The James Reserve is a place where the natural meets the digital. Part of the San Jacinto mountain range in Southern California, the James is a nature reserve that covers nearly 30 acres. It’s closed to the public. It’s off the grid. Vehicles aren’t allowed. But Sean Askay calls it “one of the most heavily instrumented places in the US.” Robots on high-tension cables drop climate sensors into this high-altitude forest. Bird’s nests include automated cameras and their own sensors. Overseen by the University of California, Riverside, the reserve doubles as a research field station for biologists, academics, and commercial scientists.
In 2005, as a master’s student at the university, Askay took the experiment further still, using Google Earth to create a visual interface for all those cameras and sensors. “Basically, I built a virtual representation of the entire reserve,” he says. “You could ‘fly in’ and look at live video feeds or temperature graphs from inside a bird box.”
Somewhere along the way, the project caught the eye of Google’s Vint Cerf, a founding father of the Internet, and in 2007, Askay moved to Mountain View, California, home to Google headquarters. There, he joined the team that ran Google Earth, a sweeping software service that blends satellite photos and other images to create a digital window onto our planet (and other celestial bodies). Since joining the company, the 36-year-old has used the tool to build maps of war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. He put the service on the International Space Station, so astronauts could better understand where they were. Working alongside Buzz Aldrin, he built a digital tour of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Now, as Google Earth celebrates its 10th anniversary, Askay is taking over the entire project—as lead engineer—following the departure of founder Brian McClendon. He takes over at a time when the service is poised to evolve into a far more powerful research tool, an enormous echo of his work at the James Reserve. When it debuted in 2005, Google Earth was a wonderfully intriguing novelty. From your personal computer, you could zoom in on the roof of your house or get a bird’s eye view of the park where you made out with your first girlfriend. But it proved to be more than just a party trick. And with the rapid rise of two other digital technologies—neural networks and virtual reality—the possibilities will only expand.
Neural networks—vast networks of machines that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain—can scour Google Earth in search of deforestation. They can track agricultural crops across the globe in an effort to identify future food shortages. They can examine the world’s oil tankers in an effort to predict gas prices. And it so happens that Google runs one of the most advanced neural networking operations in the world. For Google Earth, Askay says, “machine learning is the next frontier.”
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