I’m thrilled to welcome Ryan to the DevSeed team! Ryan is a Machine Learning Engineer who is passionate about helping organizations make sound decisions that improve environmental outcomes and livelihoods. On day one, he jumped right into scaling our AI-assisted aerial imagery analysis for wildlife conservation in Tanzania, a project funded and supported by Microsoft AI for Earth and Global Wildlife Conservation. Ryan brings extensive experience developing machine learning models to detect land-use and land cover change with satellite imagery, and will help build open object detection workflows for detecting wildlife and other features important to conservation efforts. He is ready to work on scaling machine learning and AI workflows with our partners.

Previously, Ryan was a graduate student in the Water, Vegetation, and Society Lab (WAVES) earning his Masters in Geography from UC Santa Barbara. While there, he created CropMask_RCNN, a project to train state of the art models to predict crop circle boundaries in drylands. Ryan previously worked with the Mapping Africa project, where he worked on mapping smallholder farms in Ghana using PlanetScope imagery to improve agricultural land use planning and food security in the region.

Ryan enjoys learning new things. He is currently learning to play the piano and is an aspiring chess master. He’s also a pizza aficionado, enjoying it at least once a week! When he’s not coding or teaching coding workshops, you can find Ryan outside riding his bike, climbing boulders in the Bay Area, strengthening his mind with strategy games, and practicing jiu-jitsu. We could not be more excited to have him at DevSeed!

Say hi 👋 to Ryan on Twitter and welcome him to the team!