Inspiring days we had: The FAIRiCUBE team is looking back to a successful participation at this year's International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), which took place in Pasadena, California, from July 16th through 21st. As the flagship conference of the worldwide IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS), the conference is a platform for sharing knowledge and experience on recent developments and advancements in geoscience and remote sensing technologies, particularly in the context of Earth observation, disaster monitoring, and risk assessment.

Leading agencies such as NASA, the Group on Earth Observation (GEO), and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) were on the spot to promote scientific exchange between researchers and industry. With the conference’s strong focus on Artificial Intelligence and specifically Deep Learning, FAIRiCUBE had an excellent platform for showing its achievements to the international audience.

Besides AI, the presentations also explicitly included the subject of datacube processing and federation. Kathi Schleidt, Scientific Coordinator of the project, introduced FAIRiCUBE´s mission of leveraging the power of combining Machine Learning (ML) with multi-thematic datacubes. In her talk “Bringing the power of ML and Remote Sensing Data to a wider audience” she addressed a wide range of governance and research institutions who at present cannot easily access and utilize these potent resources. Her second presentation “Completing Space-Based EO Data with Fine Grained In-Situ Observations” focused on FAIRiCUBE´s five use cases in detail: Urban adaptation to climate change, spatio-temporal assessment of neighborhood building stock, biodiversity and agriculture nexus, and linking climatic and genetic variation for biodiversity Inference.

Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science and entrepreneur in Bremen, presented the project´s innovative impact from a different perspective. In his presentation "Datacubes and Friends: the Coverage Date and Service Model in ISO, OGC and INSPIRE", he focused on the latest advances and emerging synergies of standards opening new vistas for interoperability, exemplified by FAIRiCUBE. The impact was again emphasized in his second presentation “AI-Enabled Analysis-Ready Datacubes: Towards a Roadmap for More Human Centric Services” where he explained the seamless integration of ML into the rasdaman datacube engine which is the core technology used in the project.

After manifold inspiring conversations the FAIRiCUBE team is excited to reporting its further progress and results at the next IGARSS conference in Athens, Greece in July 2024.