Mobilizing Earth Science for Impact: How DevGlobal’s NASA Lifelines Team Supported Crisis Response in Goma

NASA Lifelines is a six-year initiative building a global community between Earth scientists and humanitarian experts. Led by international services firm DevGlobal, in partnership with NASA, the program brings together humanitarians, Earth scientists, and policy leaders to unlock the power of satellite data in some of the world’s most complex crises.  That mission came into … Read more

The Spectrum of Earth Observation: Applications in Agricultural Development

How DevGlobal Leverages EO to Advance Agricultural Innovation Earth Observation (EO) technologies have revolutionized our ability to monitor and evaluate agricultural interventions across diverse landscapes – ranging from continent-scale deforestation tracking to detecting single-gene crop improvements. This spectrum of applications reveals how EO bridges the gap between satellite data and on-the-ground impact, empowering governments, NGOs, … Read more

The History of NASA Lifelines

As NASA Lifelines enters its second year, DevGlobal is proud to reflect on this initiative we’re leading in partnership with NASA.

DevGlobal at St. Louis’s T-REX Geospatial Innovation Center

DevGlobal Principal Consultant, James Haithcoat, spoke at St. Louis’s T-REX Nonprofit Technology Innovation Center as part of their monthly geospatial speaker series, Geosaurus Unleashed recently. James spoke to who and what DevGlobal is, focusing specifically on the RAMP project DevGlobal led, in partnership with the World Health Organization. DevGlobal has partnered with T-REX as a … Read more

DevGlobal Leads Gates Foundation Geospatial Impact Evaluations CoP

DevGlobal leads community of practice for geospatial impact evaluations with award from Gates Foundation  DevGlobal will support a four-year, $4.74 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to broaden the use of Earth Observation to evaluate agricultural and climate investments. Led by William & Mary’s AidData, the aptly named GeoField initiative is an … Read more

Negotiating a Humanitarian Data License

Get the Most Data for your Dollar – How the Pros Negotiate a Humanitarian License Fight for health and climate equity by mastering the fine print  Just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the government of the West African country of Sierra Leone was able to use geospatial data to identify at-risk … Read more

What Does GIS Day Mean to Us?

For those of us working in geospatially focused organizations, the applicability of using geographic information systems (GIS) to solve the world’s most pressing problems is clear. There are communities in desperate need of support, and true impact is contingent on strong partnerships and in-depth collaboration. Employing user-centric design within an ethical framework to ensure the … Read more

Producing Global Training Dataset Labels

Photo of city taken from multistory building

The ramp project is working with the World Health Organization to map healthcare buildings, a tool that will support humanitarian emergency response teams in the likelihood of the next pandemic. In this blog post, we discuss the labeling process, answering a fundamental question: How can we ensure generating high-quality labels working with remote teams?

A Perfect Machine Learning Training Data Set?

Top-down drone-captured image of African town with computer generated rectangles over building rooftops

“What is good enough” is a living question that has evolved over the span of the ramp project. It starts at the end, in defining our use case and engaging end-users as advisors to get an idea of how the model outputs will be utilized. Working backward in this way has allowed us to craft our approach to establishing training data guidance and quality assurance . . .