Wessel is Research Lead at the Alan Turing Institute, where his mission is to the advance the state-of-the-art of machine learning for environmental forecasting. He was previously Senior Researcher in the AI for Science initiative at Microsoft Research Amsterdam.
Wessel’s talk, “A Foundation Model for the Earth System”, introduced Aurora, a large-scale foundation model for predicting air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather. This can be used to help mitigate natural disasters and support human progress. Aurora was trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data. It outperforms operational forecasts with lower computational cost and can be fine-tuned for diverse applications at modest expense. It thus represents a notable step towards democratizing accurate and efficient Earth system predictions.
Staff and students from several universities and companies joined us in person at the UCL AI Centre and online. The talk was followed by lots of interesting questions, discussion, and networking over drinks and nibbles.
Thank you to Wessel and our host Dr Magnus Ross .
The recording is available on the AI Centre YouTube channel and the Open Access paper can be read here.
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