Corey Jaskolski, founder and CEO of Synthetaic, dubbed his satellite image scanning tool Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC. After the Chinese weather balloon incident caught the nation's attention in January, Jaskolski applied RAIC to satellite photos of the Earth's surface, as collected by geospatial satellite imaging company Planet. He was able to trace the balloon's origins to China in just a matter of days. Now, Jaskolski says, the company is using those lessons to further reduce the time. "Our goal is to be able to ingest the entire Planet daily take [of Earth images] and be able to process that all in less than 24 hours. So if you wanted to literally look for balloon launches around the entire world, we could give you a daily update of that every day. Let you know if there was a balloon launched anywhere.“ The RAIC is part of a new class of AI tools that don't require a massive, labeled dataset to generate what Jaskolski describes as an understanding of what to look for. He was able to teach it to look for the balloon based only on a single hand-made drawing. In essence, by continuously looking at satellite images, the RAIC tool develops a familiarity that comes close to expertise. So when it scans satellite imagery, it has a rudimentary understanding of what's unusual, and can look for specific unusual objects. And the input doesn't have to be precise. Jaskolski says his drawing depicted what a balloon might look like in satellite data, and RAIC was able to find it. Then, once they found the actual balloon in one of the satellite datasets, RAIC was able to look for that in other images.
