GEOSPATIAL DATA & ITS APPLICATIONS

The Urban Expansion Observatory (UXO) is a joint research center between New York University Marron Institute and the Pillai Group of Institutions. The UXO was founded in 2014 to undertake the digitization of high resolution satellite imagery, in order to measure the quality of urban expansion in the fringe areas of 200 global cities from 1990 – 2010. The outputs from the digitization were analyzed to obtain various urban indicators that measured quality of global city growth and development. Currently the Observatory specializes in the digitization of high resolution satellite imagery as well as collecting and curating geographic datasets from all over the world. These datasets are either generated using AI or machine learning tools, scrapping open information from websites, imagery collected from drone surveys or by curating data sets from open street map. The datasets are then put on our online platform called Map Data Labs and is made available to the general public. These datasets can then be used by researchers, academics, commercial entities and government agencies for research studies or as tools for decision making. Various use cases of this data will be highlighted in this talk. Speaker Biography: Dr. Priam Pillai graduated with a PhD in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. He is currently an Associate Professor at Pillai College of Engineering in Mumbai, India as well as the Chief Operating Officer of Mahatma Education Society (MES), an educational trust that runs over 48 institutions in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. He is the founding partner of the Urban Expansion Observatory, a joint research initiative in geospatial technologies between Mahatma Education Society and New York University. His research interests include applications of GIS and remote sensing for development of maps that can be used for a variety of applications across different sectors and countries.