IBM has partnered with NASA to gain new findings on Earth’s climate through the power of AI technology. The two organizations will use AI tech developed by IBM together with the large amounts of Earth observation and geospatial data that NASA has available to share. Earth observation is the gathering of information about Earth’s physical, chemical, and biological systems, usually through the use of satellite imaging.
Key Points of NASA and IBM Partners to Build AI Foundation Models to Advance Climate Science
- IBM informed that the goal of the partnership is to provide an easier way for researchers to analyze and draw insights from these large data sets.
- The company plans to apply its foundation AI models – which are trained on broad sets of data – to speed up the analysis of this data.
- The company stated that these types of AI systems have been used to advance natural language processing (NLP) technology in recent years. An example of an AI model that uses NLP is ChatGPT.
- NASA senior researcher Rahul Ramachandran informed that these foundation models can be potentially used “for many downstream applications”.
- The two organizations plan to work together on several projects to extract new insights from Earth observation data.
- By analyzing the satellite data, it is hoped this foundational model will identify changes in natural disasters, crop yields, and wildlife habitats to help researchers analyze the Earth’s environmental systems.
