New foundational modeling technology from IBM leverages NASA Earth Science data for geospatial intelligence for the first time
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, New York – February 1, 2023 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, today announce a collaboration to use IBM’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology to discover new paths with Earth’s vast wealth of geospatial and Earth science data. NASA. The joint work will, for the first time, use AI foundational modeling technology to data from NASA’s Earth observation satellites.
Foundational models are types of AI that take a large unlabeled dataset, and are trained to be used in different tasks and allow information regarding one situation to be applied to another. These models have grown rapidly in the field of natural language processing (NLP) technology over the last five years, and IBM is a pioneer in applications of foundational models beyond language.
Earth observations, which allow scientists to study and monitor our planet, are being collected at a frequency and volume never seen before. New approaches are needed to extract all of this knowledge from this work and provide an easier way for researchers to analyze and gain insights from the vast resources of captured data, in order to rapidly advance scientific understanding of planet Earth and answering questions. climate related.
One project will train IBM’s foundational geospatial intelligence models on NASA’s Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset, a record of Earth’s surface and land-use changes captured by Earth-orbiting satellites, analyzing the petabytes of satellite data to identify changes in the geographic presence of phenomena such as natural disasters, cyclical crop yields, and wildlife habitats. This fundamental modeling technology will help researchers provide critical insights into our planet’s environmental systems.
Another result of this collaboration should be a more accessible research corpus of Earth science literature. IBM has developed a natural language processing model, trained on nearly 300,000 articles from scientific publications on Earth, to organize the literature and facilitate the discovery of new information. One of the largest AI projects trained with Red Hat’s OpenShift software to date, the model uses PrimeQA, a multilingual Q&A software from IBM. In addition to providing a resource for researchers, the new language model for geoscience can be inserted into NASA’s scientific data management and administration processes.
“The beauty of foundational models is that they can be used for many later applications,” said Rahul Ramachandran, senior research scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. “Building this foundational model cannot be tackled by small teams,” he added. “You need to have teams in different organizations to bring together their different views, resources and skills.”
“Foundational models show successful natural language processing, and now it’s time to expand into new domains and modalities important to business and society,” said Raghu Ganti, one of IBM’s principal investigators on the project. “Applying foundational models to geospatial factors, a sequence of events, time series and other non-linguistic factors within geoscience data might make the knowledge and valuable information generated from these models become available to a much wider group. wide range of researchers, companies and society as a whole. Ultimately, it might help a wider range of people working on some of the most pressing climate issues.”
Under this agreement, other potential projects between IBM and NASA include building a foundational model for climate predictions using MERRA2, a dataset of atmospheric observations. This collaboration forms part of Open Source Science Initiative from NASA, an initiative committed to building an open, inclusive, transparent, and collaborative scientific community over the next decade.
Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
About to IBM
IBM is a leading global provider of hybrid cloud, AI and business services, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, optimize business processes, reduce costs and gain competitive advantage in their industries. Nearly 3,800 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to power their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting provide open and flexible options for customers. All backed by IBM’s commitment to trust, transparency, accountability, inclusion and service. For more information, visit the link.
IBM press office
Weber Shandwick
E-mail: [email protected]
