CarbonPlan is doing a great job bringing transparency here by analyzing and publishing proposals to the major carbon removal programs to date (Stripe and Microsoft): https://carbonplan.org/research/cdr-database
On the waitlist for rooftop solar panel install, currently installing electric heat pump water heater (we use radiant heat, so this covers space heating as well) and induction stove and will buy electric car as soon as solar panels are in to go all-electric at home!
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OpenAI | San Francisco | Full Time, Onsite, Interns, Visa | https://openai.com
OpenAI’s mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. We are building a team of researchers and engineers to make the defining breakthroughs in machine learning.
We care about what people will accomplish here much more than what they've already done: for any of our hiring criteria, demonstration of exceptional motivation and potential can overcome a lack of experience. We value personal development; we hire curious, highly-motivated individuals who look to grow in areas where they have not yet achieved mastery.
Our impact is greater than just publishing research papers. We build working systems. We try to empower and strengthen the AI research community, and collaborate freely. We publish our techniques, tools, and methods, and try to find creative approaches for how to improve the progress and impact of ML research.
We're currently hiring software engineers, machine learning researchers, machine learning interns, and a recruiting coordinator.
Planet Labs (http://planet.com/) in San Francisco, CA has a large number of positions open. We're a collection of electrical, mechanical, aerospace, software, science, etc. folks looking to image the whole planet on a daily basis with a large number of small satellites. It's a terrific bunch of folks doing what we call "agile aerospace". We've launched ~90 satellites so far (and had 8 on the SpaceX CRS-7 rocket :( )
Python (Flask, Django) and Javascript (React, Backbone) are used heavily in the web projects. We of course have systems programming to do for the onboard software. Plenty of other interesting work from the satellite design and various subsystems, manufacturing, georectification of images, image corrections, and heaps of possibilities with a supremely interesting dataset that we're growing.
Some gigs are onsite only, others may be available to remote workers.
Satellites in LEO (including ours) travel at about 17,000 mph — drones can get nowhere close to that, which affects total coverage area possible per aircraft / spacecraft, which in turn will affect costs and operations.
Ground speed doesn't seem like a feature to me - after all, the ideal is an unblinking 'eye in the sky' that provides high-resolution video for large regions a la ARGUS. A stationary observer seems like it would provide more valuable information than an orbiting one.
With orbiting satellites, most of the time the birds are over the ocean and empty stretches of land that most people don't care about. You're wasting most of your bandwidth and storage on places that someone might be interested in one day...
Don't get me wrong, the work you're doing is very cool, and global data sets are really fun! Unfortunately, I've found that the 'value density' of these global data sets isn't great.
You cannot keep a stationary drone in the sky for long stretches of time. Their field of view is also going to be massively smaller than a satellite. You would need a lot of them just to keep the same amount of coverage.
How do you know nobody is interested in the 'ocean and empty stretches of land'? It could provide a lot of meteorological and geological data for scientists for example.
Funny you should mention meteorological use cases. At a previous startup, we built global historical weather data sets (at 5km resolution, 30+ year hourly time series), accessible via a metered API. This took HPC, storage, and engineering investment about an order of magnitude less than Planet. We also had a whole room of tapes filled with satellite imagery from the world's governmental Met offices...
Our main use case was for wind and solar renewable energy, but we also entertained other uses, like architecture and agriculture. These data sets turned out to be difficult to monetize; while the continental US data set may have broken even, the rest of the globe never recouped the cost of storage, let alone the supercomputer time. It's not that people around the world weren't interested in the data, they just couldn't justify paying for it.
We design, build, launch, and operate small satellites, and process, analyze and serve the imagery data we downlink from them. We have some serious (-ly fun!) data and software challenges as we aim to rethink how satellite imagery is accessed and used. Our goal is to image the entire Earth, every day, and democratize access to these data and tools. So far this year, we've launched 71 satellites across 6 rocket launches, with many more slated for next year. We're a team of ~100 engineers (software, mechanical, electrical, aero/astro, and manufacturing) and business people primarily based in San Francisco, with a small, primarily SRE, team building in San Antonio, and a handful of remotes across the world.
