Aleksei Unagaev
I’m a geospatial engineer and Earth observation specialist with a PhD in Earth sciences and 15+ years of experience applying spatial data to real-world problems – from ecological monitoring and agriculture to engineering and transportation industries. For the past several years at AI environmental start-up Deep Planet in London, I’ve been the technical lead on the geospatial and data side of production ML systems.
My interests include R&D and building end-to-end workflows for optimizing automated land cover mapping, ecosystem monitoring, geospatial data reseach and infrastructure organizing with AWS S3 and EC2 at scale. During my career, I have worked with all kinds of EO data of all available scales and modern formats: Landsat, Sentinel-1/2, PlanetScope, WorldView, UAV, DEM, weather data, Sonar imagery, field GNSS data, topographic survey and cartographic materials.
With my role as a geospatial lead at Deep Planet, I’ve set up, customised and validated a geospatial part of ML workflows and models for land cover classification, change detection and agricultural analytics, and coordinated field calibration and validation campaigns to ground-truth model outputs in the USA, Australia, UK, Italy and Kenya.
My primary expertise sits at the intersection of geospatial engineering and applied ML – understanding what satellite data physically represents and what information we can extract from it, designing robust validation, and building pipelines that make models work in practice on messy real-world EO data.
I’ve also published research on the data interpretation and methodological challenges of land cover mapping in data-scarce environments. I mentored junior engineers, helping them to master GIS tools and promoting systematic geospatial thinking at the intersection of domain science and AI.
Currently working on optimization solutions that utilize and combine geodata, AI and ML for global and regional scale environmental monitoring for solving global issues.
Welcome to the fascinating world of geospatial data resources and tools!