Joe Morrison Profile Banner
Joe Morrison Profile
Joe Morrison

@mouthofmorrison

24,771
Followers
1,830
Following
3,137
Media
33,862
Statuses

“Controversial industry figure” - @gridnews . VP @umbraspace 🛰 Satellite imagery for mapping 🗺, monitoring 📈, and 'mergencies 🚨

Austin, TX
Joined March 2016
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Pinned Tweet
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 months
Today we announced a new capability: bistastic imaging. Helped along by the invaluable support of our partners @DARPA , we've started launching and operating SAR satellites in tandem pairs flown in precise formation in order to simultaneously image a target.
Tweet media one
38
191
1K
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Someone on Reddit found a stealth bomber in Google Maps. I love how the R/G/B bands smear for fast-moving objects in satellite imagery. Supposedly you can use that quirk to estimate speed of objects if you know a bit about the satellite.
Tweet media one
80
1K
8K
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
10 months
OSINT analyst uses the OpenStreetMap Overpass API to pin down his target’s location to within a meter using only clues spotted in the background of her selfie video
32
672
3K
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 months
@coldhealing I’ve been pronouncing it wrong but after watching this I don’t think I’m going to be pronouncing it right anytime soon
10
13
2K
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
Here’s a thread of 10 strongly held opinions I have formed about the “geospatial industry”: 1. The most successful and ambitious mapping project of all time, Google Maps, is an advertising platform. There is no “geospatial industry,” only industries with spatial problems.
25
254
739
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Raster Vision is the most interesting open source project I ever had the pleasure of seeing get built up close - as we enter golden age of AI, free and open tools for applying new techniques to satellite imagery are going to be invaluable!
Tweet media one
11
96
725
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
In the spirit of writing boring but helpful blog posts, here's my magnum opus, "How to Find the Most Recent Satellite Imagery Anywhere on Earth" including a patent-pending flow chart:
Tweet media one
17
202
669
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
OpenStreetMap is now at the center of a truly incredible alliance of the biggest companies on earth, and I'm surprised by how little attention it's getting. So I wrote it up!
17
202
583
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
11 months
Yesterday I got to welcome this little guy into the world. I’m very in love!
Tweet media one
108
2
576
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Just that simple
Tweet media one
1
52
506
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
Holy mother... @planetlabs will be releasing monthly basemaps for the entire central swath of the world for FREE because @Climateforest is funding them to publish this data for climate work. Mind-boggling barely begins to cover it.
Tweet media one
8
143
509
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 month
A thread of 20 X-band synthetic aperture radar designs I have known… 1. Umbra 🇺🇸
Tweet media one
16
57
504
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Let’s talk a little bit about what the future of the satellite imagery industry looks like. Can you code? No? Well, then, it doesn’t look like you.
30
94
480
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
9 months
This morning, we shared some huge news courtesy of Payload space. We're now able to sell 16cm SAR imagery, the highest resolution SAR ever made publicly available and close to the native capability of our system. But there's more to this story...
20
103
462
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
@Senn_Spud Sometimes I feel lucky to have such a lackluster imagination
1
0
437
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
5 years
@geo_will @krees go for "howdy folks," everyone hates it equally
2
4
434
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
9 months
Recently we announced 16cm resolution data, the highest resolution SAR ever released. Today, three examples of that data have been released freely and openly: Let me explain what the *real* story is here, which I don't think is obvious...
Tweet media one
11
99
441
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
Found an incredible map mural in a random alley in Delft today—such an awesome city
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
22
56
424
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
I think the satellite imagery industry isn't living up to its potential. I wrote about why it's broken and what can be done to fix it:
37
123
413
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
I’ve told this story in private a few times but it’s time to tell it publicly. How I Got a Lifetime Ban from AWS: A Cautionary Tale for Idiots on Computers (Illustrated with Larry David GIFs)
14
106
390
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
I know a lot of folks in the commercial satellite industry pulling longer-than-normal hours under lots of pressure right now. If that's you: you're on the right side of history, and I suspect you'll always be proud of what you accomplished during this period.
