Impact Science

Also published on LinkedIn. Those of us at the intersection of EO and AI still have a lot to bring, but further maturing a separate domain might not be the most impact-driven path. This is the article form of the talk I gave at #ECCV conference workship on Conservation and Climate change. Thank you Climate AI Nordics for the invitation. Hope I was able to sir the pot enough. Is geodata just data? We geo experts adopt most frontier techniques fast — SAM (“Segment Anything Model”) was applied to satellite imagery within three weeks, with fantastic applicability. Yet there is no evidence that the general-purpose frontier models (Gemini, GPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM) treat Earth observation in any of the specific ways we in GeoAI do: feature engineering around metadata, rasters, projections, bands, and sensor physics. Models that do accept images expose only an RGB image interface, and while they can appear well versed and able to generate GIS code, the primitives that define GeoAI (e.g. geoattention) are absent from their published core architectures. I have reviewed eighteen frontier-lab model cards and technical reports from this year. Not one documents an Earth-observation input or an Earth-observation benchmark. This is absence of evidence, not evidence of absence, but it does show that geo is not a publicly stated architectural priority. ...

There is a growing and urgent need for a new kind of scientist – one who is skilled in applying not just knowledge but above all scientific skills to solve real-world problems, outside of academia or research. The fact is that many of our global drivers are complex, interrelated, dynamic, and strongly underpinned by science processes. Let’s see some examples: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the compounding effect of interrelated progress in many fields from AI to Big Data, IoT, or cloud. Climate change and its impact (and opportunity) to drive positive change, like mitigation via more efficient factories or adaptation measures like green city spots that lower the temperature and improve our health. Sustainability and the need to play the interrelation of people and planet. These are just some quick examples. ...