WHATS NEXT IN AI4EO?

Surfing the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) and thanks to open Earth observation (EO) data, there has been a buzz in the community for some time about exploiting AI methods like deep learning (DL) to solve problems in EO that have been solved before (“we can also do it with deep learning”) yet to achieve superior performances. There is no doubt that AI/ML/DL can do a great job in classification and detection tasks, which are only small fractions of EO problems. Is this all? Are you getting bored by applying AI methods in EO and playing with toy data? As the introduction talk of the invited session”AI4EO: Reasoning, Uncertainty and Ethics”, two important RD lines are discussed, namely developing cutting-edge next generation AI4EO methods, and generating large scale and representative benchmarks enabling these developments. With all the advancements in EO and AI technology, so far non-existing geo-information has and will become openly available that may raise ethical issues, like mis-use, bias or stigmatization. Hence, ethical accompanying AI4EO research is becoming increasingly important.