XKDR Newsletter - Issue 27
Economic activity from outer space • Nighttime lights • Climate transition • Trade barriers against China • Consumer credit • Julia • Higher education reforms • MLs and LLMs • Software patents
Exploring economic activity from outer space: A Python notebook for processing and analyzing satellite nighttime lights
Published in REGION, this paper by Ayush Patnaik and Carlos Mendez addresses the underutilization of the nighttime lights (NTL) data. The NTL data serves as a proxy for monitoring economic activity, offering advantages such as higher spatial resolution, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional economic indicators like GDP. However, the lack of accessible methods for processing and analyzing satellite imagery has hindered its widespread adoption.
To bridge this gap, the authors present a user-friendly geocomputational notebook that demonstrates how to process and analyze satellite NTL images effectively. The paper introduces a cloud-based Python environment for visualizing and transforming raster satellite images into tabular data, provides interactive tools for exploring space-time patterns, and describes methods for evaluating NTL data's usefulness in various predictive and analytical contexts. By making NTL data more accessible, this work aims to expand its application in economic analysis.
Read the full paper here.
OP-ED & COMMENTARY
In his column in the Business Standard, Ajay Shah writes on,
Organising the union government for the climate transition, with Akshay Jaitly. They argue that the clean energy transition is one of the biggest problems awaiting attention, because the presence of multiple government departments creates a siloed environment. This hampers the union government’s engagements with state governments as well as the external world. They suggest five areas of work, including - rethinking the list of departments and fusing some together into a single Ministry of Energy, creating a Group of Ministers for the Climate Transition, rethinking energy regulators, and creating a unified Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Energy Transition.
The case for trade barriers against Chinese imports, with Ila Patnaik. They write that China is facing internal economic weakness due to a combination of poor domestic policy and the actions of the advanced economies. There is not enough domestic demand. Until these problems are resolved, the flood of cheap exports from them to India comes with the danger of damaging the organisational capabilities of firms or entire industries. While there has been an overall export growth of 36%, their export growth into India has been 53%. They argue that the solution is establishing non-tariff barriers against Chinese exports and overseas production sites of Chinese firms, for a finite period of time. They also suggest that these protectionist actions should be offset by compensating moves of liberalisation in engagement with all other countries.
VIDEOS AND PODCASTS
New episodes of XKDR’s YouTube series Big Ideas - conversations with some of the leading thinkers of today - are out:
Why rising consumer credit is concerning, with Dr. Harsh Vardhan: Ep 16
Julia: Origins and Potential, with Viral Shah: Ep 17
Need for reforms in higher education, with Yugank Goyal: Ep 18
Need for pedestrian infrastructure in urban planning, with Vikram Aggarwal: Ep 19
New episodes of Ajay Shah’s YouTube show Everything is Everything with Amit Varma are out:
Ajay Shah was a guest on an episode of the podcast “Jack of all knowledge”, hosted by Divyanshu Dembu:
The episode is titled “The Indian journey of knowledge production and XKDR Forum”. They discussed India, its knowledge society and institutional landscape and how knowledge institutions work. They also spoke about XKDR Forum, and how India progresses.
EVENTS
Seminars
We hosted two seminars by Vikram Aggarwal, an engineering lead at Google:
"The new world of ML and LLMs" - There is a lot of excitement and hype around Language Models like Gemini and ChatGPT. This new technology brings a renewed interest in Machine Learning capabilities. This talk was a quick primer on what these models are, how they are trained, what they can do, and what their current limitations are. He spoke about these models within a larger context of problems that can be solved by computers, to see if they are a fundamental shift in computing.
"Software Patents"- Patents are a dark art that few software engineers care to think about. However, they can form a strong Intellectual Property foundation of a firm. He discussed what a patent is, what software patents look like in the US, and a software engineers' perspective on these patents. He concluded with a look into software patents in India.
XKDR Forum is an inter-disciplinary research and policy organisation harnessing knowledge and capabilities across diverse fields of economics, law, public administration, engineering, statistics and science. We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work. Please write them to us here.