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Newsletter #5 | June 2022

Dear Φ-lab community,

The first half of 2022 has been an especially busy time for our researchers, with a number of collaborative ventures helping to bring Φ-lab’s own activities and experience together with that of other organisations. Most recently, these include the strategic partnership signed with Leonardo Labs in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data, together with a collaboration with Rome Sapienza University dealing with AI edge computing and quantum machine learning for remote sensing.

A great deal of work also went into preparing for and participating in the Living Planet Symposium 2022, which is probably the world’s largest EO gathering. Not surprisingly then, the event takes pride of place in the main feature of this edition of our newsletter. The prominence of Commercial EO at this year's Living Planet was noteworthy, and when research turns into products, young companies need to think about business services. OVHcloud's Alessandro Di Felice gives us an interview on his company's agreement with ESA to grant a free cloud package to ESA-assisted start-ups. This is the first of a series of accords that we will sign in support of entrepreneurial EO, so stay tuned.

The Φ-lab team

FOCUS ON THE LIVING PLANET SYMPOSIUM 2022

The Living Planet Symposium (LPS 2022) was for many the first major event with a physical attendance since the COVID-19 pandemic began. As such, communicating our ideas, working with others and discussing where the future of EO might take us have all been a top priority for everyone here before and during the event. Φ-lab took a leading role throughout the week, with researchers and business innovators chairing a number of sessions and presenting a wide range of activities.

Φ-lab co-chaired two sessions on emerging computational technologies in EO, covering topics such as onboard Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing on satellites (edge computing), together with neuromorphic and quantum computing. We also helped organise gatherings discussing super-resolution methods and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data analytics, Health in Earth observation, and also ‘Meet the Next GenEO’, which gave a voice to some of the most passionate and promising young players in EO.

Maritime projects also featured in Φ-lab’s presentations, including work on the categorisation of sea-ice in the Arctic, and results from Copernicus Sentinel-2-based research on floating debris detection. Both optical and radar imagery formed part of the discussions concerning our collaboration with Planet Labs Germany, a project which demonstrates the power of timeseries analysis and self-supervised learning techniques.

A plenary session was organised to outline all the ESA Earth Observation programmes to be presented at the Council meeting at ministerial level (CMIN22), which will take place in November. InCubed was one such programme and was well represented at the event in two specific sessions, one of which presented an overview of InCubed within the context of both the EO commercial sector as a whole and CMIN22. There were also examples of current initiatives and strategic partnerships that Φ-lab is either developing or has put in place to support innovation and investment. The second session gave a detailed view of several commercial EO satellite missions that are benefitting from InCubed co-funding.

With all these activities and the many others that were discussed and showcased at LPS22, we were able to present a diversity and breadth of topics that perfectly reflect Φ-lab’s equally broad range of interests.

LPS22: Φ-lab shows how new digital tech and computing paradigms will reshape EO

LPS22: boosting commercial Earth observation

LPS22 kicks off

REVISIT THE LIVING PLANET SYMPOSIUM 2022

Watch the session replays

Read all articles

LATEST FROM THE LAB

BAVARIAN DELEGATION VISIT

27 April - A Bavarian EO industry delegation led by Roland Weigert, the State Secretary of the Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft, Landesentwicklung und Energie, visited Φ-lab@ESRIN. Our team captured the visitors' imagination and interest by talking about how transformative technologies like quantum computing, Machine Learning (ML), AI and Cognitive Space will change Earth observation, leading to what we call Earth Cognition: from data/images to perception, reasoning and action.

VIVATECH EVENT IN PARIS

15-18 June - VivaTech is one of the biggest events for start-ups and tech in Europe. Held in Paris, this year's event included cross-Directorate participation from ESA, including joint initiatives with some of the ESA Business Incubation Centres (BICs). Φ-lab represented the Earth observation component, presenting the InCubed programme and its support for innovative product and service development.

WE MAKE FUTURE EVENT IN RIMINI

16-18 June - The WMF event has one major and ambitious goal: to foster a better future by enhancing digital education and promoting innovation, while also boosting cooperation between social, economic and institutional actors in Italy and globally. Φ-lab attended for the third year running, with its own booth and several key note speeches.

SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY COLLABORATION

May - Φ-lab started a new and inspiring collaboration with the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Sapienza University of Rome. The partnership will cover advanced topics such as AI edge computing and quantum machine learning applied to new disruptive applications for remote sensing. PhD and Masters students from the Sapienza will develop the growth of AI4EO, guided by the expertise, challenging spirit and innovation mindset of Φ-lab.

FDL EUROPE CHALLENGE 2022

June - Following intense joint preparations, the Frontier Development Lab (FDL) Europe Challenge 2022 was launched on 20 June. Alongside Trillium Technologies, Φ-lab helped shape some of this year’s topics, including a proposal to combine physics-based and ML methods to enable an end-to-end flood detection system, and one to better understand the complex relationships between aerosols emitted by fires and the climate.

INTERVIEW WITH OVHCLOUD

With its recent announcement of a strategic partnership with OVHcloud to supply free cloud services, ESA is strengthening the support it gives to qualifying start-ups, including those that benefit from ESA InCubed co-funding. We caught up with OVHcloud Key Account Manager Alessandro Di Felice to get his thoughts on the partnership, the EO downstream segment and the European cloud market.

Alessandro, can you tell us the value you see in this exciting new agreement?

InCubed stands for ‘Investing in Industrial Innovation’, and in fact innovation is a factor that has particularly stimulated our partnership. Cloud services are able to help exploit the value of Earth observation information by playing a key role in developing innovative products, managing Big Data, extracting insights and leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models.

What’s your view on the downstream commercial sector and how it can be bolstered by cloud services?

The New Space Economy is a fast-growing market, especially in the EO downstream domain. XaaS [Anything as a Service] is and will be the business model of choice and is cloud intensive. The data and technology are available, so the challenge is to establish a relationship between them to enable a best-in-class customer experience by simplifying both access and the user experience. To achieve this, I’d say the ecosystem approach is not only recommended but is the only viable solution – European tech excellence empowering start-ups and specialised SMEs to build EO-based services and get to market.

How do you think European cloud providers should position themselves in the face of stiff US-based competition?

Well I think again the ecosystem vision is probably the solution we need here. As the leading European cloud provider we can make a difference, as we can perfectly match the EU ethos in terms of data sovereignty and we also operate with a comprehensive ecosystems approach. This vision is based on European DNA and values, open-source architectures and a trusted cloud that makes data security and storage location the cornerstone of any activity. Thanks to this commitment, both OVHcloud and the wider European provider market can offer home-grown benefits that represent an important alternative to American hyperscalers.

FROM OUR WEBSITE

ESA explores cognitive computing in space with FDL experiments

In a series of world firsts, FDL and ESA have achieved significant results in the field of Cognitive Cloud Computing in Space (3CS) aboard a D-Orbit satellite.

**Access to EO data to improve with AI-based I*STAR platform**

Telespazio has signed a contract with ESA InCubed to develop I*STAR, an innovative AI-based service for improving access to customised Earth observation data.

Prestigious UNESCO award given for Φ-lab AI-powered dengue fever research

IRCAI has recognised a Φ-lab and UNICEF initiative as part of its Global Top 100 awards. The research developed an AI solution for quantifying dengue outbreaks.