Simon Cope Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Washington, United States

Leading a Strategic R&D group of approx. 30 engineers across 4 teams with dedicated focus on opportunities to acquire, develop, and integrate advanced technological capabilities in geospatial informatics that create differentiated value and enhance EagleView's extensive and valuable portfolio of intellectual property.This group is working on state of the art solutions across the entire geospatial and derived insights value ecosystems to demonstrate value and de-risk key strategic product and technology decisions across the business and demonstrate thought leadership by example. Utilizing a broad range of cutting edge technologies including in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, SfM, Photogrammetry and Computational Geometry, with a current focus on state of the art Novel View Synthesis methods including NeRF, Gaussian Splatting and Plenoxels, the team is tacking the unique challenges faced with geospatial imagery and derived insights at mass scale.

Seattle, Washington, United States

Head of Engineering for EagleView's imagery business. This was an interim position during heavy restructuring of EagleView to better align resources and outcomes with both existing customer segments and clearly identified future strategic markets, products and technology initiatives. This engineering group was responsible for the entire imagery technology chain from raw unprocessed imagery and metadata through to delivery of fully processed products. Multiple engineering teams across 3 continents, ongoing technology stack transition and optimization, significant AWS budget responsibility, architecting and engineering of efficient lean solutions, delivering on aggressive product roadmaps with tight timeframes, and change agent to bring the business along on the strategic journey.

Seattle, Washington, United States

Post acquisition of Spookfish by EagleView I relocated to Seattle, Washington to oversee the entire imagery architecture and future strategic direction to ensure maximum value for EagleView from the acquisition. During this period I was directly responsible for re-architecting the entire backend image archive to significantly reduce operating costs, increase performance and greatly expand capabilities, developed a new technology platform for browser based photogrammetric measurement tooling, and built an efficient and robust Aerial Triangulation/Bundle Adjustment solution for UHR drone imagery of built structures that formed the foundation for the EagleView Assess product.

Perth, Australia

Creating the worlds most productive, cost effective, high resolution aerial camera systems, supporting infrastructure and AI powered analytics.By leveraging advanced in imaging sensors, optics, optomechanical systems, precision control systems, high density storage, edge compute, and state of the art machine learning, computer vision and photogrammetry techniques, we achieved orders of magnitude improvements over contemporary systems in the market. These technological breakthroughs not only enabled the potential for continental capture at high resolution, they also enabled repeat capture of economically dense areas at high frequency at moderate costs and rapid capture timeframes, something that had eluded the broader industry for decades. Several international patents were obtained across camera system technologies, flight path optimization, processing sophisticated camera models and boresight calibration of dynamic systems. The technology was quickly recognized as industry leading by international partners on multiple continents with exclusive rights licensed in the USA to EagleView Technologies and significant licensing revenues accrued, and who subsequently acquired the company outright in 2018 in recognition of the competitive edge.I was personally a co-inventor on multiple patents, responsible for all internal and external engineering resources, built out multiple high performance engineering teams, public listed entity board member, assisted with integrating the technology with licensees, worked with potential partners to develop innovative product and technology concepts based on our core IP, involved in all fund raising rounds from initial seed round to final public market raise and eventual sale of the company to EagleView. Post acquisition I have also been involved in integrating and expanding the core technologies inside EagleView to maximize realized value.

Perth, Australia

Applying a vast practical knowledge base I consulted and contracted for several organizations including WA Department of Environment and Conservation, New South Wales Land and Property Information, Landgate WA, Ajilon Consulting and a number of early stage startups. Highlight outcomes were facilitating the transformation of Landgate's legacy proprietary and legally mandated land title system to a multi-tenant cloud based solution useable across a wide domain of Torrens Title jurisdictions and transitioning Landgate's proprietary spatial databases as a set of integrated cloud based services.

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Multi-faceted role that involved developing prototype aerial camera system hardware and software through to highly scalable robust commercial operations with a rapidly growing subscription revenue base where customers could easily access regularly updated, highly detailed maps via highly performant web services, a market defining product and technology breakthrough at the time. This role required overall management of production and engineering functions including external contract aviation engineering resources to achieve certification targets, product enhancements and roadmaps, driving business development activities, product and technology strategy, cost optimization, corporate governance activities via board membership, high performance team building and industry thought leadership. The technology and product innovation and scalable systems created during my tenure created the solid foundation than enabled nearmap to become a tech unicorn and ultimately be acquired by a private equity firm.

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Primarily an R&D role with a focus on enhancing the companies image compression, processing and serving technologies, along with implementation of some advanced performance optimization techniques. Much of the year was also spent assisting with integration planning between the different products erdas had acquired.

Perth, Australia

fotoMuse was a social media photo sharing site similar to flickr developed utilizing patented image compression and serving technologies to provide a significant cost reduction over the competition in the market at the time. In 2005 2.5TB of storage cost approximately $18,500, the image compression technology as applied in the fotoMuse solution resulted in a 75% cost reduction. The website was also an early example of a responsive UI, and heavily leveraged web services and dynamic rendering techniques in an era of click-and-reload websites. A commercial image gallery version of the technology was license to a Victoria Government agency in Australia. It was subsequently acquired outright by Leica in 2007, with some of the IP developed later used in other products.

As Chief Software Architect I was responsible for the Overall architecture for desktop, server and toolkits, product enhancement and performance optimization, ECW and JPEG2000 toolkits. I am also co-inventor and patent holder for Image Web Server (ECWP). During my tenure I worked on and was responsible in management roles for many projects including ERMapper script language, 3D, cross platform support, realtime color transformation and adjustment code, 64bit and large-file support, multi-threading, Algorithm process engine enhancements, Image Web Server, ECW v3 and v4 toolkits, entire JPEG2000 implementation.ER Mapper was well ahead of it's time with the concepts of on the fly image processing using Algorithms and Virtual Datasets, techniques which are today commonly known as Graph based processing - specifically Directed Acyclic Graphs aka DAGs which are now fundamental to frameworks such as TensorFlow. The product also embodied and early version of what is now known as JIT (Just In Time) Compilation - Algorithm formulas written in a custom functional language would be emitted on the fly into ANSI C code, compiled and dynamically linked into the running application to accelerate performance. The product also incorporated a scripting language to allow codification and automation of common tasks, something that is commonplace today. ER Mapper was so advanced that it is still available for purchase from Hexagon despite being over 35 years old, a testament to both the underlying technologies and quality of implementation.