S. Skakun (Assistant Professor with the Department of Geographical Sciences and iSchool) is part of the consortium led by Kitware Inc. that was awarded a contract within the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique (SMART) program. The SMART program aims at automating the quantitative analysis of space-based imagery to perform broad-area search for natural and anthropogenic events and characterize their extent and progression in time and space.

The project titled “WATCH: Wide Area Terrestrial Change Hypercube” will develop a system that will monitor wide areas for terrestrial change using multiple satellite data, including those acquired by NASA/USGS Landsat and ESA Sentinel-2 missions.

S. Skakun leads a team of two PhD students (Y. Zhang, A. Qadir) and a faculty specialist (M. Adegbenro) that will contribute with co-registration of satellite imagery and cloud detection.

More about IARPA SMART program: https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/smart and https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2021/item/2177-iarpa-launches-space-based-machine-automated-recognition-technique-program.