Anyone who sails a ship, flies an aircraft, goes into harm’s way, makes national policy decisions, responds to disasters, or navigates with a cellphone, all rely on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. NGA delivers world-class geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, that provides a decisive advantage to warfighters, policymakers, intelligence professionals and first responders. Both an intelligence agency and a combat support agency, NGA fulfills the president’s national security priorities in partnership with the intelligence community and Department of Defense.

Gary Dunow, the Associate Director of Enterprise at the NGA, discusses the agency’s priorities and what he would like to see be the focus for the coming five years. The three main targets he explains are an interoperable GEOINT environment, sensor to effect capabilities, and GEOINT superiority from space. And he went on to elaborate on how he plans to coordinate with NGA’s industry partners to achieve their goals.

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application, fundamentally changing the way Development, Security, and Ops teams collaborate and build software. From idea to production, GitLab helps teams improve cycle time from weeks to minutes, reduce development costs and time to market while increasing developer productivity.

Marc Kriz, a Strategic Account Leader with GitLab, discusses the work his National Security Programs group does with government organizations. Their single end-to-end DevSecOps platform is key to developing software both quickly and securely. With remote work becoming more and more common, even in the intelligence community, GitLab is building tools to mitigate many of the challenges that come with that shift.

As a leading location intelligence platform provider (Forrester Wave 2020), Esri empowers leaders with innovative tools to help create sustainable prosperity. Esri's customers drive digital transformation by embracing the power of location,

Stuart Penninger, a Solution Engineer at Esri, tells us about the ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine. He discusses how their tool allows users to access massive amounts of data from virtually anywhere. His demonstration walks us through an analyst’s workflow and emphasizes the speed and ease-of-use of their system and how impactful it is for analysts in the industry. He also explains the skillsets needed to work with the application and the learning curve users may face.

Cognitive Space is an AI-driven solution for near real-time dynamic mission management, collection planning & optimization, and revenue/performance capacity forecasting. Through space, we can monitor a changing planet, protect national interests, provide real-time communications, and enable a web of globally connected devices. It also offers the means for human civilization to scale beyond the bounds of our planet. For the vision of space to reach its fullest potential, the traditional approach of operating satellites individually will not suffice; they must be orchestrated at scale. By leveraging modern AI, cloud, and blockchain technology, Cognitive Space will orchestrate this new space domain to bring about the future we envision.

Scott Herman, with Cognitive Space, describes the problems and challenges they solve for their customers including mission management, collection planning, order management, and more. He describes the benefits of starting with Moonshot Labs and the process of participating in various other accelerators. Scott then goes on to discuss what is around the corner for Cognitive Space and the future challenges of machine orchestration.

Adobe is the global leader in digital media and digital marketing solutions. Their creative, marketing and document solutions empower everyone – from emerging artists to governments and global brands – to bring digital creations to life and deliver immersive, compelling experiences to the right person at the right moment for the best results. In short, Adobe is everywhere, and we’re changing the world through digital experiences.

Adobe’s Industry Specialist, Jon Lewington, sat down with us to discuss the 3D modeling tools they recently announced and their new focus on the metaverse. He discusses what the metaverse means for the GEOINT community and how the merging of the physical and virtual worlds can make drastic shifts in the industry. Jon addresses the needs and problems of their customers that they are trying to serve with this new focus as well.

With the creation of distributed sensing and intelligence gathering capability, the Kleos satellites exploit rapidly deployed technologies to reduce risk and ensure that changing customer needs are fulfilled proactively by small, low cost satellites. Their engineers utilise propriety algorithms and data processing methodologies to ensure their unique data products can be used in conjunction with other data sources, mapping or GEOINT imagery to enhance the identification of dark maritime and land-based activity.

Peter Round and Guillermoe Gutiérrez, with Kleos, explain their unique services and why they choose to focus on the engineering and improvement on their constellation rather than analytics. They discuss the challenges facing the RF data industry and benefits of using that data.

Hydrosat provides daily, high-resolution thermal and multispectral infrared imagery of the entire Earth. Thermal allows you to visualize heat and reveal unseen truths that visual imagery can’t detect. Leveraging their first-in-history thermal capabilities, they also provide analytics solutions to solve climate and agriculture issues.

Hydrosat’s Co-Founder and CEO, Peter Fossel, sat down with Adam with talk about their upcoming launch of their first satellite. He went on to discuss why they chose to focus specifically on infrared as opposed to other parts of the spectrum, such as visible or SAR. Their sub field level resolution helps them get a clearer snapshot than even Landsat which sits at about 120 meters per pixel. And their always-on monitoring eliminates the need for tasking and allows users to access data from any time slot.

PAR Government is the recognized expert in mobile situational awareness and geospatial technology including full-motion video. Their goal is to help users best manage their information in any type of dynamic environment, whether that be military assets, first responders, local government, or international allies.

TeamConnect-Sit(x) is a SaaS solution hosted in the FedRAMP compliant Amazon GovCloud that delivers next generation TAK Server capabilities. It supports federation with GOTS TAK Servers and provides an intuitive user experience allowing organizations to sign up and deploy in minutes. Situational Awareness (SA) provides knowledge of what is happening in the area of operation while gathering intelligence in real time. Their technology works with the Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) to provide an SA solution to communicate, push data to others, and see other operators in real time. To put it into layman's terms, it provides you (the user) the ability to see others movements and actions within your group, and provides you with the ability to send data points and chat messages to those people.

Here Mike Nelson, the President of PAR Government, explains the importance of mobile devices to provide crucial situational awareness to various groups and the increased communication and collaboration they are able to achieve with their system. Verne LaClair then walked us through a demonstration of their cutting edge software.

People have grown to believe that big data is unwieldy, cumbersome, slow. Tectonix believes otherwise. They set out to deliver an unmatched data experience, where rapid response times and intuitive controls combine to yield actionable insights in seconds instead of hours. Traditional data tools are built to take a large data set, accept a narrowly defined query and provide the answer that the user thinks they're looking for. Tectonix sought to take a different approach. Instead, they start with the big picture, allowing their users to whittle down to the answers they seek. In doing so, users discover answers to questions along the way that they would never have thought to ask, generating actionable intelligence that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. Most analytics platforms can help you find a needle in a haystack — but when scaling your lens to start with hundreds of billions of data points becomes not just possible, but PRACTICAL, you'll be able to find every needle in every haystack and see how they all fit together.

Mike DiMarco, with Tectonix, explains their large scale data visualization and how they are able to work with datasets in the hundreds of billions. Their frontend UI allows users to easily interact with the data at the speed of thought. He demonstrates how their scalability creates an environment where analysts can get core insights without having to wait hours.

Spire Global is a space-to-cloud analytics company that owns and operates the largest multi-purpose constellation of satellites. Its proprietary data and algorithms provide the most advanced maritime, aviation, and weather tracking in the world. In addition to its constellation, Spire’s data infrastructure includes a global ground station network and 24/7 operations that provide real-time global coverage of every point on Earth.

Iain Goodridge with Spire, discusses the new directions for Spire beyond AIS. Their space services, including constellation-as-a-service demonstrates their new capabilities as a company and their shift in focus. He also discusses the new opportunities in RF specifically.

Check out what's ahead for GEOINT 2022 with a discussion with Kevin Corbley. GEOINT 2022 will be taking place in Denver, Colorado April 24-27th 2022. See Everyone there!