Episode 1: Seble Alemu

[MUSIC] Welcome to Spatial Signals. It's a podcast about remote sensing and geographic information systems, but more importantly, the people behind it. I'm your co-host, Dr. Brad Shelato, and with me today is your other co-host coming to us from his pirate radio station, where he is not encountering anything spooky whatsoever at the Devil's Canyon Nature Trail between Monichello and Blending. Mr. Chris McGinty, Chris, how is Utah treating you today? Utah is good, but I got to head off the Utahns that might be listening to this and tell you it's Monicello. We don't want anybody riding over mispronunciation of Utah names. I mean, it's a rough state. Especially anything spooky that might be happening in the whole of Monticello. Exactly. I'm doing good. How are you today, Brad? Spring is finally here. We have finally emerged from the Mordor-like state that we have been in for I'm not sure how long, and we're actually seeing that strange solar disk in the sky once again. It sort of confuses me, haven't seen it in a while, but there it is. Doesn't oh, hi, I'll just go from cold to hot, and then that's it. Pretty much. We just sort of go into perpetual gloom for several months, and then we emerge again into the sun. Vampires all have to migrate somewhere else during that time. Oh, great. They got to go north. So for those of you just joining us, this podcast is sponsored by America View, the National Geospatial and Remote Sensing Network dedicated to empowering Earth observation. Now, America View has been around since 2003. It has grown from a program just within the state of Ohio to a network of programs that stretch across the United States, working with remote sensing, GIS and geospatial technologies in all forms of outreach research and education. But before I introduce today's guest, let me kick things back to Chris there at where he is between Monticello and Blanding for a little bit of the news. I'm glad you got that right. You'll be happy that you don't have much Utahans chasing around. Well, Brad, today I wanted to, we're getting back into at least in the West of the fire season as it will be underway if it hadn't already gotten there. In 2025, we know we had a lot of pretty significant fires, especially in California and a number of other places. And so in my cruising of the internet and all things remote sensing, Earth observation, geospatial, I came across a pretty cool project that I didn't know of, but I should have known of because Google has Earth hands and or digits in all things, I suppose. And what that is, Brad, is actually, Google is partnered with the Earth Fire Alliance and a satellite company called Moonspace. And they're launching a constellation of about 50 satellites that are going to be designed to detect wildfires. And so, you know, Brad, there's a lot of sensors out there that detect wildfires. There's a lot of federal government agencies that have sensors up, but these are, this is a private venture and this is going to be a constellation of 50. And what's unique about this is they're going to be able to find or identify or locate hot spots fires, if you will, that are less than about 10 meters across. So that's like an order of magnitude better than some of the other sensors out there. So this whole, you know, Earth Fire Alliance and all the data coming off of these sensors is going to be ported into Google. Google is going to be distributing that data via Google Earth Engine. In fact, there's already some early data out there. They don't have all 50 satellites up yet. But it is really a neat project that really shows how, you know, this is the next generation of EO Earth observation tech that's becoming, you know, faster, smarter, gives more information, more focused information on some of these key topics like wildfires. But there's other constellations that are going up to look at other things. So just, you know, a little bit of commercial and private EO news there, Brad, that I think is really cool. But what's awesome is that Google have a lot of this data available on the Google Earth Engine platform for people look at. That's a very cool, especially when we're used to seeing, you know, 100 meter resolution stuff from Landsat Thurough bands or one kilometer from Modus or something similar to that for tracking wildfires. And especially having that huge constellation of satellites out there, that's pretty cool. Every 20 minutes, I should have mentioned that every 20 minutes the entire Earth, at least the land forms will be, will be imaged for wildfire. Wow, which is something pretty cool. It is. So there's your news for the day. Sounds great. Well, it is my pleasure to introduce today's special guest, who is Dr. Keshif Mahmoud, who is an assistant professor in the Kimball School of Geosciences at Midwestern State University in Texas, where he leads their remote sensing and modeling lab. Now, before joining Midwestern State in fall of 2022, he was a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Geography at Indiana University. And before that, before he moved to the United States in 2019, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Western Sydney University in Australia. Keshif received his PhD from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and he completed his master's and his bachelor's from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Daca, Bangladesh. Now, in addition to his role at Texas, he also holds an appointment as an adjunct senior lecturer at the School of Biological and Earth and Environmental Science at the School of, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the co-PI for Texas view. He's been organizing the El Paso Science Festival and collaboration from America, viewing Louisiana. He's a member of the Landsat Advisory Group and all kinds of other really cool stuff that we're going to be talking about today. So welcome to the show, Keshif. Thank you for inviting me. It's my pleasure to be here, to share my