ESA Φ-lab and IARAI announce their partnership

The ESA Φ-lab and IARAI are proud to announce a new partnership supporting the growth of AI research to improve the understanding of our planet.

The Φ-lab division of Earth Observation Programmes Directorate at the European Space Agency (ESA) and IARAI are proud to announce a new partnership.

IARAI pursues basic and applied research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), from studying theory and white-boxing AI, i.e. gaining a quantitative understanding accessible by human intuition, to innovating for smart cities, sustainable mobility, climate change, and health. IARAI focuses on AI research for industrial scale real-world data to solve the major challenges of our society.

ESA’s mission is to develop European space capabilities for the benefit of all citizens. Φ-lab aims to accelerate the future of Earth observation by means of transformational innovations. Its AI4EO initiative promotes research in AI to exploit its potential with Earth Observation (EO) data.

IARAI and Φ-lab will now join efforts and resources to support the growth of AI research aimed to improve the understanding of our planet. The new partnership will bring joint research activities, organisation and promotion of scientific events, including conferences, competitions, workshops, and seminars, as well as focus group meetings and academic visiting programs, and other opportunities. We will collaborate to advance research in EO by applying and developing AI, and in particular Machine Learning (ML) methods for analysis and interpretation of big data on our planet.

As a first step in our partnership with Φ-lab, we are organising the 1^st workshop on Complex Data Challenges in Earth Observation (CDCEO) 2021, in collaboration with the State Meteorological Agency of the Government of Spain AEMET and EODC. This workshop is held as a satellite event at the 30^th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). The workshop focuses on application and development of advanced ML methods for effectively interpreting the high-dimensional heterogeneous data obtained by high-resolution EO missions. We invite all workshop participants to submit the extended versions of their accepted papers for publication a special issue of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. A special session of the workshop will present the winning solutions and highlights from a unique multi-sensor weather forecasting competition based on meteorological satellites data obtained in collaboration with AEMET and EUMETSAT’s Nowcasting Satellite Application Facility NWC SAF.

To know more: IARAI Press Release, IARAI website, Workshop on Complex Data Challenges in Earth Observation