Carlos Vivar Ríos
Hi! I'm Carlos, a Biologist and Data Engineer with experience spanning genomics, microscopy and satellite multidimensional image analysis, cellular biology modelling, and web development. I currently work as a Senior Data Engineer at the Swiss Data Science Center at EPFL, where I focus on building tools and pipelines for scientific data. I'm passionate about learning across disciplines and am a frequent hackathon participant; there's nothing better than building something unexpected with extraordinary people in 48 hours.
Check out my GH -> github.com/caviri
Sessions
Monitoring forest cover change, wildfire risk, and post-fire recovery demands integrating heterogeneous data sources (i.e. satellite imagery, field observations, weather feeds, and alert systems) into a shared operational picture. Yet existing tools force a choice: either powerful but expensive proprietary platforms, or open-source solutions that require significant server infrastructure and maintenance.
This workshop introduces Driades, an open-source, self-hosted geospatial tool developed by h4ck1ng.science that runs entirely in the browser with no backend server. By leveraging cloud-native formats (Zarr, GeoParquet, and PMTiles among others) served directly from S3-compatible object storage, Driades enables users to visualise satellite imagery, execute spatial SQL queries via WASM, and run basic transformations using WebGPU. Heavy computational tasks (such as machine learning inference for burn scar detection) can be offloaded to remote APIs, keeping the client lightweight while providing access to geospatial foundation models hosted on model registries like Hugging Face.
Driades aims to reduce the friction of accessing and sharing geospatial data, providing non-experts with a simple interface to explore, annotate, and distribute interactive results among collaborators without requiring specialised infrastructure.