Frontier Development Lab Europe
Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is an AI research Lab and applies AI technologies to science to push the frontiers of research and develop new tools to help solve some of the biggest challenges that humanity faces. These range from predicting the effects of our planet's changing climate to understanding the mechanisms of space weather; from improving disaster response to planetary defense from Asteroids and Comets. FDL is also helping NASA prepare for the next phase of lunar exploration, creating better Moon maps and probing the effects of long duration spaceflight on astronauts.
Working in partnership with ESA Φ-lab and Mission Operations at ESA ESOC, Trillium founded FDL Europe to tackle challenges important to the UN’s SDG’s, such as mapping floods, informal settlements, global food supplies and assessing Earthquake damage. FDL Europe has successfully tackled some of the most pernicious problems in climate science and digital twinning. FDL has also tackled climate modeling with cloud-type classification - crucial for studying changes in our planet’s albedo and predicting aerosol / albedo relationships, with the cloud classification project winning best paper at the prestigious climatechange.ai workshop at NeurIPS.
On the mission operations side, FDL Europe has developed an open python probabilistic deep learning toolbox called ‘KESSLER’ for Space Traffic Management (STM) and automated ground station management methods for ESA. Both projects massively scale the capabilities of human operators managing multiple spacecraft and are now being integrated into ESOC operational workflows.
Machine Learning for Space requires exacting standards in uncertainty quantification and FDL Europe has been able to maintain global parity through its ongoing partnership with Oxford OATML and Oxford AIMS. It also requires data and on-the-ground labels which we can deliver through our ongoing partnership with Planet and insight on commercial space from D-Orbit and Airbus. Lastly FDL Europe’s achievements are built on vast compute requirements supported by NVIDIA / SCAN and Google Cloud.
Trillium operates and runs FDL in Europe, USA and Australia. FDL Europe is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the University of Oxford - currently the top rated computer science university in the world - has been a key partner for FDL Europe and hosts the research sprint in the Summer. In partnership with private industry and academia in which the latest tools and techniques in AI and Machine Learning (ML) are applied to basic research priorities in support of ESA science and exploration.
