Smart stands for Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique, and its goal is to “harmonize” data from many kinds of Earth-watching satellites and then task software with searching through it for signs of change, natural or human-made. And it’s the work an intelligence community R&D agency called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is trying to take a giant leap further through a program dubbed Smart. In satellite imagery, hindsight is easy.īut what about automatically detecting big construction projects as they’re happening, anywhere on Earth, without knowing when or where that skyscraper or shiny military base might appear? That’s … less than easy. This time-lapse record of Dubai’s 38-year synthetic evolution relied on archival shots taken of a single location during a period when large-scale construction was happening. This video was a way to show the long-term changes you can see with data in Google Earth. The population is now more than 10 times larger than it was when the time-lapse project began. By 2020, the shoreline and surrounding land have completely transformed after sprouting the flashy construction projects the city is famous for. The beach now looks far from blank: Buildings and roads have spawned more buildings and roads. By 2007, there’s another island-also shaped like a tree that grows on islands. An artificial island shaped like a palm tree has shown up. The video is a time-lapse compilation of satellite images, pictures of this modern city taken from hundreds of miles overhead. It’s the Dubai of 1984, back when it had a population smaller than that of Tampa, Florida. But soon, in the left-hand corner of the screen, words appear, informing you that this is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Based on the sand’s relative blankness, it could be almost anywhere with a beach. The scene opens on a coastline, shot from above.
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