Celebrating Excellence: Trillium Technologies Triumphs at CogX 2023 AI Awards
CogX is the world’s biggest festival of AI and transformational technologies. The annual CogX Awards celebrate the innovators and change-makers impacting our world in the last twelve months. For the 7th annual CogX Awards, thousands from around the world came together once more to champion some of the finest AI practitioners and innovators doing work today.
Trillium Technologies was delighted to take home two awards at the end of the night: “Outstanding Achievements & Research Contributions - AI Accelerator/Incubator” and “Best Innovation - Space.”
“We’ve never been an award-chasing organization, but it does feel nice to be acknowledged every so often. For that reason, I’d like to take a moment to recognise all the researchers who deserve the credit for this prodigious research. It’s a superb moment and evidence that we are delivering useful outcomes for the community,” says James Parr, Founder and CEO of Trillium Technologies
Award Recipients Take the Stage at the CogX Awards at the O2 in London
Outstanding Achievements and Research Contributions - AI Accelerator/Incubator goes to FDL.ai
During the CogX Awards, we were pleased to receive the “Outstanding Achievements and Research Contributions - AI Accelerator/Incubator” award for the work that the Frontier Development Lab (FDL.ai) is doing. FDL is a public-private AI research accelerator in partnership with NASA in the U.S. and ESA in Europe (fdleurope.org), as well as leaders in commercial AI such as Google Cloud and Nvidia.
Over the past eight years, FDL has pushed the limits of AI applications for science in the realms of space exploration, climate change, and disaster response. The AI lab has delivered numerous breakthrough AI solutions at the highest level, and many have been deployed on NASA or ESA initiatives and published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and Science Advances.
Pioneering firsts include: the first view inside the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters; successful replacement of a broken instrument on board a NASA spacecraft with a virtual one; the first demonstration of a digital twin outperforming a supercomputer for a coastal inundation model; the first map of metallic resources on the lunar surface; the first causal inference of cancer-causing genes using blended human-mammalian data and many more.
FDL.ai also leads the charge in AI reproducibility and open science, with many of its 50+ data products and ML pipelines available for the community on SpaceML.org.
Best Innovation - Space Goes to NIO.space
The “Best Innovation - Space” award was given for Trillium Technologies’ work on NIO.space; building onboard machine intelligence on spacecraft and working towards a future where autonomous spacecraft are supporting our understanding of our planet; managing and cleaning up low Earth orbit; and enabling our species’ aspirations for deep space exploration.
Over the past two years, the NIO.space program has demonstrated numerous firsts in deployed ML on spacecraft in partnership with the European Space Agency, D-Orbit, the University of Oxford, and Unibap.
Worldfloods: the rapid return of a flood map on the ground from Low Earth Orbit. (LEO)
These groundbreaking firsts include the first-ever flood segmentation conducted in space, with the rapid return of a flood map on the ground; the first migration of a ML model to a completely new instrument; the first demonstration of ML change detection in orbit; rapid inference on-board; and the first time a network has ever been successfully trained in-orbit.
As well as its in-orbit demonstrations, NIO has also shown numerous proof-of-concept studies for intelligence on-board spacecraft, including rapid production of analysis ready data; unsupervised change detection; cloud detection; autocalibration of instruments; virtual instruments; methane detection; and super-resolution and federated learning methods for compute task sharing and data privacy.
The NIO.space achievements are stepping stones to the vision of in-space hybrid observation, where enhanced situational awareness is achieved by multiple networked instruments fusing multiple data sources to enable an enhanced view for decision makers across a network of intelligent nodes, unlocking third party validation and confident and trusted autonomy.
Simon Jackman, University of Oxford and James Parr, Trillium Technologies on the CogX Red Carpet at the 02 in London.
How Can AI Help Advance Planetary Stewardship?
At CogX, Trillium Technologies also hosted an executive suite overlooking the O2 Arena at CogX as part of the Global Leadership program. The theme of the suite was “How Can AI Help Advance Planetary Stewardship” — in other words, how can AI help us save the world?
Trillium Technologies’ Executive Suite
The climate crisis is here. We need to make our cities more resilient, our supply chains and food systems more robust, and grow our disaster response capabilities. To do this will require us to make better decisions with the data we have. AI is particularly well suited to support the interventions we need for the future we desire using twinning and simulation, new ways of integrating knowledge, and systems for decision intelligence.
Participants in the executive suite were asked to participate in an activity geared around Earth Systems Predictability (ESP), labeling accelerators, blockers, and wildcards to answer the question of how our ability to wield Earth Observation (EO) data, AI, and Decision Intelligence (DI) will bring us to the future we dream of.
Expert guests included Pierre-Philippe Mathieu, Head of the ESA Phi-Lab, Simon Jackman, Senior Innovation Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Kevin Ramirez, Space/Earth Observation Manager at Climate-KIC.
Read more about Trillium Technologies’ work on Earth Systems Predictability here.
Lior Torenberg
Deputy Director of Communications and Program Management
Trillium Technologies
lior@trillium.tech
