The 2020 ESA Phi Week - which this year is held in fully digital format - is dedicated to the Digital Twin Earth, a digital replica of our planet.
This is why ESA has invited experts, engineers and scientists to join at Phi Week to explore the idea of a Digital Twin Earth combining Earth Observation data, demographic and social data, the power and modelling capabilities of Artificial Intelligence as well as cloud computing.
The perspective of creating a Digital Twin of our planet, obviously, goes well beyond the technological aspect. Thanks to a digital reproduction of Earth, in fact, it will be possible to extend our decision-making capabilities, to formulate increasingly advanced forecasts and simulations and to face - through the data provided by science - the environmental and social challenges of our time.
Telespazio takes part in the Digital Twin Earth project thanks to its British branch Telespazio UK, which in the last few days signed an agreement with ESA for the development of a Digital Twin Earth Precursor (DTEP), a technological demonstrator capable of increasing the comprehension of the local impact of the global-scale climate change.
The solution to be devised by Telespazio UK will, for instance, measure the ground humidity and drought parameters impacting agriculture in Africa.
The innovative Climate Explorer proposed by the Telespazio UK team will use advanced Earth System Models, processed using High Performance Computing infrastructure and state-of-the-art data assimilation techniques with satellite Earth Observation (EO) data.
Optimised model simulation outputs will be delivered via Machine Learning emulation to the end user through a cloud-based Interactive Data Portal.
“We are excited to be supporting ESA’s flagship Digital Twin Earth initiative. Telespazio will build on our established relationships with leading UK academics, exploiting our complementary capabilities in EO and Climate Data analytics to develop relevant tools that can improve our understanding of climate-related impacts on our daily lives”.
Geoff Busswell, Head of Sales at Telespazio UK
The solution devised by Telespazio UK will be presented today, Tuesday September 29th, 16:30 (CEST) during a specific panel dedicated to all the selected DTEP projects.
e-GEOS, GAF, Telespazio France will also be present at the Phi Week
In addition to Telespazio UK, e-GEOS, a Telespazio (80%) and the Italian Space Agency (20%) company, the German company GAF AG (100% e-GEOS) and Telespazio France will also take part in the ESA EO Φ-WEEK 2020.
In particular, on Wednesday September 30th at 12:30 (CEST), e-GEOS will explain the capabilities and performance of CLEOS, the new digital marketplace that, thanks to innovative technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, focuses on the customer to revolutionize the traditional approach to geo-information.
The webinar is aimed at highlighting, through two workshops that will be attended by Paolo Minciacchi, CEO of e-GEOS, and by representatives of space and non-space organisations, the two pillars of CLEOS. On the one hand CLEOS is a digital platform taking inspiration from B2C marketplaces, on the other it also is a portal for developers capable of providing large companies, SMEs and start-ups with all the tools required to create new e-services based on Artificial Intelligence and geo-information.
In fact, CLEOS is a large step forward towards the accessibility and interoperability of geo-information data and services, and represents a great opportunity to promote the use of these applications, even in non-space companies, and to foster innovation among different sectors.
The following day, October 1st, at 16:30 (CEST) GAF AG will present in form of an e-poster "Cloud-Based Solutions for Automatic Monitoring of Agricultural Parcels in the Frame of the European Common Agricultural Policy”.
GAF will describe its services conceived for agricultural administrators that integrate geo-spatial data and Artificial Intelligence in a cloud environment.
In the same day, during the e-panel “AI4EO – Methods, Algorithms-2, Buildings and Roads Extraction from Satellite Data”, moreover, e-GEOS and GAF will present their joint work about the development of Deep Learning methods for automated road network and building footprint extraction from Very High Resolution satellite imagery.
On Friday 2 October, Sébastien Saunier from Telespazio France will present the paper "Sentinel-2 Harmonized Surface Reflectance Products with Sen2like" during the session dedicated to systems, sensors and technologies in the Earth Observation.