The work carried out in ExtremeEarth so far pushes the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation data. The specific innovative contributions of the project are the following:
1. The Hopsworks data and AI platform of LogicalClocks has been extended with new functionality that make it the platform of choice for developing big data and deep learning algorithms for Earth Observation.
2. The deep learning algorithms for the Food Security use case and the Polar use case offer precise solutions to the problems of crop type mapping and ice classification.
3. The large-scale training data developed for the deep neural networks for the Food Security use case and Polar use case are the first such publicly available datasets, and it is expected that they will be used by other Remote Sensing researchers.
4. The big linked geospatial data systems GeoTriples-Spark, JedAI-Spatial, Strabo2 and SemaGrow are the most scalable and effective systems currently available with the respective functionalities.
5. The results of the Food Security use case will provide precise irrigation recommendation information for farmers.
6. The results of the Polar use case will allow the semi-automatic creation of ice maps in a fraction of the time that it takes experts to produce them manually today.
The expected results of ExtremeEarth by the end of the project will be the completion of the tasks discussed above under the title "Worked performed so far".
The expected impacts of the ExtremeEarth project are the following (listed in the text of the call ICT-12-2018-2020):
1. Increased productivity and quality of system design and software development thanks to better architectures and tools for complex federated/distributed systems handling extremely large volumes and streams of data.
2. Demonstrated, significant increase of speed of data throughput and access, as measured against relevant, industry-validated benchmarks.
3. Demonstrated adoption of results of the extreme-scale analysis and prediction in decision-making (in industry and/or society.
ExtremeEarth has the following additional impacts:
1. Competitive advantage for European industry.
2. Shaping the Integrated Ground Segment of Copernicus and the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment.
3. Enable the development of EO services using Copernicus data by European companies that are not consortium members.
4. Bridging the gap between Remote Sensing and Informatics in the academic sector, and the Earth Observation and ICT industry sectors.
5. Enhancing innovation capacity and creating new market opportunities and new jobs in the European EO and ICT sectors.
6. Significant financial impact to farmers due to precise irrigation recommendations given that water savings and optimization of farming measures (e.g. fertilization) are the keys to sustainable practices.
7. Positive impact on maritime navigation and safety due to the provision of accurate and near-real time automated sea ice mapping.
8. Societal and environmental impacts due to the importance of food security and the Polar regions globally.
9. Impact on GEO, GEOSS and EuroGEOSS.
10. Impact on the Big Data Value Public-Private Partnership.
11. Impact on the following research and innovation areas: Remote Sensing and Earth Observation, Big Data and Extreme Earth Analytics, Deep Learning techniques for Remote Sensing, Semantic Web and Linked Data.
12. Impact on OGC and W3C geospatial standards such as GeoSPARQL.
13. Impact on ICT projects INFORE, SmartDataLake and AI4EU and ERC project BigEarth due to our collaboration with them.