By Saurabh Rai

Reflecting on 2024, the geospatial sector has witnessed transformative advancements, driven by innovations that integrate GIS, AI, and IoT into critical domains. The development of the Ayodhya Sustainability Index as a milestone in leveraging geospatial intelligence for sustainable urban planning, environmental conservation, and heritage preservation. This initiative has set a global benchmark, showcasing how technology can balance growth with cultural preservation. 

The year also saw India embracing national initiatives like Naksha, Bhuvan, and SVAMITVA, which propelled sustainable development, urban planning, and disaster management using geospatial solutions. These programs reflect the sector’s growing influence in addressing complex challenges.

Looking ahead to 2025, the integration of geospatial technologies with AI, IoT, and big data is poised to transform industries such as agriculture, logistics, and renewable energy. 

The focus will be on leveraging these technologies to tackle global issues like climate change, rapid urbanization, and resource management. With data-driven tools at the core, the industry aims to drive impactful and sustainable change, fostering innovation and supporting national priorities. 

With precise data-driven insights, industries can make informed decisions, optimise resource allocation and implement sustainable practices.

In agriculture, for instance, geospatial tools combined with AI can enhance crop monitoring, predict yield and manage water resources effectively. In logistics, they streamline operations by providing real-time data on traffic, weather and optimal routes. Renewable energy sectors can benefit by identifying ideal locations for solar and wind energy projects, thus accelerating India’s transition to cleaner energy sources.

The integration of geospatial technologies aligns with India’s national priorities, such as building resilient infrastructure and achieving sustainable development goals. 

As geospatial intelligence continues to evolve, it promises to play a critical role in shaping a more sustainable, resilient, and technologically empowered future.

Saurabh Rai is the CEO of Arahas, a provider of Geospatial, AI, and Sustainability Technology services. The opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of CIO Dimension.

The post Outlook 2025: Navigating the future with Geospatial Intelligence appeared first on CIO Dimension.

IBM’s watsonx.ai geospatial foundation model – built from NASA’s satellite data – will now be openly available on Hugging Face. It will be the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA, according to an IBM press release. 

As part of a Space Act Agreement with NASA, IBM set out earlier this year to build an AI foundation model for geospatial data. Its availability on Hugging Face has the potential to advance the efforts to democratize access and application of AI to generate new innovations in climate and Earth science. 

The model is trained jointly by IBM and NASA on Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS) over one year across the continental United States and fine-tuned on labeled data for flood and burn scar mapping. According to IBM, it has demonstrated to date a 15 percent improvement over state-of-the-art techniques using half as much labeled data. With additional fine tuning, the base model can be redeployed for tasks like tracking deforestation, predicting crop yields, or detecting and monitoring greenhouse gasses.

Access to the latest data remains a significant challenge in climate science where environmental conditions change almost daily. And, despite growing amounts of data — estimates from NASA suggest that by 2024, scientists will have 250,000 terabytes of data from new missions — scientists and researchers still face obstacles in analyzing these large datasets. 

“The essential role of open-source technologies to accelerate critical areas of discovery such as climate change has never been clearer,” said Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research AI. “By combining IBM’s foundation model efforts aimed at creating flexible, reusable AI systems with NASA’s repository of Earth-satellite data, and making it available on the leading open-source AI platform, Hugging Face, we can leverage the power of collaboration to implement faster and more impactful solutions that will improve our planet.”

“We believe that foundation models have the potential to change the way observational data is analyzed and help us to better understand our planet,” said Kevin Murphy, Chief Science Data Officer, NASA. “And by open sourcing such models and making them available to the world, we hope to multiply their impact.”

IBM and NASA researchers are also working with Clark University to adapt the model for applications such as time-series segmentation and similarity research.

The news follows IBM’s announcement earlier this year to collaborate with NASA to build an AI model that could speed up the analysis of satellite images and boost scientific discovery. NASA, along with the White House and other federal agencies, has declared 2023 a Year of Open Science to celebrate the benefits and successes created through the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge.

In June, IBM announced the availability of watsonx, an AI and data platform that allows enterprises to scale and accelerate impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. A commercial version of the geospatial model, which is part of IBM watsonx, will be available through the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) later this year.

The post IBM, NASA make open-source geospatial AI model available on Hugging Face  appeared first on CIO Dimension.