stories. Well, we really appreciate it. Bill will take the time to join us here today. We've got a lot of cool stuff to talk about. But the first thing that we always bring up is that when you draw a zero degree line of latitude on a map and you draw a zero degree line of longitude on a map, where those two lines meet is going to be the origin of the map or the starting point or that zero zero point of the map. So our first question is, what is your zero zero point? What's your starting point? How all the things you could have gone into? How did it end up being GIS promote sensing? Yeah, let's start with this interesting story. In my life, particularly for my education and professional career, I always write the waves which brought me finally here. Okay. I'm originally from a South Asian country Bangladesh where I grew up. I completed my bachelor and master's in civil engineering. I enjoyed the way some of my professors, by the way, not all, taught me the complicated concepts of engineering. And I decided to become an instructor, yeah, myself after I graduated. So as planned, I started looking for opportunities and started my professional career as a lecturer and started teaching civil engineering courses, very basic ones, first in two different universities in Bangladesh. After like four years of teaching, I was also engaged with some sort of small research projects with my faculty members and students as well. So I loved both teaching and research during those years. And then finally decided I need to pursue my PhD to become a professor. So I started exploring opportunities. When I started choosing the country for my graduate school, Australia was in the top of my list. And the reason is I had a desire to finally find a faculty position in Australia and settle down with my family in Australia after my PhD, which eventually didn't happen anyway, which you can see. So as planned, yeah, I applied for a few Australian schools and luckily got multiple scholarship offers. And then it came down to choose the best school and the project for my PhD, right? So I picked UNSW because of its ranking, obviously, but at the same time, my potential supervisor offered me a cool project to work with with some additional top-up scholarship. So who doesn't want more money, right? Oh, yeah. So I flew with the waves and choose UNSW. So during my PhD, I started working in a project using remote sensing lighter inside a Western Australian cave. So the idea of the project was to map the cave ceiling features, which are called selectites, and use their size and shape their morphology and spatial distribution within the cave to understand how water flow paths from the surface to the cave ceiling. Now, the formation of those cave ceiling features, selectites, those are driven by water flow from the surface to the cave, right? So their size, their shape, their spatial distribution, all these provide information about the quantity of the water flow as well as quality of the water. So that was my introduction to remote sensing while being a graduate student at UNSW Australia. After I finished my PhD from UNSW, I got an offer from Western Sydney University for a postdoc position, and that's because of my expertise with lighter. However, I had to take the challenge to shift my research interest from hydrogeology to test gel carbon cycle. So I once again, I went with the waves and took the challenge because I wanted to stay in Australia for a while to look for faculty positions. So I worked on a project to utilize the lighter point clouds to estimate above ground biomass from a forest carbon dioxide enrichment experiment at West End Sydney. The experiment is running since 2012 still running and has six large six 30 meter 30 meter circular plots among those six three being ambient like natural condition and then three being in elevated carbon dioxide with the predicted carbon dioxide concentration of 2050 to see how how the native Australian trees particularly euclipters are dealing with the extra carbon dioxide. So that's the that's the that's the that's the massive face experiment that we have many across the entire world. So the project involves lighter scan of all those native euclipters trees within those six plots and then I apply a tree segmentation algorithm and geometric modeling to quantify the total carbon stored in those trees for both ambient and elevated carbon dioxide plots. So these are the main two projects which actually drove me essentially to remote sensing and GIS fields. And then yeah after three issues I realized that the academic job opportunity is extremely limited and as well as competitive in Australia. And I wasn't ready to sacrifice my ambition to be a university professor and join industry. So I decided to move to the US. So the story started from there in the US. I first joined Indiana University as a postdoc before coming to Midwestern State University in Texas as an assistant professor in Kimberley School of Geo Sciences. Now I'm teaching introductory GIS. I'm teaching graduate GIS. I'm also teaching geospatial programming in the department. So I'm continuing my research projects as well in line with my previous experiences. So I have a terrestrial lighter in my lab. I do have a drone based lighter as well in my lab. So we are using those tools playing with those tools to to collect data from South Central Texas Gaves, and also from North Texas vegetation. To understand both South-South-West-West Water Floors and digital carbon storage. - That's very cool, especially that the waves have taken you from Bangladesh to Australia, then to the US, in Indiana, and finally now ending up in Texas. That's quite the journey there, Kesheev. - Oh yeah. (laughing) - So setting up shop there in Texas, and getting things set up more with LIDAR expertise, what brought you in connection with America view? - Ha, yeah, I still remember the day when I was actually attending AGU back in 2021. I got a phone call from Midwestern State University