We present a multi-temporal, multi-modal remote-sensing dataset for predicting how active wildfires will spread at a resolution of 24 hours. The dataset consists of 13 607 images across 607 fire events in the United States from January 2018 to October 2021. For each fire event, the dataset contains a full time series of daily observations, containing detected active fires and variables related to fuel, topography and weather conditions. The dataset is challenging due to: a) its inputs being multi-temporal, b) the high number of 23 multi-modal input channels, c) highly imbalanced labels and d) noisy labels, due to smoke, clouds, and inaccuracies in the active fire detection.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Whether it's the ocean's deepest hydrothermal vents or tall mountain peaks, bacteria is likely surviving and thriving. Ice caves can host a wide variety of microorganisms and offer biologists a bevy of genetic diversity that still has to be studied. And it could help save lives. A team of scientists in Romania tested antibiotic resistance profiles with a bacterial strain that was hidden in a 5,000-year-old layer of ice inside an underground ice cave.

The Landsat program is the longest-running Earth observation program in history, with 50+ years of data acquisition by 8 satellites. The multispectral imagery captured by sensors onboard these satellites is critical for a wide range of scientific fields. Despite the increasing popularity of deep learning and remote sensing, the majority of researchers still use decision trees and random forests for Landsat image analysis due to the prevalence of small labeled datasets and lack of foundation models. In this paper, we introduce SSL4EO-L, the first ever dataset designed for Self-Supervised Learning for Earth O bservation for the Landsat family of satellites (including 3 sensors and 2 product levels) and the largest Landsat dataset in history (5M image patches). Additionally, we modernize and re-release the L7 Irish and L8 Biome cloud detection datasets, and introduce the first ML benchmark datasets for Landsats 4-5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ SR. Finally, we pre-train the first foundation models for Landsat imagery using SSL4EO-L and evaluate their performance on multiple semantic segmentation tasks.

Today’s global coral bleaching events are the worst kind of climate warning.

Clouds in satellite imagery pose a significant challenge for downstream applications.A major challenge in current cloud removal research is the absence of a comprehensive benchmark and a sufficiently large and diverse training dataset.To address this problem, we introduce the largest public dataset -- *AllClear* for cloud removal, featuring 23,742 globally distributed regions of interest (ROIs) with diverse land-use patterns, comprising 4 million images in total. Each ROI includes complete temporal captures from the year 2022, with (1) multi-spectral optical imagery from Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9, (2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from Sentinel-1, and (3) auxiliary remote sensing products such as cloud masks and land cover maps.We validate the effectiveness of our dataset by benchmarking performance, demonstrating the scaling law - the PSNR rises from $28.47$ to $33.87$ with $30\times$ more data, and conducting ablation studies on the temporal length and the importance of individual modalities. This dataset aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the Earth's surface and promote better cloud removal results.

Satellite imagery is increasingly available, high resolution, and temporally detailed. Changes in spatio-temporal datasets such as satellite images are particularly interesting as they reveal the many events and forces that shape our world. However, finding such interesting and meaningful change events from the vast data is challenging. In this paper, we present new datasets for such change events that include semantically meaningful events like road construction. Instead of manually annotating the very large corpus of satellite images, we introduce a novel unsupervised approach that takes a large spatio-temporal dataset from satellite images and finds interesting change events. To evaluate the meaningfulness on these datasets we create 2 benchmarks namely CaiRoad and CalFire which capture the events of road construction and forest fires. These new benchmarks can be used to evaluate semantic retrieval/classification performance. We explore these benchmarks qualitatively and quantitatively by using several methods and show that these new datasets are indeed challenging for many existing methods.

WIRED spoke with DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli about the recent past--and promising future--of the Nobel Prize-winning research project that changed biology and chemistry forever. Amino acids "folded" to form a protein. Over the past few years, we've periodically reported on its successes; last year, it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry . Until AlphaFold's debut in November 2020, DeepMind had been best known for teaching an artificial intelligence to beat human champions at the ancient game of Go Its work culminated in the compilation of a database that now contains over 200 million predicted structures, essentially the entire known protein universe, and is used by nearly 3.5 million researchers in 190 countries around the world The Nature article published in 2021 describing the algorithm has been cited 40,000 times to date. Last year, AlphaFold 3 arrived, extending the capabilities of artificial intelligence to DNA, RNA, and drugs.

Unsupervised pre-training methods for large vision models have shown to enhance performance on downstream supervised tasks. Developing similar techniques for satellite imagery presents significant opportunities as unlabelled data is plentiful and the inherent temporal and multi-spectral structure provides avenues to further improve existing pre-training strategies. In this paper, we present SatMAE, a pre-training framework for temporal or multi-spectral satellite imagery based on Masked Autoencoder (MAE). To leverage temporal information, we include a temporal embedding along with independently masking image patches across time. In addition, we demonstrate that encoding multi-spectral data as groups of bands with distinct spectral positional encodings is beneficial. Our approach yields strong improvements over previous state-of-the-art techniques, both in terms of supervised learning performance on benchmark datasets (up to $\uparrow$ 7%), and transfer learning performance on downstream remote sensing tasks, including land cover classification (up to $\uparrow$ 14%) and semantic segmentation.

An analysis of the expansion of cracks in the Thwaites Glacier over the past 20 years suggests that a total collapse could be only a matter of time. Known as the "Doomsday Glacier," the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers on Earth, and its future evolution is one of the biggest unknowns when it comes to predicting global sea level rise. The eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier is supported at its northern end by a ridge of the ocean floor. However, over the past two decades, cracks in the upper reaches of the glacier have increased rapidly, weakening its structural stability. A new study by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) presents a detailed record of this gradual collapse process.