Since the burning of the Kuwaiti oil wells during the Arabian Gulf War, Iraqi Kurdistan has suffered from poor air quality. In this talk, Christina Last will present an end-to-end geospatial pipeline open-geo-engine (https://github.com/AQ-AI/open-geo-engine), used to investigate the human exposure to industrial pollution from flaring in Kurdistan, Iraq. The talk will demonstrate how this geospatial data pipeline is used to acquire, filter and preprocess, open geospatial information from OpenStreetMap and Google Earth Engine. Attendees will understand how to use the OSM Open API to query specific geolocations worldwide and pull a variety of satellite data from Earth Engine, for modelling and analysis.

Christina Last is a Research Data Scientist in the Research Engineering Group (https://www.turing.ac.uk/research-engineering) at the Alan Turing Institute (The UK’s AI Institute), where she specialises in building machine learning solutions to understand our built environment. Her work(https://christinalast.com/) bridges geospatial intelligence and science. Christina has collaborated with a number of city governments and international organizations on software, data science, and strategic planning, in both developed and rapidly developing urban environments in the US (https://www.ny.gov/programs/reimagine-canals-initiative), the UK(https://christinalast.com/.../community-conversations.html), and Vietnam(https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12505). She has led various international research projects, most recently as a Senior Data Scientist collaborating with UNICEF to model air pollution during COVID-19 lockdowns using machine learning.

The event is organized by DataFest Tbilisi, Google Developers Group (GDG) Tbilisi and ForSet. The partners are Bank of Georgia and Grant Thornton