with the offer to join in fall of 2022. So like I had to, I had a long wait of eight months. And during that time, I started email conversation with my MSU faculty, yeah, future faculty. And then Dr. Rebecca Dodge, who is an emeritus professor at Midwestern State, one of the board members of America view, and also the PI of Texas view. So she emailed me with this great opportunity to be engaged with America view and Texas view. So as usual, I said yes straight away. So in the first year, I was involved with my students with the mini grants reported by Texas view. I and my students really enjoyed working on those small projects related to remote sensing GIS. Then in the second year, I became the COPI for the Texas view grant and heavily engaged with America view. I attended the annual meeting in 2024, really enjoyed the time during those days. As quiet decided to offer more time, more of my time to America view for the next year. And then I took the opportunity to help the organizing El Paso Science Festival this year with a couple of my grad students as well. So we were part of the team coordinated by Texas view, America view and Louisiana view, to participate in that festival. The festival reached more than 14,000 registered participants from El Paso and also from southern New Mexico. So we set up eight booths for all ages of people. There was satellite image puzzles, thermal activity, kite coloring for the kids, spin art for the kids. We had a stream table. I had my lighter with me. So I showed how lighter works, book reading for the kids and so on. So I and two of my grad students, we drove from, which it falls to El Paso, nine hours drive, yeah, to operate three of the booths in the festival. The event was for two entire days during a weekend and it was so busy and crowded that there wasn't even a break to have our lunch during that event. But we were really, really impressed because the event was so successful and we really enjoyed seeing the excitement and the enthusiasm of the kids, particularly the kids, to learn more about science in general and also remote sensing and GIS. And then the smile in their parents face, that's something to remember forever, yeah. So yeah, that's how America brought, I started connecting with America view. America view also brought me some opportunity, definitely, particularly first, become a member of Lancet Advisory Group, the LAC, which is a subcommittee sponsored by National Geospatial Advisory Committee in GAC, who are the main advisory committee for the federal geographic data committee. We just finished our first report and submitted to NGAC for review. The report actually addresses the strategic opportunities, challenges and future pathways for the USGS National Land Imaging Program to expand its impact and leadership in the global geospatial ecosystem. I'm also an editor for America View Journal of Art of the Patient and Geospatial Applications. And we are in the process to publish our first, our inaugural issue this month, hopefully. One of my grad students submitted a manuscript in the first issue and it's been accepted for publication in this first issue. So we're really happy that we were able to contribute. I'm also in the editorial panel for MDPI Journal of Remote Sensing and currently managing a spatial issue on remote sensing and GIS for natural hazard mitigation and the resilience. - Kashiha, you've been incredibly busy, and especially a lot of work with America View. I kind of want to step back and welcome, I'm going to come back to your Texas view work here in a minute, especially I'll pass. So I can testify to the fact that that is one of the busiest times I've ever been is the time that I went to two years ago to help with the science festival. And you do your right, you do not have a time to do anything except-- - Oh, yeah. - But it's great, like you said, just to see the smiles and see the students learning. - Yeah, it was. - Yeah, but so one, I ask a little bit about some of the work that you're doing in the remote sensing and modeling lab that you lead, correct? And some of the work that you're doing within the university and what are you working on? What are your students working on? - Yeah, the remote sensing jazz thing started during my PhD when I was using the lighter inside the cave and presented the quantitative analyses of those morphology and spatial distribution in the-- using those cave ceiling features. The goal was to identify the subsurface water flow processes and finally quantify groundwater research. Then during the postdoc at Wistensin University, I was using the limousensin lighter to quantify the carbon stored in those forest trees. Later on in the-- at Indiana University, I use a data assimilation framework. I haven't used that much of remote sensing products during that period. However, the goal was to understand the big celestial models, how they work and how can we improve those model by optimizing parameters for the Southwest semi-arid ecosystem, Southwest-- the US semi-arid ecosystem because the climate is very different, the vegetation is significantly different compared to tropical, subtropical regions. So the goal was to improve the model so we can have better climate change prediction influence on vegetation distribution and carbon storage. My current research is mainly focused on application of remote sensing and modeling to mainly characterize art surface and subsurface features. By alongside with my grad and undergrad students, we are using wide area of remote sensing observation now. We are using ground-based lighter. We are using drone-mounted lighter as well. And we are now investigating some satellite remote sensing products as well to map art surface and subsurface features. The actual aim is to characterize the properties of the systems, understand how the changes happening in hydrology, groundwater, and also in ecosystem and forestry. And definitely, so yeah, talking about Moria, I think there is no brainer that