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‘The foundation of future AI systems for monitoring forests, crops, and climate change will be built upon the open-source model.’
NASA has estimated that its Earth science missions will produce approximately 250,000 terabytes of data in 2024. To effectively analyze this massive amount of raw satellite data, IBM, HuggingFace, and NASA have joined forces to develop an open-source geospatial foundation model. This model will serve as the basis for a new generation of climate and Earth science artificial intelligence systems capable of monitoring deforestation, predicting crop yields, and tracking greenhouse gas emissions.
In this collaborative project, IBM utilized its recently-released Watsonx.ai to create the foundational model. The model was trained using one year’s worth of NASA’s Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS). This data is collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites, which are designed to capture high-resolution optical imagery over land and coastal regions in 13 spectral bands.
HuggingFace, on the other hand, is hosting the model on its open-source AI platform. By fine-tuning the model with labeled data for flood and burn scar mapping, the team managed to improve its performance by 15% compared to the current state-of-the-art models, while using only half the amount of data.
“The essential role of open-source technologies to accelerate critical areas of discovery such as climate change has never been clearer,” said Sriram Raghavan, VP of IBM Research AI. He added, “By combining IBM’s foundation model efforts aimed at creating flexible, reusable AI systems with NASA’s repository of Earth-satellite data, and making it available on the leading open-source AI platform, Hugging Face, we can leverage the power of collaboration to implement faster and more impactful solutions that will improve our planet.”
Source: NASA estimates
Read more: open-source geospatial foundation model
Related: Watsonx.ai, Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS), ESA’s pair of Sentinel-2 satellites, HuggingFace