3
30
368
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
10 months
@paytmitch @bestofdyingtwit They’ll ship a following tab and it will get 10x better overnight
3
0
372
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
5 days
If you work in the satellite imagery industry you know what these are
@john_qjn
John Qjn
7 days
Saw these while flying into Hokkaido. What are they?
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
85
14
360
52
13
569
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
ProPublica’s tool for scrolling through videos posted to Parler the day of the capitol attack is one of the coolest examples of tech-enabled journalism I’ve ever seen. How they built it that fast is also beyond me.
9
99
331
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
10 months
If you want to learn about how satellite imagery analysis can be combined with other GEOINT techniques to produce amazing insights, nobody does it better than the NYT visual investigations team. They not only do amazing work, they do an amazing job explaining it.
6
92
321
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
I made a GDAL T-Shirt for no good reason! The first ~20 shirts will cover costs to make it, and everything thereafter will be donated directly to @OSGeo .
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
31
80
314
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 months
Typical government acquisitions office trying to buy a satellite
Tweet media one
8
18
288
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Another stereoscopic animation of the open pit mine we are releasing images of semi-weekly as part of our open data program. This one was made by a customer indecently of the one we shared this morning.
17
15
285
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
24 days
I was on a defense intelligence panel in London recently with a bunch of acquisition professionals from the US, the UK, and NATO. I got asked what the benefits of working with commercial, unclassified sat vendors were, and I said “access to talent that likes to smoke weed.”
8
21
285
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
If you love maps and want to make a career of it, you need a trade. Maps pair well with: - Software engineering - UX and print design - Data science - Teaching - Sales - White wine - Antipasti - Contract killing - Ancient relic hunting
25
30
266
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
To all of the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists worried we’re using SAR to spy on you and invade your privacy: joke’s on you because the tinfoil hat is a spot reflector so you stick out like a sore thumb
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
7
39
256
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Time to get educated
Tweet media one
17
6
253
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
I've probably had 50 conversations with current and former executives at satellite imagery companies about why they choose to keep such a tight lock on their archival data. I've never heard a satisfactory answer. It's time to change things up.
21
51
253
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Holy lord, if you're a technically-oriented individual looking to get into the satellite imagery/machine learning racket...I totally recommend starting with @map_andrew 's insane collection of resources and tools
5
53
252
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
@__mihir How do you get your friends to share their W2 and how do you evaluate fitness? I keep offering to pay for their V02 max test but they aren’t returning my texts…
1
0
242
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
10. Geospatial’s time hasn’t yet come. The effects of climate change, and the coming effort to mitigate those effects globally, will require geospatial literacy at an unprecedented scale. You’re not too late to start something or get into the field. Now is the moment.
13
36
240
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
1/4 Every healthcare worker in the world is now asking the same question: will we have enough ICU beds, ventilators, and PPE to weather the surge? A small volunteer group has been working on a tool to help answer that question for every hospital in the US
10
130
238
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
9 months
Everybody’s first time buying satellite imagery
Tweet media one
12
18
239
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 months
There are many applications of bistatic imaging, from stifling radar jamming, to deriving 3D models, to identifying the heading and velocity of moving objects (both on land and at sea). The Air Force is funding our development of moving target indication.
5
19
234
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
9. Google Earth Engine is the most important advancement in the field of remote sensing and climate science in 50 years. It will probably be unceremoniously killed by Google at some point without explanation and an entire era of research will suddenly be impossible to reproduce.
9
40
231
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
If you work in tech, and you’re looking for a change of pace, allow me to suggest looking into… ✨👋 the commercial satellite imagery industry👋✨ 10 reasons I love it and you might, too:
8
33
228
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
8 months
@TheBrianMcManus I think a neat side effect of this phenomenon is that it can be used to estimate the speed of the object in question fairly accurately if you know a bit about the sensor and the altitude of the satellite!
