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Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

louisquissetlabs.com

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Re: Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

#11

Post by skygazer »

This tool looks very interesting, and seems to work well, but being utterly unfamiliar with geospatial vector embeddings, their purpose or use, I had no idea what I was looking at, or why.

It seems to show areas of similarity, within a radius of a central query location, with regard to (perhaps) vegetation cover (e.g., forests, grasslands, wetlands), artificial surfaces (e.g., urban areas, roads), agricultural areas, water bodies, etc, overlayed on Google Maps, and allows exporting of the embeddings for lat/lons as cvs. It looks like land features for hexagonal grid areas have been turned into points in a 15 dimensional space, and some sort of nearest-neighbor search is done to return most similar other grid areas within the larger area. It does indeed seem accurate in my area!

I'm not sure what this would be useful for, but I'm assuming urban planning, real estate, agriculture or conservation? I know I'm not the target audience, but more info or ideas would be fascinating.

Re: Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

#13

Post by [deleted] »

skygazer wrote: post #11

This tool looks very interesting, and seems to work well, but being utterly unfamiliar with geospatial vector embeddings, their purpose or use, I had no idea what I was looking at, or why. It seems to show areas of similarity, within a radius of a central query location, with regard to (perhaps) vegetation cover (e.g., forests, grasslands, wetlands), artificial surfaces (e.g., urban areas, roads), agricultural areas,…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

#16

Post by potatoman22 »

wyldfire wrote: post #7
fnordpiglet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what I’m looking at? I don’t know how to interpret the hex tiles :-)

I'm pretty sure I'm not the intended audience but I also have no idea what this is used for. Surveying? Real estate tycoons? Oil & gas exploration?

It's a way to encode land to make predictions of it. E.g. is the land arable, is it rural, how similar is it to X, etc. Embeddings help encode data in formats more usable by ML models.

Re: Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

#17

Post by wyldfire »

potatoman22 wrote: post #16
wyldfire wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the intended audience but I also have no idea what this is used for. Surveying? Real estate tycoons? Oil & gas exploration?

It's a way to encode land to make predictions of it. E.g. is the land arable, is it rural, how similar is it to X, etc. Embeddings help encode data in formats more usable by ML models.

Sure, I get that part -- but then how do people use the predictions?

Re: Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

#19

Post by foota »

wyldfire wrote: post #17
potatoman22 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a way to encode land to make predictions of it. E.g. is the land arable, is it rural, how similar is it to X, etc. Embeddings help encode data in formats more usable by ML models.

Sure, I get that part -- but then how do people use the predictions?

The embeddings are used by algorithms, not people, generally. You could ask something like "what's the most similar place to X within Y", and it would using the embeddings (which cover a variety of facts) to calculate answer. An embedding is an N dimensional vector (where the dimensions may or may not be meaningful to us), and similarity can be implemented by looking at the similarity between vectors.

Re: Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

#20

Post by breckenedge »

tartakovsky wrote: post #6
fnordpiglet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what I’m looking at? I don’t know how to interpret the hex tiles :-)

Great question. A legend or brief description of the underlying logic / heuristic would be helpful.

The heuristic is likely the result of an ML algorithm, so the underlying logic may not make much sense to us.
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