IBM (NYSE: IBM) is collaborating with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center on a new initiative that will use the Armonk-based company’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology to discover new insights in NASA’s massive trove of Earth and geospatial science data.
As part of this collaboration, AI foundation model technology will be used with NASA’s Earth-observing satellite data for the first time. 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, while another output is expected to be an easily searchable corpus of Earth science literature culled from nearly 300,000 articles. Other potential IBM-NASA joint projects in this agreement include constructing a foundation model for weather and climate prediction using MERRA-2, a dataset of atmospheric observations.
“Foundation models have proven successful in natural language processing, and it’s time to expand that to new domains and modalities important for business and society,” said Raghu Ganti, principal researcher at IBM. “Applying foundation models to geospatial, event-sequence, time-series, and other non-language factors within Earth science data could make enormously valuable insights and information suddenly available to a much wider group of researchers, businesses, and citizens. Ultimately, it could facilitate a larger number of people working on some of our most pressing climate issues.”
