda.

Aim and philosophy:

Why this workshop?
EOClimLab was a successful ESA initiative meant to boost the usage of EO technologies in Eastern Europe (Romania, Poland, Czech Republic). One of the project’s main successes was introducing children to the wonders of space.
Creative Space, one of the startups derived from EOClimLab, has created a programme introducing children to space discovery in a playful manner. It is based on play and discovery, using serious toys (Lego Mindstorms®) to discover robotics, programming and basic remote sensing. Groups of 10 children follow a 3-month (14 meetings) programme, learning and playing while following a personalized curriculum.
The workshop organized for PhiWeek is adapted for adults, inspiring them to use technology and EO to create new business, science discovery or make a social impact.

What is it about?
Developed as a natural follow-up of the EOClimLab Design Thinking Workshop with Lego Serious Play® organized in the 2018 edition of PhiWeek, the workshop introduces robotics, sensors and serious play into space, providing a playful manner to intrude entrepreneurs, educators and non-experts to space and its huge potential (mainly on downstream applications).
The 3 hour workshop @PhiWeek, inspired by Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Little Prince, will take participants on a journey exploring the universe and EO technologies. On the path, they will meet the geographer (mapping places he had never visited thanks to technology), the businessman (turning remote sensed data into mathematics) and the fox (the social innovator - making use of space data to improve quality of life on earth). The little prince (our participants) will complete their journey using pre-built robots that they will customize and program in order to map cities or natural protected areas and simulate earth2 discovery.
The robots built during the workshop simulate remote sensing and employ NDVI / NDSI / false color to perform actions such as protecting biodiversity, cleaning waste or grooming ski slopes.

How does it work?
The maximum number of participants is 28, split into up to 7 teams of up to 4 people. There is no minimum number of participants. Each team will have its own pre-build robot (to reduce building time) that they will customize and program. The robots will simulate satellites and rovers exploring a planetary surface. Coding will include motors (movement, driving), color, touch and distance sensors. They will explore maps simulating NDVI, False Colour and NDSI.

Completion
Participants will use creativity and design thinking methodologies to complete their robots. The first half hour of the workshop will be used for explaining concepts and demonstrating capabilities, while the next hour will be dedicated to learning about programming the robots. The remainder of the time (approx. 1,5 hours), the participants will use their design ideas and creativity to customize their robots and solve global challenges. As recognition for their efforts, they will be awarded a certificate of completion.

Contributors:
Sorin POP
Bianca MUNTEAN

Expected Outcome
Participants spend 3 gamified hours of designing EO based tools using simple programming and robotics tools. They will understand how the process of design thinking and gamification can support the development of new products and technologies that contribute to improving the quality of life for local and global communities.

Open Cosmos tackles three main barriers in the space industry: high costs, time-consuming paperwork and complex technology, making space accessible to more players than ever before. The simplification of the process of developing a space mission is achieved with beeKit, a payload hardware emulator platform, and beeApp, a cloud-based mission and system simulator. The Mission and System Design (MSD) module, included in beeApp, allows users to run simulations and optimise different mission parameters based on payload requirements. The Hardware In the Loop (HIL) module interfaces with the payload through beeKit, enabling smooth interaction and testing capabilities from day one. The beeApp and beeKit bundle constitute a set of groundbreaking tools that simplify the process of sending payloads to space. By using standard interfaces and processes, combined with industry best practices, the design of a small satellite space mission is made simple. This massively reduces costs and time to orbit and ultimately opens space access to a broader and more diverse audience.

The aim and philosophy:

Our hands-on workshop offers an introduction to NewSpace, explaining key steps and theoretical concepts involved in the space mission design process and highlighting basic satellite mission parameters and constraints. The workshop is highly interactive, using the online space mission design tool of beeApp, demonstrating that designing your satellite mission should no longer be considered “rocket science”.

Targeted audience:
Anyone with an interest in modern small satellite mission design is welcome to attend. This hands-on workshop is interesting for people from both inside and outside the space industry, with or without a technical background. This workshop is specifically designed for:

• People working on satellite applications or using space data
• People thinking of using satellite technology for their applications
• Startup entrepreneurs thinking of using space data
• Startup entrepreneurs thinking of designing space instruments
• Anyone interested in the basics of space mission design

The outcome of the workshop:
The participants will come away from this workshop empowered with an understanding of the NewSpace environment and key concepts and parameters involved in a small satellite space mission. That will allow participants to benefit from advances in the industry and it will provide some experience towards designing a space mission in a short timeframe of a three hours workshop.
Previous participants have said: “I learned how to design a space mission with a direct application through the software”, “The interactive nature of the workshop with polls and exercises was excellent”.

Workshop lead and side event owner:
The workshop will be delivered by Daniel Sors Raurell, Head of Customer Success at Open Cosmos. As an engineer and head of customer success at Open Cosmos, Daniel works with customers daily to simplify access to space. He acts as the interface between customers and the Open Cosmos technical teams, managing customer interactions from the first delivery to the end of mission.

All participants are required to bring their own laptops and WiFi access will be needed to allow participants to connect to our online platform.

Title: TOP Training Session

Capacity: 20 people

Duration: 09.00 – 12.00

Description:

TOP is a web-based platform offering users from the atmospheric sciences domain a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to exploit Copernicus atmospheric and climate data products, such as COPERNICUS Sentinel-5 Precursor data and CAMS products. Deployed on the MUNDI DIAS, it is the first operational platform implementing the data triangle (EO, model and in-situ data) and hence creates an atmospheric multi-source data cube, stimulating a multidisciplinary scientific approach due to the availability of various collections.

Scope of the TOP training is to show participants the potential of the TOP platform to facilitate atmospheric data exploration and exploitation. Two use-cases will be presented, allowing participants to familiarize with the features of TOP and get hands-on experience in handling data. After a short theoretic introduction of the TOP platform, the use-cases will cover two different ways of exploring data. The first use-case will enable users to qualitatively explore atmospheric data related to a Sahar dust event using the TOP graphic user interface DAVE. The second use-case will be based on the Jupyter notebook interface, offering an insight how data accessible via TOP can be explored through the Jupyter environment.

Note: for this side event participants are required to bring their own laptop. The training is OS independent, only web browser needed (Chrome > Firefox)

Preliminary Agenda:
09.00 – 09.30 – TOP Introduction
09.30 – 10.30 – TOP DAVE UC1
10.30 – 11.30 – TOP Jupyter UC2
11.30 – 12.00 – Discussion