Mikolaj Czerkawski: Geographical Guidance in the Era of Large-Scale Earth Observation Data and AI

The current scale of available Earth observation data provides an unprecedented perspective on planet Earth. However, with the ever-expanding volumes of data and new tools designed for extracting insights, come new challenges and obstacles that must be addressed by the community. 

Some of the key questions centre around data and that is the focus of this talk - the challenges of building a collaborative, vibrant, and accessible ecosystem for Earth observation data with the aim to enable extracting valuable insight at scale. 

This talk provides a perspective on this topic and describes several ongoing research projects focused on the coordination of efforts to curate large-scale datasets for Earth observation (such as Major TOM) and on the topics of deriving highly abstract descriptions of environment at scale.

Mikolaj Czerkawski is a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Space Agency in ESRIN, Frascati, Italy. His research interests include data-centric analyses of large-scale Earth observation data, dataset curation, generative modelling, and restoration tasks for satellite imagery. 

He is a co-founder the Major TOM community project, which provides a platform for collaborating and reusing Earth observation datasets designed specifically for AI pipelines. He received the B.Eng. degree in electronic and electrical engineering in 2019 from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom, and the Ph.D. degree in 2023 at the same institution, specialising in applications of computer vision to Earth observation data. 

Homepage: https://mikonvergence.github.io/