BlackSky Technology Inc. (NYSE: BKSY) won a contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to move forward into the third and final phase of the multi-year Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique (SMART) program — Phase III emphasizes the transfer of SMART broad area search technologies into other U.S. government programs.
Focused over large areas of the Earth’s surface, broad area search and discovery techniques help intelligence organizations get a wide-angle, baseline picture of aggregate change over time. For the SMART Program, all participants’ artificial intelligence (AI) change detection tools were deployed and evaluated for performance, cost and scalability within BlackSky’s MLOps (Machine Learning operations) architecture.
With the core technology developed under the SMART program, BlackSky’s AI tools have detected and classified more than two million change observations with a high degree of accuracy of more than 120,000 distinct sites after having analyzed five years of historic broad area satellite imagery from government and commercial sources.
“BlackSky built a high-performance machine learning operations (MLOps) architecture for the SMART program that was originally designed to manage the analysis of one million square kilometers of land,” said Patrick O’Neil, BlackSky chief technology officer. “That foundational technology is now generating value elsewhere on other U.S. government search and discovery efforts, where we are analyzing more than 30 million square kilometers – more than 20 percent – of the Earth’s surface every month. BlackSky is using AI to reshape the broad area search mission with industry-leading speed and economics. We have taken the lessons learned from SMART Phases I and II, folded them back into BlackSky Spectra, and quickly proven these investments can excel in an operational setting.”
BlackSky is a real-time, space-based intelligence company that delivers on-demand, high frequency imagery, analytics, and high-frequency monitoring of the most critical and strategic locations, economic assets, and events in the world. BlackSky owns and operates one of the industry’s most advanced, purpose-built commercial, real-time intelligence system that combines the power of the BlackSky Spectra® tasking and analytics software platform and our proprietary low earth orbit satellite constellation. With BlackSky, customers can see, understand and anticipate changes for a decisive strategic advantage at the tactical edge, and act not just fast, but first. BlackSky is trusted by some of the most demanding U.S. and international government agencies, commercial businesses, and organizations around the world. BlackSky is headquartered in Herndon, VA, and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as BKSY.
