Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) systems that have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, and are now advancing geospatial analysis and Earth Observation (EO). They promise improved generalization across tasks, scalability, and efficient adaptation with minimal labeled data. However, despite the rapid proliferation of geospatial FMs, their real-world utility and alignment with global sustainability goals remain underexplored. We introduce SustainFM, a comprehensive benchmarking framework grounded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with extremely diverse tasks ranging from asset wealth prediction to environmental hazard detection. This study provides a rigorous, interdisciplinary assessment of geospatial FMs and offers critical insights into their role in attaining sustainability goals. Our findings show: (1) While not universally superior, FMs often outperform traditional approaches across diverse tasks and datasets. (2) Evaluating FMs should go beyond accuracy to include transferability, generalization, and energy efficiency as key criteria for their responsible use. (3) FMs enable scalable, SDG-grounded solutions, offering broad utility for tackling complex sustainability challenges. Critically, we advocate for a paradigm shift from model-centric development to impact-driven deployment, and emphasize metrics such as energy efficiency, robustness to domain shifts, and ethical considerations.

This study investigates the application of an artificial neural network framework for analysing water pollution caused by solids. Water pollution by suspended solids poses significant environmental and health risks. Traditional methods for assessing and predicting pollution levels are often time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address these challenges, we developed a model that leverages a comprehensive dataset of water quality from total suspended solids. A convolutional neural network was trained under a transfer learning approach using data corresponding to different total suspended solids concentrations, with the goal of accurately predicting low, medium and high pollution levels based on various input variables. Our model demonstrated high predictive accuracy, outperforming conventional statistical methods in terms of both speed and reliability. The results suggest that the artificial neural network framework can serve as an effective tool for real-time monitoring and management of water pollution, facilitating proactive decision-making and policy formulation. This approach not only enhances our understanding of pollution dynamics but also underscores the potential of machine learning techniques in environmental science.

Structured documents analysis and recognition are essential for modern online on-boarding processes, and document localization is a crucial step to achieve reliable key information extraction. While deep-learning has become the standard technique used to solve document analysis problems, real-world applications in industry still face the limited availability of labelled data and of computational resources when training or fine-tuning deep-learning models. To tackle these challenges, we propose SDL-Net: a novel U-Net like encoder-decoder architecture for the localization of structured documents. Our approach allows pre-training the encoder of SDL-Net on a generic dataset containing samples of various document classes, and enables fast and data-efficient fine-tuning of decoders to support the localization of new document classes. We conduct extensive experiments on a proprietary dataset of structured document images to demonstrate the effectiveness and the generalization capabilities of the proposed approach.

The responsible and sustainable agave-tequila production chain is fundamental for the social, environment and economic development of Mexico's agave regions. It is therefore relevant to develop new tools for large scale automatic agave region monitoring. In this work, we present an Agave tequilana Weber azul crop segmentation and maturity classification using very high resolution satellite imagery, which could be useful for this task. To achieve this, we solve real-world deep learning problems in the very specific context of agave crop segmentation such as lack of data, low quality labels, highly imbalanced data, and low model performance. The proposed strategies go beyond data augmentation and data transfer combining active learning and the creation of synthetic images with human supervision. As a result, the segmentation performance evaluated with Intersection over Union (IoU) value increased from 0.72 to 0.90 in the test set. We also propose a method for classifying agave crop maturity with 95% accuracy. With the resulting accurate models, agave production forecasting can be made available for large regions. In addition, some supply-demand problems such excessive supplies of agave or, deforestation, could be detected early.

AI and live coding has been little explored. This article contributes with a short review of different perspectives of using virtual agents in the practice of live coding looking at past and present as well as pointing to future directions.

Using analogical model formulation with sketches to solve Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test problems.