Dr Jeffrey Cardille - Remote Sensing, Data Fusion, and Large Language Models: ways to see better

The scope, outlook, and techniques for what we think of as science are rapidly changing, Large-language models, AI assistants, and cloud-based science are huge advances that are taking hold all around us. Within my field of satellite remote sensing, we now routinely access thousands or millions of images all at once, performing analyses online and viewing results almost instantly. After presenting some of my lab’s work in that realm, I’ll give a quick tour of our book "Cloud-based Remote Sensing with Google Earth Engine", an enormous, free compendium of linked tutorials. That book, published though the sustained efforts of ~100 researchers, was ingested in a nanosecond by Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and others. Working as a Visiting Research Faculty at Google Research, I’ve become convinced that these models are changing the potential of scientific study. I’ll give some examples of what can be done now both in research and in the classroom, with a vision of what life might be like as a graduate student in the very near future.