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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t done this kind of thing since undergrad, but hyperspectral data is really frickin cool this way. Not only can you use spectral signatures to identify specific things, but also figure out what those things are made out of by unmixing the spectra.

For example, figure out what crop someone’s growing and decide how healthy it is. With sufficient temporal resolution, you can understand when things are planted and how well they’re growing, how weedy or infiltrated they are by pest plants, how long the soil remains wet or if rainwater runs off and leaves the crop dry earlier than desired. Etc.

If you’re a good guy, you’d leverage this data to empower farmers. If you’re an asshole, you’re looking to see who has planted your crop illegally, or who is breaking your insurance fine print, etc.

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Hyperspectral data is really neat though it's worth pointing out that TESSERA is only trained on multispectral (optical + SAR) data.

You are very right on the temporal aspect though, that's what makes the representation so powerful. Crops grow and change colour or scatter patterns in distinct ways.

It's worth pointing out the model and training code is under an Apache2 license and the global embeddings are under a CC-BY-A. We have a python library that makes working with them pretty easy: https://github.com/ucam-eo/geotessera

> If you’re a good guy, you’d leverage this data to empower farmers. If you’re an asshole, you’re looking to see who has planted your crop illegally, or who is breaking your insurance fine print, etc.

How does using it to speculate on crop futures rank?

Every time someone explains the way short selling or speculative markets work, I have a “oh, I get it…” moment and then forget months later.

Same with insurance… socialized risk for our food supply is objectively good, and protecting the insurance mechanism from fraud is good. People can always bastardize these things.

It is complex. I was going to write out how it works in a simple way that everyone could understand - but then I realized that even though it would be a gross simplifications that are unrealistic, it still would be so complex that people would go "yep I understand that to every step", and then finish and not understand it. Every step alone makes perfects sense and is simple, but the total quickly gets complex.

Even calling this a speculative market is a gross simplification of the truth.

It is good to enable people to hedge against bad harvests.

There are two sides hedging against bad harvests, the farmer that grows the crop, and the industry (cattle, ethanol, food oils, and others) that buys that crop. The farmer wants to get paid, and the industry wants to get their crop.

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