European Space Agency

Homepage: https://www.esa.int/

This fellowship aims to advance the development and application of geospatial foundation models tailored to multimodal and multiscale EO datasets. The goal is to unlock new capabilities in understanding complex environmental systems and support transformative solutions for climate resilience, sustainability and planetary health. For example, you will leverage large-scale AI models to:

• integrate heterogeneous EO data sources, such as satellite, aerial and in-situ data, across spatial and temporal scales;
• enable zero-shot or few-shot learning for rapid adaptation to new EO tasks such as disaster response, biodiversity monitoring or land-use change detection;
• support generative EO applications such as synthetic data creation, gap-filling, and simulation of future Earth scenarios, for example “what if” scenarios;
• develop advanced embedding strategies and neural compression techniques to efficiently represent high-dimensional EO data for scalable learning and inference.

As part of your application, please provide a research proposal of no more than five pages, answering the following questions:

• What EO challenge would you like to address using foundation models?
• Which disruptive technologies or paradigms (specific architectures, lightweight adaptation methods, xAI, interpretable-physic awareness, uncertainty quantification, etc.) will you explore?
• Why is this research proposal important to society?

In particular, you will:

• undertake advanced research activities exploring and expanding the use of disruptive and transformative innovation to develop new frameworks and solutions around geospatial AI foundation models for EO. Research may cover a wide range of innovative topics and will focus on:
  • exploring innovative methodologies and technologies;
  • developing novel methods of new technology implementation, for example ML models, for high-level products;
  • contribute to the development and curation of open datasets and tools enabling the community to develop its own AI for applications and research;
• support the definition and implementation of rapid prototyping activities, research sprints and open challenges of innovative EO solutions addressing upcoming lab activities and wider strategy;
• participate in internal research sprints to explore, test and validate novel EO concepts, algorithms and workflows in a fast-paced, collaborative environment;
• engage with the innovation ecosystem to promote the uptake of new techniques and capture the latest developments in EO and disruptive/transformative innovation;
• publish the research project outcomes in high-impact journals;
• drive collaboration within the Φ-lab community and ESA internal teams to promote the uptake of the new techniques and solutions;
• contribute to the Φ-lab strategy, activities and outreach on disruptive technologies for EO;
• maintain a continuous dialogue with the scientific community, including major international programmes and initiatives in the field;
• support the Φ-lab’s daily activities and research network of young graduate trainees, national trainees, interns and visiting researchers, as applicable.

Visit Internal Research Fellow (PostDoc) in Geospatial Foundation Models for EO Job Details | ESA