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Just that simple
Tweet media one
1
52
506
4
7
225
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Saw this aerial shot of the forbidden city trending on Reddit today - so fresh and so clean, clean
Tweet media one
9
18
217
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
The news yesterday that @Mapbox decided to release a new version of Mapbox GL JS under a proprietary license has really upset me. I tried to work through what I think it means this morning:
9
67
218
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
Something I've become kind of obsessed with over the past year is how similar the technology challenges are between analyzing satellite imagery and analyzing medical imagery. 👇human tissue under 🔬 👇 planetary tissue under 🛰️
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
12
34
211
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
8. The modern discipline runs on open source code maintained by prolofic, intermittently impoverished, unreasonable software engineers. Every single Fortune 500 company uses a handful of such libraries in critical infrastructure and almost none ever donate or contribute back.
3
30
200
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
There are only two genres of SAR software: 1. An undocumented Github repo with 6 stars built by a grad student who is now living off the grid in Alaska in a cabin he built 2. A $50K/seat add-on to a $10K/seat desktop GIS software built in 2005 for the British Royal Navy
14
10
204
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
It took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at this framework for understanding tradeoffs in the satellite imagery industry. Once I started looking through the industry through this lens, everything felt a lot simpler.
14
24
204
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
8 months
I think this is the first time we’ve been featured in original reporting by Bellingcat, super proud to support them. All data available to download, CC BY 4.0 if you read the article, there’s a link
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
4
29
199
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Tired of seeing a lot of negativity in your feed? Pro tip: get really into maps and follow a bunch of map people on here. They just make cool maps. And share them.
10
20
199
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
6 years
Let's say you want to learn about using deep learning models to interpret aerial or satellite imagery...here are ten (10!) useful training datasets you could start with! 👇👇👇
4
59
198
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
6 years
(1/8) For once, I have some big news! After months of hard work, today @azavea is releasing Raster Vision (), our open source framework for building computer vision models on satellite, aerial, and other large imagery sets! Here's why it's so exciting...
Tweet media one
9
75
192
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
6 years
If you're starting a software company in the machine learning world, you should seriously consider an open source core as a growth strategy. My favorite examples: - @h2oai 🌊 - @fastdotai 🐎 - @anacondainc 🐍 - @OmniSci 🔍 - @feature_labs 🔧 - @explosion_ai 📃 - @PrefectIO 📊
5
35
193
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
1/9 Tomorrow is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'm visiting @NASAGoddard at the invitation of @NASASocial to watch the reveal of the James Webb Space Telescope's first images in person surrounded by the scientists and engineers who dedicated their careers to making it happen.
Tweet media one
9
11
191
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Hey everyone! I wrote a quick essay on why so many of the new products I see getting launched in the satellite imagery industry are off the mark. Would love to learn about counter-examples or have a respectful debate with anyone who disagrees.
24
30
192
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
3. In geo, you either die a hero or live long enough to make the majority of your revenue from defense and intelligence.
7
18
188
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
I few weeks ago I was hanging out with an “alternative data” CEO (the mythical people who sell data to hedge funds) and after a few beers he said, “I don’t sell insights, I sell confirmation bias.”
9
20
189
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
15 days
@zeta_globin These are the same voice actor
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
5
5
189
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Microsoft today announced some fancy new tools for enhancing satellite imagery using AI. My favorite is this paper (“SpaceEye”) showing how reference SAR data can be used as a baseline to infer what’s under clouds in optical imagery and then simulate it
Tweet media one
10
47
181
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
I think probably my absolute 🔥flaming hot take 🔥 is that most people who take an absolute moral stand against working with the military have no idea what the military does and no desire to find out.
19
5
179
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
Friends, today is "GIS Day," so to celebrate I wrote a short novel about why open source software hasn't killed Esri's business. It's a beast at almost 2,500 words, so I put the main points in the thread below.
