NASA, IBM team up to spur new discoveries about Earth

NASA and IBM have collaborated to develop artificial intelligence (AI) based models that will make it easier to mine vast datasets to advance scientific knowledge about Earth, and help the world to adapt to a changing environment.

The joint work will apply AI foundation model technology to NASA's Earth-observing satellite data for the first time, NASA said in a statement. Foundation models are types of AI models that are trained on a broad set of unlabelled data, can be used for different tasks, and can apply information about one situation to another. "The beauty of foundation models is they can potentially be used for many downstream applications," said Rahul Ramachandran, a senior research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Building these foundation models cannot be tackled by small teams; you need teams across different organisations to bring their different perspectives, resources, and skill sets," Ramachandran said in a statement. One project will train an IBM geospatial intelligence foundation model on NASA's Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset, a record of land cover and land use changes captured by Earth-orbiting satellites, the statement said.