BlackSky Technology Inc. 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 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 over 120 thousand distinct sites after having analyzed five years of historic broad area satellite imagery from government and commercial sources.