12
50
183
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
Insanely impressive work from @ImpactObserv and another example of the Descartes Labs mafia in action. Kudos to the @Microsoft Planetary Computer and @Esri folks who supported the work, too. Best part: it's CC BY 4.0, totally openly licensed!
14
40
182
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
1/? Maybe I’m nuts but I truly believe that every satellite imagery provider has an ethical and fiduciary duty to give away their archive for free. …allow me to explain:
23
36
178
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
11 months
You hear a lot about launch costs declining, but that trend hasn’t been true for the last couple of years. And at first when SpaceX has a monopoly on that segment, I don’t see what incentive they would have to drop prices much lower than they are today
31
17
174
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
The people behind left Uber to start a company ( @unfoldedinc ) and they just announced their first product today. I’ve always loved their design aesthetic—looks like an app that would be at home on the Star Trek bridge
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
8
27
178
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
GIS is so straightforward, you probably just need to open Quantum Geographic Information System and reproject your data to European Petroleum Survey Group 4326 (the famous identifier for World Geodetic System 1984)
12
14
176
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
The role of the GIS team at most large companies includes barging into any new geospatial software procurement, claiming they can already do or build that for no additional cost using their Esri ELA, and then never doing or building it after killing the deal.
22
9
177
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
We desperately need an annual conference focused on commercial applications of satellite imagery. Some place where startups, and non-profits, and researchers, and imagery providers can present their work. 2 days. Washington, DC. Call it…Sat Summit ✨🛰🌍
26
6
173
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Ain’t no such thing as a generic change detection algorithm for satellite imagery. It has been tried many times. Never seen it work. One reason is that every use case defines “change” a little differently. One man’s change is a another man’s noise. Some dumb examples:
9
16
172
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
What’s the best beer in the world to you? My top three: 1. The first oversized beer in a stadium before the game starts 2. The jacuzzi beer 3. The mid-grilling beer
117
3
172
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
In the world of machine learning on satellite imagery, "fully automated" means you spent 10,000 human hours on a problem and 6 hours training a model that only works on one sensor and one geography during one time of year.
12
16
170
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 months
I’m genuinely stumped at the reception this got. I expected a very small, very wonky audience of European remote sensing scientists to perk up, and a few anonymous intelligence analysts to catch on, but for some reason beyond me this grabbed peoples’ imagination
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 months
Today we announced a new capability: bistastic imaging. Helped along by the invaluable support of our partners @DARPA , we've started launching and operating SAR satellites in tandem pairs flown in precise formation in order to simultaneously image a target.
Tweet media one
38
191
1K
17
9
167
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
I have access to petabytes of satellite imagery. The entire landmass of the Earth updated constantly — thousands of new images every day. And I pay $0 for all of it. Here’s how 👇
10
18
167
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
It’s all on record. The build up was captured with commercial satellite imagery. The invasion is being captured on mobile phones. In the short term, there will always be disinformation, but in the long term it’s all on record.
7
15
165
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
My favorite thing to do when presenting is to say “…which I’ll explain in more detail later,” and then never mention it again
12
5
164
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
I walk 20 minutes to work. The guy who sits next to me has an hour+ commute and two babies under 3 years old to take care of. He still beats me to work, makes coffee for the office, and always has a huge grin when I see him in the morning. I really admire him.
5
1
164
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Best part of this book so far is the detailed (and perilous) history of the Landsat program. Imagine the absolutely screwed position we’d be in today if they’d shut it down in the 80s because it didn’t make enough money to cover its own costs…
Tweet media one
5
14
161
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Zona Bananera (literally "Banana Zone") in Columbia is a nice illustration of how banana leaves happen to reflect a TON of energy to C-band SAR satellites making banana plantations pop out super brightly. Courtesy of Microsoft Planetary Computer
Tweet media one
6
20
162
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
Right now I only have one goal: make tasking satellite imagery as easy as booking a hotel room.