groundwater is crucial. because groundwater accounts for more than 95% of freshwater, which is definitely essential for us and the economic development worldwide. Many of these groundwater resources are actually hosted within the cast environments. So these are the landscape formed by the dissolution of soluble rocks, mainly limestone, dolomites and things like that. So these cast aquifers are accounting for around 25% of worlds, water, need and 40% in the US groundwater resource. So it's a great resource for us. But the problem with these is these aquifers are highly vulnerable to contamination because of the presence of large voids, fractures, caves in this system. So that's why our aim in these projects to utilize the lighter and drip bloggers in the cave to see how we can understand better these valuable, what vulnerable assets and examine the heterogeneous properties of a car's system. - Well, that's impressive. I am curious though. So you're doing all this and using all sorts of different modalities to record your data. I'm interested in maybe our listeners also would like to know, as you've been doing this and you say you ride the waves, which is awesome to take you where you're going. But there's some new waves and technology and data processing and analysis. And I'm curious what are some of those, what do you see some of these new methods coming out? How are they impacting what you're doing? And where do you see this, what you're doing? How do you see it evolving over the next five or 10 years? - Yeah, to give an example of that, I can talk about the other project we are working on. So using lighter to see the vegetation growth, the carbon stored in the trees, it's been evolving very fast over the last few years. Back in my days in Western City University in 2019, 2020-ish, we, so I tried an algorithm which where you have the point cloud for the entire forest plot with like 30, 40 large trees. And then you have to manually extract each of the point cloud of the trees. And then you can put that point cloud for each individual tree in the model and then you get a volume of your stem branches. And from there you can have an idea of how much carbon is stored, just converting the volume to density to mass. Now that, yeah, in the last year, I find a new algorithm which automatically does that tree segmentation for us. So, yeah, previously I'm doing that manual extraction was like time consuming definitely and also irona. So now we have these tools improving over days and years. So it makes things easy for us. Once we have the data collected, the lighter instruments itself having significant improvement over the years. So I remember back in 2012, when I used the first lighter, how big it was. And the data quality. And now it's like you can have it almost in your pocket, the test your lighter. And the data quality improved significantly since then also the time required. So back then I had to like click the button and then wait for like five to 10 minutes to have one scan, 360 degree scan. And now it does it within like two minutes. So everything improved, everything improved the instrument itself having better data quality, having better data processing, the software is also improved back then. I still remember the software with the lighter. I had to manually connect all the individual scans together to get the whole point out. And now I put, I just create a project and I do all scans like 50 scans. And then the software does it for me to combine all those together and give me one point cloud with all those 50 point clouds. But yeah, still it's a bit tricky when we were inside the cave because there are not not many targets for the software. It looks very similar, right? But when we're outside with the trees, that worked really well. Though we had to do a little bit of tweaks here and there to adjust the rotation of the scans. But it is now far less extensive compared to early days in like 2010s. So the advancement of the technology has not only been great for faster data processing, but it doesn't weigh as much to pack around, which is, that's always nice. So something else that you mentioned a few minutes ago when Brad was asking some questions was your time with the lag. And this is kind of, I was saying new, but you haven't been on the lag for the Landsat Advisory Group for too long. And I'm really interested for those who might be like to know about it. Maybe you could explain a little bit about what the lag is and what your role is kind of providing advice and input and your expertise to help guide national land imaging and Landsat. And maybe you could talk a little bit about what you guys have been working on. So we do have every month, we have Zoom meetings. So we started with the project to first set up that report to address the opportunities and challenges for the USGS and allow the National Land Imaging Program. So we compile the report for the NGAC, the larger committee, which is going to then forward that to federal geographic data committee. So we are actually trying to connect the science with the policy. So we are trying to find the data, how the Landsat is used in different fields, how the Landsat products are improving over time and why do we need even better resolution, spatially and temporally for the future. So that was the goal in the report to bring the science to the policy maker. So they can decide, take the policy, helping the science behind that. Sure. I think that's really important because there's a lot of policy makers that may not understand the incredible impacts behind the science and various things going on. I think that's a really powerful group. And certainly there's not a lot of groups out there that help guide a federal agency like the lag does. So I think that's very impressive. You know, you have your hands and so many things. And your co-I, co-PI for Texas view working with Dr. Rebecca Dodge. And she's chosen a great person to help work in Texas. But I'm curious about your interest. And you've done a lot of K-12 or younger education, providing opportunities for some of these young kids, students to learn about geospatial remote sensing, lidar. And I'm interested in, you know, is that a passion of yours? Do you enjoy it? And do you intend on continuing doing those types of things throughout Texas and wherever your career leads you? Yes, definitely. Yeah. