James Crawford is the founder and CEO of Orbital Insight, which uses advanced image processing and data science at petabyte scale to understand global and national trends.

He has two decades of experience leading innovative software projects: empowering farmers with climate data at the Climate Corporation, working to get a commercial robot on the moon at Moon Express, making the world's books searchable at Google, and managing robotics at NASA Ames Research Center.


James will be speaking on the Main Stage at WIRED Retail, our second annual one-day summit focusing on the future of retail, being held in London on November 23.

He will take part in the session "Commerce in the cloud and into orbit" alongside Paul Clarke of Ocado and Ken Denman from Emotient.

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What are you planning to speak about at WIRED Retail?

Commercial satellite and drone imagery is increasing every year in quantity and quality -- driven by the same trends that bring you cell phones with the power of mainframe computers. At the same time, artificial intelligence has made major breakthroughs with algorithms that can automatically process more imagery than a human could ever look at. These two trends are enabling unprecedented visibility into socio-economic trends. My talk will discuss these trends in more detail and what they will mean for the retail industry.


Is there anything you'd like to achieve by speaking at WIRED Retail?

We would like to meet thought leaders in the space and engage in broader discussions of the impacts that satellite and drone imagery will have on the industry over the next three to five years.

Who are you looking forward to hearing and/or meeting at WIRED Retail?

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We are looking forward to meeting movers and shakers who are disrupting the retail industry.


What do you think could be the most significant challenges and developments for the use of advanced image processing and data science for analysing global trends in the next five years?

Several startups are aggressively pursuing business plans to put up large constellations of new satellites. Drones are also becoming increasingly common and more capable as imaging platforms. This will create a large increase in the availability of imagery. Within three to five years -- possibly sooner -- we expect to be able to get daily sub-meter resolution imagery of all buildings in all major cities in the world.

In addition, imagery processing techniques continue to improve. They are catching up with -- and in some cases will surpass -- humans' ability to analyse imagery. This will make it possible to track and measure car, truck, rail and ship traffic, track mining, refining and manufacturing, count shipping containers, measure customer behaviour, and more broadly track all activities of economic significance in a comprehensive way that was never before possible.

What's next for Orbital Insight?


Orbital Insight is in the process of building out the software platform and algorithms needed to fully leverage satellite and drone imagery at scale. We currently count cars in retail parking lots as well as in other areas of interest and across metro areas. We can also measure everything from the amount of crude oil in tanks with floating lids to the rate of new building construction in China.

Over the next several years, we will be expanding the scope of the objects and events we can track to ultimately include all visible activities of economic significance.

WIRED Retail returns to London on November 23 at St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Last year’s event sold out, so secure your place now: WIRED subscribers save 10 percent. We also have a limited number of half-price tickets available for retail sector startups. For more information visit: wiredevent.co.uk/wired-retail-2015.