22
5
162
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
Some big personal news: today is my last day at @azavea . The last five years have been an incredibly fun and rewarding chapter in my life, and I'll miss my colleagues there dearly (especially @rcheetham , who remains the most important mentor in my life).
25
5
161
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
If you're not sick of me flooding your feed yet, I have some personal news that I'm quite proud of. Umbra recently promoted me to a leadership position, which I am extremely grateful for. This is a special company and a special mission.
@umbraspace
Umbra
3 years
Joe Morrison told the world that satellite imagery companies weren’t giving customers what they needed or wanted. So we put him in charge of giving *OUR* customers what they want. Meet @mouthofmorrison
Tweet media one
2
1
50
22
0
163
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
Not only has no one normal ever heard of Esri, they’ve never heard of AWS. We live in a bubble.
23
8
161
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 months
Perks of releasing open data - interesting people do interesting things with it. Yesterday, a data scientist in Boston shared that he had starting to poke around our data and a professor in Munich responds with a deep-learning derived DEM from that same single image.
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
7
16
160
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
8 months
@JayCuda Hell yeah
0
0
160
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Umbra's got some big news: thanks to a $4.5M award from DARPA, we're going to launch our first tandem pair of satellites later this year. With their support, bistatic collection is going to step out of the research domain into full commercialization.
2
25
154
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 months
Visiting family, trying not to talk about synthetic aperture radar
Tweet media one
6
9
153
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
To all the grad students working on yet another SAR ship detection model - I just saw someone in Slack use Meta’s new “Segment Anything” model on a port and it found all the ships, plus segmented the water from land. Stop now. I repeat, stop now. It’s time to reevaluate.
14
20
154
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
8 months
Some have speculated the tires are protection against drone-powered sabotage, but they also appear to have the effect of changing the radar signature in SAR and making them *much* brighter
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
@WarMonitors
War Monitor
8 months
⚡️For some reason, Russia is putting what looks like tires on top of bombers at numerous airbases
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
277
152
2K
9
27
150
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
What's the most controversial opinion you can come up with about the geospatial industry? Mine is probably that old CartoDB was the pinnacle of the field and it's actually all been downhill from there.
75
18
151
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
California has unrealistic hillshading
Tweet media one
10
2
148
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Thoughts on the coming relay constellation revolution—in Part I, I give some background about how things work today. Part II, dropping soon, will go into more detail on my opinions on how the new normal of instantaneous comms in space will shake things up.
18
34
149
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
I’ve heard from a few people today about the layoffs at Mapbox. Sad, sad day. If you are actively hiring software engineers, please respond to this tweet and give affected people a sense of why it might be a fit for their skills and interesests.
36
36
151
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
4 years
Uodated the “How to find recent satellite imagery” blog post with a couple new sources and a much-improved graphic thanks to @AlexandraLash
Tweet media one
3
37
150
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
3 years
The last 30 years of commercial Earth observation were all about mapping. The next 30 are going to be all about monitoring.
11
24
143
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
1 year
Another memorable day at work - today we released sample data for the first time. I took the opportunity to indulge in a little nostalgia and reflect on how lucky I am to be along for the ride
7
22
143
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
9 months
The Air Force just awarded us a $1.2M grant for systematically identifying moving objects in our data and offering that as a new product. Every SAR "image" is really more like a time series video under the hood. At our resolution, you can actually see vehicles moving.
Tweet media one
8
12
144
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
2 years
I hope Mapbox and Descartes Labs alumni will be like the PayPal mafia for the geospatial industry over the next couple of decades. So many ABSURDLY talented people who created some truly special products. Those folks can build just about anything they put their mind to.
8
11
142
@mouthofmorrison
Joe Morrison
10 months
🛰️ Twitter tasks satellites 🛰️ Reply here with coordinates for a location of interest and your best pitch for why you want a 50cm SAR image of it. And I’ll task the most-liked response this afternoon.
60
29
143