NASA, IBM team up to build LLMs that can help fight climate change - CIO
NASA, IBM team up to build LLMs that can help fight climate change | CIO
IBM on Thursday said it has partnered with the US space agency NASA to co-develop a foundation large language model based on geospatial data that it claims will help scientists and their organizations fight climate change.\n\nThe open source model, which will be available on Hugging Face, was developed on IBM\u2019s watsonx.ai platform and trained on\u00a0Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS)\u00a0over one year across the continental US before being fine-tuned on labelled data for flood and burn scar mapping \u2014 a scientific process to map large environmental fire incidents, the company said. \u00a0\n\nWhile testing the accuracy of the model, researchers at IBM saw a 15% improvement in precision compared to existing learning models for mapping floods and burn scars from fires, using half as much labelled data.\n\nThis improvement, according to the company, could speed up geospatial analysis by three to four times, and help reduce the amount of data cleaning and labelling required in training a traditional deep learning model.\n\n\u201cWith additional fine-tuning, the base model can be redeployed for tasks like tracking deforestation, predicting crop yields, or detecting and monitoring greenhouse gasses,\u201d IBM said in a statement.\n\nThe release of the model, according to both IBM and NASA, assumes significance because access to the latest geospatial data and analyzing them remains a significant challenge in climate science despite large amounts of data being added regularly.\n\nThe model can act as the base to analyze datasets for advancing applications of AI in combating climate change. A commercial version of the geospatial model, which is part of\u00a0IBM\u00a0watsonx, will be made available through the\u00a0IBM\u00a0Environmental Intelligence Suite later this year, the company said.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”