AI For Seeing The Forest - And The Trees
IBM, Monday, February 9th, 2026
IBM and NASA's family of foundation models have introduced a fundamentally new way of representing scientific data and transferring knowledge across scales and domains. These models are also attracting award-winning attention.
NASA's fleet of Earth-orbiting satellites send down terabytes of imagery each day, capturing rivers flooding their banks, forests and deserts expanding and retreating, and cities and roads emerging from land formerly covered in vegetation.
It's too much information for us humans to wrap our heads around, but with today's powerful AI models, the big picture and the meaningful details are coming into focus all at once. What makes this feat possible is a new algorithmic approach that turns raw data into rich, structured representations of the physical world.