We are privileged today to share an episode with a Pakistani geospatial firm, Seerab Technologies. Zulkifil is a co-founder and has been with the company nearly 10 years. They have their own platform for real estate developers to help customers understand the context of proposed property purchases. He gave a simple example, a property with a large hole in it is hard to spot if you don’t have a terrain map. Seerab provides that to users. He also stepped through a few prizes they have won, including from Uber. Nice to have some lessons learnt from a firm all the way over in Pakistan telling us how product development is done.

What was most interesting to hear is the timeless advice he shared applies everywhere. We’re so used to hearing it from Silicon Valley, but his is a story of applying it successfully a world away - Seerab has been in business for years.

Finally, Zulkifil talks about doing good. According to Gemini:

"The Hajj is one of the world's largest annual gatherings, with over 1.8 million to 2.5 million pilgrims converging on Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for five to six days of rituals. It is a mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime duty for all adult Muslims who are physically and financially capable."

One may imagine with so many people scrambling across a relatively small area on foot, in an unfamiliar place, there is a risk of getting lost. So Zulkifil showed us a solution based on listening to Pakistani pilgrims going to the Hajj.

Thanks Zulkifil for taking the time!

This is episode 3/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through system characteristics of weather foundation models and how we can approach building them. Toward the end, the episode touches on an example of applying these approaches to a simulation of the Earth’s weather over a period of 800 years. The approaches Alex has been talking about enable the use of a GPU to process this simulation in only one day. We conclude with the values that drive Alex’s work.

This is episode 2/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena In this episode, Alex steps through ML weather models, their history and how they work.

Links to items discussed:

1. ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5): https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5
2. I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me: https://www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-science-hypeheres