ESA-NASA International workshop on AI Foundation Model for Earth Observation takes place on 5-7 May 2025 in Frascati, Italy. It is in-person only, but it will be streamed. The workshop is co-organised by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Foundation Models (FMs), the latest breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence (AI) following the advent of Deep Learning, promise to revolutionize various fields, including Earth Observation (EO) and Earth Sciences. These models are trained on vast amounts of unlabeled data using self-supervised learning (SSL), allowing them to capture complex patterns and inherent information within the data. Once pre-trained, FMs can be adapted to numerous downstream tasks through fine-tuning or learning with little to no additional training samples, unlocking AI’s full potential across a wide range of applications. This paradigm shift will transform the information value chain, significantly impacting the industry, research and development, and the broader scientific community.
The main topics of this workshop are as follows:
- Latest advances in AI Foundation Models
- Adapting Foundation Models to geospatial data (multi-modal, multi-resolution, etc. including Language Models) and specific EO tasks
- Integration of Foundation Models with up-/down-stream applications and geospatial Digital Twins
- Advances in weather prediction and climate using Foundation Models
- Geospatial semantic data mining and data volume reduction
- Benchmarking and evaluating Foundation Models in EO
- Computational challenges in training large-scale Foundation Models
- Ethical considerations and responsible AI use in EO (bias, transparency, accountability, centralisation and democratization, etc.)
- Commercial use of Foundation Model in EO
The workshop is designed to be dynamic and participatory, featuring interactive sessions to review the importance of FM technology in the different domains. The targeted audience includes ESA/NASA Principal Investigators, AI and data scientists, thematic application experts, Earth Science experts, engineers, scientists and students active in the field of Foundation Model applied to EO, Climate, Weather and Earth Sciences.
Registration will be opened on 19 March 2025. The final programme will be released in April 2025.
