Everyday, the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP Satellite mission collects near visible infrared imagery along a Polar orbit. The utility of the data is boundless. Using nighttime imagery, there are potential applications for tracking/quantifing various aspects of life around the globe, from economy to energy use. The key, however, is to process various publicly available data sources into a format that can be 'mashed up'.
Using various pattern detection methods, train and evaluate models against hundreds of county-level, monthly-level statistics to assess the feasibility of monitoring key metrics for near real-time tracking.