NASA estimates that its Earth science missions will generate around a quarter million terabytes of data in 2024 alone. In order for climate scientists and the research community efficiently dig through these reams of raw satellite data, IBM, HuggingFace and NASA have collaborated to build an open-source geospatial foundation model that will serve as the basis for a new class of climate and Earth science AIs that can track deforestation, predict crop yields and rack greenhouse gas emissions. For this project, IBM leveraged its recently-released Watsonx.ai to serve as the foundational model using a year's worth of NASA's Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS). That data is collected by the ESA's pair of Sentinel-2 satellites, which are built to acquire high resolution optical imagery over land and coastal regions in 13 spectral bands. For it's part, HuggingFace is hosting the model on its open-source AI platform.

A partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the chemical giant BASF has managed to successfully create an AI-driven process to speed up the discovery of custom 3D printing materials. Chemists usually develop a few iterations of a material candidate over a couple of days and test them in the lab. The new machine-learning algorithm can churn out hundreds of those iterations with the desired characteristics in the same timeframe. This would save time and raw material costs, as well as lessen the environmental impact of the discarded chemicals. Not only that, but the algorithm may also come up with ideas that the material's engineer could have overlooked for various reasons.