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地理卓越學術講座系列
Geography Distinguished Seminars Series
AI4EO: Accelerating Earth Intelligence for All through AI-Driven Earth Observation
Date: 25 FEB 2025 (Tuesday)
Time: 15:30-17:00 (HKT)
Venue: Chamber, Faculty of Social Science, 11/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=98884
Abstract:
Our planet is currently facing unprecedented environmental challenges, including rapid urbanization, deforestation, pollution, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. On the other hand, natural disasters such as droughts, heat waves, and wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe, resulting in significant human, economic, and environmental losses. Earth Observation (EO) combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers transformative solutions for monitoring and mitigating these environmental challenges effectively.
In her talk, Prof. ban will present EO-AI4GlobalChange, a collaborative project dedicated to developing innovative deep learning methods for monitoring environmental changes using EO data. She will showcase her team’s cutting-edge research on 2D and 3D urban mapping, urban change detection, wildfire detection and near-real-time monitoring, leveraging multi-sensor multi-model EO data with advanced deep learning techniques. In addition, she will introduce PANGAEA, a newly developed global benchmark for Geospatial Foundation Models, highlighting key insights from their evaluation of the most widely available GFMs across multiple domains.
Prof. Ban will also introduce the GEO AI4EO Working Group, recently established under GEO’s Program Board, to accelerate GEO’s vision—Earth Intelligence for All through AI-driven Earth observation.
Professor Yifang Ban
Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Associate Director, Digital Futures, Stockholm, Sweden
Professor Yifang Ban is the Professor and Director of the Division of Geoinformatics at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and an Associate Director - at Digital Futures in Stockholm, Sweden. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo in Canada. In 2023, she earned a certificate in Leading Sustainability: High Impact Leadership from the University of Cambridge.
Professor Yifang Ban's research has been focused on Earth observation big data analytics, machine learning/deep learning for urban mapping, urbanization monitoring and wildfire and flood detection to support sustainable and resilient development. She has published extensively on these topics and has been ranked by Stanford/Elsevier among the World's top 2% of scientists in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Professor Ban is the PI/Co-PI for a number of impactful projects, including EO-AI4ResilientCities, EO-AI4GlobalChange, HARMONIA, SAR4Wildfire, Sentinel4Wildfire and Climate Change Induced Disaster Management in Africa.
Since 2016, Professor Ban has been an invited expert of the UN Habitat’s Technical Committee on Human Settlements Indicators for the SDGs. She is the lead for the newly established GEO AI4EO sub-group, co-chair of the ICA Commission on Sensor-Driven Mapping, and a co-lead of the GEO Global Urban Observation and Informatics initiative (2012-2022), an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and a scientific committee member of major international remote sensing conferences.
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