‘Prithvi’ World’s First AI Climate Change Monitoring Device By IBM

Date: August 04, 2023

Climate change is real and IBM has collaborated with NASA to build Artificial Intelligence to monitor it for smarter early preventions.

Climate change is one of the most used yet ignored terms by all of us. While some of us might be ignoring it less by putting some conscious efforts, most of us are just living by the day waiting for it to correct itself. But, the changes happening will not impact only a few, they will catch us all. But even if we think about playing our part, what can we do alone? Will the little efforts we put in bring enough results to save our earth? What do we do to stop this from happening? 

IBM took this responsibility and collaborated with NASA to do something that we both won’t and can’t do on our own. According to IBM’s officials, the biggest source of tackling climate change is identifying its pattern of change itself, and the biggest challenge is access to adequate data at the right time.

IBM Builds ‘Prithvi’

Partnering with NASA for their advanced technology, IBM is aggressively working on building Artificial Intelligence called ‘Prithvi’ that can monitor climate change using a geospatial model. 

Prithvi is built by Hugging Face that is also the first Open-source AI foundation built in collaboration with NASA. The scientists and researchers from both organizations are teaming up with the Clark University to adapt the model for time-series segmentation and similarity research applications.

We believe that foundation models have the potential to change the way observational data is analyzed and help us to better understand our planet. And by open sourcing such models and making them available to the world, we hope to multiply their impact.

Kevin Murphy, Chief Science Data Officer, NASA

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.

Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research AI

While we’ve been only seeing fascinating artworks and terrifying data leaks being in the news around us, this type of utilization of Artificial Intelligence throws confidence we wanted to have in its development. With proper regulations and adequate measures in place to prevent abuse of AI, we can successfully nurture it into a technology that nurtures a better future for us.