Motivation

Impact Investing needs new tools to measure and quantify returns on investments done in
various communities. For now, Sela relies on community monitors to send data verifying
contractor claims for infrastructure projects. One feedback we’ve often received is that there is
possibility of collusion between contractors and community members verifying project.

Based on this feedback, we came up with a ​randomized algorithm​ simultaneously minimizing

the chances of collusion as well as the effort required per worker while maximizing effort
required to corrupt the system. Along with the work done on online reputation, we can argue
that measures have been taken to create incentives for collaboration. That said, a
complementary way to make our approach more robust is to integrate with other independent
data sources such as satellite image for verification of infrastructure project.

Research Questions
In this research program, we want to go from Satellite Imagery to Impact Measurement and
extract information the impact investing community cares about.

Given the nature of the first 2 projects anticipated to happen on the Sela platform over Q1-Q2
2019, our research questions will fall under 2 broad categories:

Forest monitoring
Urban monitoring
1) Urban monitoring (Jeba)

In urban monitoring, the subgoal for the Sela platform is to track construction of roads, building
and other type of infrastructure projects as well as come up with city-level indexes of
sustainability. Example questions include:
● What’s the area of vegetation in this city ?
● How many new buildings were added this year?
● What new roads or buildings have been added since last month ?
● What’s the density of buildings/roads per area ?”

High level goals, deliverables :

● Technique taking as input high resolution satellite imagery of urban areas and delivering
insights such as (road coverage, green space coverage, number of buildings and
relative size) to develop city-level indexes

We can take various approaches to answer this question. The most promising one has been
done through the ​DeepGlobe Challenge​ . It comprises a dataset made of high resolution image

Winning solutions :
● https://github.com/zlkanata/DeepGlobe-Road-Extraction-Challenge​ (Pytorch)
● http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018_workshops/papers/w4/Hamaguchi_Bui
lding_Detection_From_CVPR_2018_paper.pdf​ (Building detection)
● http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018_workshops/papers/w4/Tian_Dense_F
usion_Classmate_CVPR_2018_paper.pdf​ (Land Cover Classification)
From reading code and understanding the solutions, you should have a better idea on how to
approach different type of computer vision problems depending on the tasks and data type

Pre-Internship Step
Setup ​Google Earth Engine
Setup ​Google Colab
Go through Pytorch ​deep learning​ course and do all the practicals to be comfortable. We
can arrange work sessions and check-in throughout the break
Go through all ​OpenCV-Python tutorials

Around Internship Step (Week 1)

1) Read ​DeepGlobe Paper
2) Read 3 Winning solutions and keep the following questions in mind:
a) What are the commonalities in the approaches for these different types of
problems ?
b) What are the differences in the approaches for these different types of problems
?
3) Re-Implement and understand solutions
 4) Using background knowledge from OpenCV and Deep Learning tutorials → Propose
next step to build on top of better models to derive more insights beyond trained tasks
(i.e go from building detection to building count)

(Week 2) → Switzerland
1) Read Facebook AI paper on “From Satellite Imagery to Disaster Insights” →
https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/From-Satellite-Imagery-to-Disaster-I
nsights.pdf
2) Think about data augmentation techniques and how to build models taking different type
of satellite images as input
3) Meet with EPFL team to discuss insights learnt

(Week 3)
1) From solutions and models which propose segmentation masks, work on techniques
taking as input segmentation masks and outputting scores such as road kilometers,
number of building
(Week 4)
1) Focus on wrapping up, writing results and outlining next steps

2) Forest monitoring (Myra + Hassan)

In forest monitoring, the subgoal for the Sela platform is to develop index scores of oil pollution.
Samples were collected on different sites in the Niger Delta

High level goals/deliverables

● Approach integrating an increasing number of data source to predict level of oil pollution
from multimodal satellite imagery

Sub-problems
● Overlay UNEP report results with physical site location (Dotun can help with that)
● Overlay physical site location with Google Earth Pro high resolution images (Dotun can
help with that)
● Use land cover classification architecture to extract visual features from Niger Delta
Digital Globe images
● Train prediction models from visual features to site level pollution
● Integrate vegetation indices, SAR images into prediction model

Pre-Internship Step
1) Setup ​Google Earth Engine
2) Setup ​Google Colab
3) Go through Pytorch ​deep learning​ course and do all the practicals to be
comfortable. We can arrange work sessions and check-in throughout the break
4) Go through all ​OpenCV-Python tutorials
Around Internship Step
(Week 1)
1) Read DeepGlobe Paper
2) Focus on Land Cover Classification tasks and solutions
3) Re-implement and understand solutions
4) Evaluate and visualize feature extractor on images from Niger Delta

Week 2
1) In an unsupervised way, assess possibility of clustering together polluted/non polluted
images
Week 3
1) Train prediction model from extracted features to oil levels
2) Integrate with other data sources such as vegetation indices and SAR

Week 4
1) Wrap up and outline next steps