NASA, IBM team up to develop AI-based models to spur new Earth discoveries

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.