Experts discussing emerging space-based computing capabilities at the World Satellite Business Week in Paris have emphasized the need for stronger collaboration between policymakers and technology leaders to accelerate the societal benefits of artificial intelligence (AI).
Rika Nakazawa, chief of commercial innovation at Japanese telecoms giant NTT, proposed tech providers use private forums to educate policymakers and industry players about AI advancements.
“So thinking about this as a system design is critical,” she said, “and having forums where industry, policy and technology are all sitting at the table is also really key for us.”
Clint Crosier, director of aerospace and satellite at Amazon Web Services (AWS), highlighted how the cloud computing behemoth partnered with French geospatial analytics company Alteia to assess global infrastructure from space for the World Bank.
“The examples are just numerous about how you can use this technology in ways that we didn’t even really think of two or three years ago,” Crosier said, “and we’ll see we’ll be using it ways two or three years from now that we didn’t envision today.”
Crosier also stressed the increasing demand for advanced AI and machine learning (ML) tools across sectors such as environmental management, agriculture, healthcare, insurance, and energy is driving a need for more computing power in orbit.
“We’re going to be bringing down so much data,” he said, “it will be physically impossible for us as humans to organize the data,” analyze, disseminate and “make real-time insights of the data without the use of AI ML.”
In a recent experiment using AWS cloud services and computing technology from Sweden’s Unibap, Crosier said a satellite from D-Orbit of Italy almost doubled available bandwidth by using AI to only send relevant hyperspectral data from orbit back to Earth.