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. I was a kind of at the beginning stage. I wasn't like entirely sure whether I'm going to enjoy that or not. But yeah, I just started. And then I realized, oh, that's pretty cool to see help the community. And also particularly the kids to know more about science. And yeah, definitely our goal is to spread the news about the remote sensing and GIS. But yeah, I really enjoy that. And I'm going to definitely continue doing this. I am engaged with a lot of other community activities and student activities within the university as well. And whenever I get an invitation, if there is a no schedule clash with my other activities, then I always say yes. Well, what other things are you doing in Texas, what Texas view are there other activities, other things going on across the state? You certainly just said you worked within your university and if there's opportunities to do things within your community, but are there other activities? The El Paso Science Festival is certainly one. But other things going on? Mostly those are mainly-- Dr. Rubikov Dodge trying to cover all those things. However, whenever she's here at Wichita Falls, Midwestern State University, I always help her set up last year. She did the art-- the Texas Art Gallery at Midwestern State. So I tried to help her set up the gallery. I was there for her talk. And then there was some sale from those art gallery. And we utilized those money part of Texas view. Grand. So yeah, not too much. Outreach activities mainly driven by Dr. Rubikov Dodge. However, whenever she asks for anything, if I am free during that time, and if it's not too far, I try to-- yeah, I try to go out with her. Not as far as El Paso, anyway. Oh, that was fun. Yeah, that's why-- I'm going to do that. - Next year as well, yeah. - Oh yeah, yeah. For all those in Texas listening, we're planning on another year in El Paso at the Science Festival. So come check out Kishief's setup and everything that Texas view has. That'll be great. Just one other thing before Randall Brad's gonna take it away from me and just a minute. But interested in, you've talked about what you're doing. You've talked about your past projects, your current projects. Are you gonna, you've changed your direction so many times to just to learn new things and are you planning on continuing down your current path or do you see a spot in the future that might provide an opportunity to take off on another path of interest that you could study? - Yeah, that's again, what feature rings me? (laughs) So I'm gonna probably ride the waves once again and take the challenge. But I don't know yet what's gonna happen but the diversity actually brings me here in Texas. They were looking for a faculty who can teach environmental science and also GIS has application in geology and environmental science. And that fits perfectly with my research expertise and that's why probably I'm here. And you never know what feature, yeah, take me to. But yeah, yeah, I'm always up for the challenges. So who can see? - Well, Kashif, unfortunately, I do see by that Monticello made clock on the wall that we are just about out of time. But thank you so much for joining us today. But before you go, we just wanna know where can everybody find you online to learn more about all this cool stuff that you're doing? - Yeah, it's easy to find someone online these days, right? (laughs) So if I'm just Google my name with MSU Texas, I think my MSU profile would come up in the search. And there are links for my personal webpage as well in that page and also the lab page which has more details about our current projects, my grad undergrad research students and also any future opportunities. So I'm just a Google search away from the find out. (laughs) - Sounds great. Well, we'll also make sure that we put some links to all this stuff in the show notes for the non-Google inclined listeners that we have in our audience here. But thank you again, Tushy. This was great. Really appreciate you coming on the show and taking the time today. - No problem. - And Chris, where can everybody find us online? - Thanks Brad, and thanks Tushy for it was great to visit with you. As far as America view goes, hopefully if you're listening to our podcast, you've already subscribed. But if you haven't, you can head on over to Substack and search for spatial signals in America view and you'll find us there. You can subscribe there and then listen through your favorite platform, of course. If you're interested in following us on the various larger social accounts we're at America view and then over YouTube, some great content put together by our America view members. And then of course the America view.org website where there is all sorts of great downloadable information, including educational activities and data and courses. And so head on over there to check out some of the great work that's being done by our membership across the country. - And as always, we'd like to thank our editor, Matt Wozniak for making us sound good. And our theme music comes courtesy of Mr. Matthew Maxwell. And if you are listening to this podcast on a platform that allows you to leave a review, if you could do that, that would be great. We'd really appreciate it. But it also genuinely does assist that great algorithm in the sky to help sort things out and get this show out into the hands of more people. But we'll be back soon with another episode. So until then, I'm Brad Shalato, I'm Chris McGinty. And you keep watching the skies for those spatial signals out there. (upbeat music) (whistling)