Database Reference
In-Depth Information
For oil and gas, you want to figure out things like the best locations for your
oil platforms. Or, if your platform is already operational, you want to know
what the weather conditions are going to be for decisions like: Should I stop
my drilling and, if so, when? When is it too dangerous for the people involved?
Or when it is too dangerous for the infrastructure involved, so that no lives
are lost and expensive hardware stays intact?
For insurance companies, you want to assign the right premium for policies,
so you use the data you have about the environment to make smarter invest-
ment decisions and smarter evaluation of the risks involved. The relevant
data can be anything from climatological studies, which are long-term analyses
of what's going to happen, to data collected in the past few weeks, months,
or years. Based on that data, companies then try to make the best decisions
possible.
Lastly, of course, are problems that, when solved, benefit people like us. For
instance, let's say that we are going diving or sailing somewhere, or choosing
a vacation spot. For that we'd like to know when to go, where to go, and if
we'll be close to the sea or the ocean, it's great to know what the underwa-
ter visibility will be. And if we want to sail somewhere, it's great to know the
best winds to take you from one place to another. An offshoot of this area of
problem-solving is that this data also helps yachting competitions.
Overall, these are largely the most important two cases: long-term investment
decisions and daily operational decisions. For the most part, oceanographers
usually have a background in physics, so they use their numerical models to
create simulations of the dynamic ocean environment with this data. This
involves a lot of statistical analysis of past events in order to predict future
events. They use highly advanced technology and methods these days, so there
are many, many use cases you can think about.
Gutierrez:
When you started, what books, publications, blogs, or confer-
ences did you attend to learn more about this industry?
Karpištšenko:
The first thing we did was go to the top conferences and
reach out to the top organizations. We visited NOAA, we interacted with
NASA, and we went to different universities, such as Cornell and Rutgers, who
are now partners with Planet OS. We looked into what they were doing and
quite often engaged in dialog with their experts. We've done a similar thing
with customers: we've interacted, over the course of two years, with close to
100 different organizations. We make sure to talk with people at executive
and board levels, as well as those people who are actually on the sea. We've
worked really hard to understand how their decisions depend on the data
they collect or the data they have, what their decision flows are, and what
their workflows are so that we can make sure our product and platform will
be much more efficient than the way they do it today.
