Artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important part in our daily lives, whether it is providing us with our personalised social media feeds, online shopping or streaming movie suggestions, and it even powers the mapping apps that route us around traffic jams. On a bigger scale, AI has already had a major impact on healthcare, finance, farming and many other sectors and its influence is predicted to expand rapidly in the coming years. But one area where considerable untapped potential still exists for new AI applications is the field of Earth observation, where AI can be applied to help manage large datasets, find new insights in data and generate new products and services.
With this in mind, EUMETSAT, ECMWF, Mercator Ocean International and the EEA have joined forces to develop a new massive open online course (MOOC) on the applications of AI to Earth monitoring. This course will introduce participants to the wealth of Copernicus Earth observation data and the AI and machine learning techniques that can be used to work with it. By providing a round-up of the latest developments in AI and Earth observation, the course will help participants bridge the gap between Earth observation data and AI techniques and hopefully drive an array of innovative new uses of Copernicus data.
How long does the MOOC take to complete?
The course is structured to be followed over the course of six weeks — allowing 3–4 hours of study a week — but it will be available on FutureLearn for an entire year from the starting date of 18 October 2021. Once participants are registered for the course, they will be able to freely access all the material to follow the course and work with the Jupyter notebooks. The only cost of the MOOC exists for those participants who would like to receive an optional certificate of completion from FutureLearn, which is delivered against a fee of 25 euro.
Who has organised the MOOC?
The MOOC is funded by the European Commission’s Copernicus Programme and has been developed as a joint project with EUMETSAT, ECMWF, Mercator Ocean International and the EEA. These organisations also operate the Copernicus WEkEO platform.
Join the MOOC
The link to register for the MOOC can be found here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/artificial-intelligence-for-earth-monitoring/1
The copernicus annoucement can be found here: https://www.copernicus.eu/en/news/news/new-mooc-bring-ai-and-copernicus-data-together
