A Year For Cutting-Edge Research at NeurIPS and AGU 2023

FDL Europe’s SAR Foundation Model precursor caps off a big year for AI applications. Extreme UV livestream, thermospheric drag, geoeffectiveness, ML onboard for CME detection, LLMs for floods, and a best paper award at Climatechange.AI’s NeurIPS workshop rounded out a tremendous year for FDL.AI and FDL Europe at AGU and NeurIPS 2023.

The second week of December is akin to Oscar season in the science and AI world. Two of the largest scientific conferences — NeurIPS and AGU — took place within the same week this year, shuttling our researchers and teammates across the United States to present their work to peers in geo, space science, and artificial intelligence. 

Congratulations to the FDL Europe 2023 Generalisable SSL SAR team for taking home the big prize: Best Overall Paper at the Climate Change AI Workshop at NeurIPS. 

We’d like to extend a hearfelt congratulations to all of the FDL Europe and FDL-X researchers, faculty, partners, and advisors for their terrific outcomes this year. 

The results of this year’s research can be read here:

NeurIPS 2023

December 10th-16th, 2023; New Orleans, Louisiana

Our FDL Europe teams delivered outstanding research this year, with a total of five papers presented across different workshops at NeurIPS 2023. 

• Exploring generalisability of self-distillation with no labels for SAR-based vegetation prediction

• Fewshot learning on global multimodal embeddings for Earth Observation tasks

• Large scale masked autoencoding for reducing label requirements on SAR data

• Exploring DINO: Emergent properties and limitations for synthetic aperture radar imagery

• FloodBrain: Flood disaster reporting by web-based retrieval augmented generation with an LLM

FDL-X was similarly well-represented with poster presentations by the Thermospheric Drag and ARD EUV teams:

• High-Cadence Thermospheric Density Estimation enabled by Machine Learning on Solar Imagery

• Virtual EVE: A deep learning model for solar spectral irradiance prediction

The heart of NeurIPS 2023 was our space social, an evening beyond the infinite filled with panel discussions, co-opetition, games, prizes, and networking with fellow like-minded explorers. Thank you to Massimo Mascaro from the Google Cloud team for serving as a special guest speaker, and to our partners at NVIDIA, NASA, and the University of Oxford for supporting the stellar evening. 

The activity of the night: teams were asked to split up for foundation model madness and collaborate to fill out different parts of a foundation model, passing a sheet back and forth to stretch their creative and scientific minds. See some of our favorite submissions and highlights of the night below:

Submissions From Foundation Model Madness

Clockwise from top left: Massimo Mascaro presenting to social attendees, teams completing foundation model madness, crowds at NeurIPS 2023, and Anne Spalding, Program Director at Trillium Technologies

AGU 2023

San Francisco, California’ December 11th-15th, 2023

FDL Europe was represented at AGU 2023 by the Generalisable SSL SAR team who presented their work on “Self-supervised learning for SAR; benchmarking datasets and performance on diverse downstream tasks.” ESA climate office Research Fellow Anna Jungbluth discussed how EO and ML can be used in tandem for scientific discovery. 

Anna Jungbluth, ESA with Jonathan Knowles, Trillium Technologies

All three FDL-X teams were delighted to present their work at AGU this year. Read more about their research online:

• A Novel Synthesis of SDO EVE MEGS A&B Spectral Irradiance Data through Convolutional Deep Learning

• Multiscale Geoeffectiveness Forecasting: Upgrading the DAGGER Pipeline

• Incorporating Direct EUV Irradiance from Solar Images into Thermospheric Density Modelling with Machine Learning

Clockwise from top left: Raman Mukundan, FDL-X presenting his research; AGU 2023; Banafsheh (Bashi) Ferdousi, FDL-X; and Thomas Berger, University of Colorado TREC

Our partners at NASA also had a tremendous showing at AGU, with presence across five events culminating in the NASA “Living with a Star” Town Hall headlined by Simon P. Plunkett, John McCormick, and Madhulika Guhathakurta on the last day of AGU. This exciting event was an opportunity for the greater community to hear updates on program status and to have an open discussion about the “Living with a Star” (LWS) program. 

From left to right: Simon P. Plunkett, NASA; Madhulika Guhathakurta, NASA

After a show-stopping year for the FDL community, we look forward even more to what lies ahead in 2024. Thank you to all who had a hand in the remarkable scientific achievements we’ve seen this year and in recent years, and we look forward to supporting the next generation of scientists, engineers and dreamers in years to come. 

Applications are now open for our 2024 programs. Apply online on the FDL Europe and FDL-X websites.